Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [29]
In the late 1990s, the U.S. government conducted a large and priceless survey of 457 passengers involved in serious airplane evacuations. Over half of them said that they had not watched the entire preflight safety briefing because they had seen it before. Of those who did watch most of the briefing, 50 percent said it had not been helpful to them when the emergency came to pass. In retrospect, they wished they had been told more about exit routes, how to use the slides, and how to get off the wing after fleeing through the overwing exit. They wanted a more vivid, practical warning than they got.
Carry-on bags are a major problem in plane crashes. About half of all passengers try to take their carry-on with them in an evacuation, even though they have been ordered by flight attendants to leave everything behind. (This is the same gathering behavior exhibited by Elia Zedeño in the World Trade Center, when she felt compelled to take things, including a mystery novel, before she left her office.) Later, plane-crash survivors report that these collected carry-on bags posed a major obstacle to getting out quickly and safely. People tripped on them as they groped through the darkness, and the bags became weapons as they hurtled down the evacuation slides. The solution to this problem may not be that complicated, however. In a recent study in the United Kingdom, one volunteer suggested that flight attendants, instead of asking passengers to “leave all hand baggage behind,” tell passengers why they should do so. They should simply say this, the volunteer suggested: “Taking luggage will cost lives.”
Why don’t the airlines give people better warnings, even when plane-crash survivors tell them how to do it? For one thing, they are in business. They don’t want to scare customers by talking too vividly about crashes. Better to keep the language abstract and forgettable. But there’s another, more insidious reason. Airline employees, like professionals in most fields, don’t particularly trust regular people. “Like police, they think of civilians as a grade below them,” says Dan Johnson, a research psychologist who has worked for the airlines in various capacities for more than three decades. At aviation conferences, he still has trouble getting experts to appreciate the human factor. “They would rather talk about hardware and training manuals—and not worry about what I consider equally important, which is the behavior of the actual people.” If the worst does happen, this distrust makes things harder still for regular people. “Often the pilots and the flight attendants do not want to inform the passengers about an emergency for fear of upsetting them,” Johnson says. “So they let them sit there in ignorance, and when the accident does happen, no one knows what the hell is going on.”
On the D.C. subway system recently, I heard this taped announcement: “In the event of a fire, remain calm and listen for instructions.” That’s it. Hundreds of conversations and thoughts were interrupted for that announcement. What was the message? That the officials who run the subway system do not trust me. They think I will dissolve into hysterics and ignore instructions in the event of a fire.
Consider what the people who created this announcement did not do: they had an excellent opportunity to tell me how many subway fires happen in the D.C. system each year. That would have gotten my attention. They also had a chance to explain why it’s almost always better to stay in the subway car in case of a fire (because the rails on the track can electrocute you, and the tunnels are, in some places, too narrow to fit through if a train is coming). But instead, they just told me not to panic. Ah, thank you so much. And here I’d been planning on panicking!
Trust is the basic building block of any effective warning system. Right now, it’s too scarce in both directions: