The Great Escape

The Life You Save May Be Your Own
According to an FAA advisory, "an alert, knowledgeable person has a much better chance of surviving a life-threatening situation" aboard an aircraft. I am a seasoned flier and one who has even taken a flight-attendant training course. In other words, I'm knowledgeable. And yet, my experience in the evacuation exercise shows just how little my familiarity with safety and emergency procedures would serve me in the event of a real accident. How would an inexperienced flier fare?

The answer to that question is known all too well by cabin-safety specialists, who, while seeing plenty of room for improvement, generally believe that human behavior may be a more crucial, and elusive, factor in crash survivability. From the late 1990s until early in this decade, the FAA's Oklahoma City research facility studied passenger behavior by staging evacuations aboard real aircraft using paid volunteers. In all, some 2,500 civilians—recruited from churches, schools, and shopping malls—participated in hundreds of drills. Videotapes of the tests are revealing: One recorded a large man who became stuck in an over-wing exit and broke his arm struggling to get free. Useful as the drills were, they were discontinued because of the number of volunteers who were injured.

Garnet "Mac" McLean, the FAA's principal investigator for cabin safety, has spent a lot of time at the Oklahoma City facility and believes that one of the biggest impediments to accident survival is the woefully inadequate briefing of exit-row passengers. After all, these people choose their seats for the extra legroom, not because they are eager or even able to assist in an emergency. McLean has recommended that airlines create a corps of designated passengers (most likely drawn from their frequent fliers) who would be trained and would have to pass a test to demonstrate that they are capable not only of opening the exit but of helping direct the evacuation. In exchange, they would be given priority for receiving those sought-after seat assignments. Although the idea may sound far-fetched, it gained legitimacy last year when an NTSB safety study found that exit-row passengers in real-life evacuations were an impediment because they were unfamiliar with procedures and did not know how—or when—to open the emergency exits. Even so, McLean's proposal has not gotten far with the top brass at the FAA and only one carrier is seriously considering it.

Because familiarity with the plane and with evacuation procedures significantly influences survival, McLean decided to investigate just how much of the airlines' safety briefings passengers understand and remember. "Passenger Safety Awareness: Still Ignorant After All These Years" is the withering title of the resulting report, which had not been released at press time but which Condé Nast Traveler was permitted to review. The report, co-written and -researched by Cynthia Corbett, compared their findings with those of another study done in the late 1970s and found that passengers today pay far less attention to aviation safety, despite the heightened emphasis on emergency preparedness since 9/11. "This considerable reduction . . . could have significant adverse effects on passenger survival rates in future aircraft accidents," warn the study's authors. "The best chance passengers have of surviving is to be fully knowledgeable, even proficient at, emergency procedures."