Come Fly With Me: Have Airline Safety Videos Gone Too Far?

What inflight safety instruction used to look like (Photo: Thinkstock)

Airlines, it seems, are for children now. Apparently passengers can no longer sit still for safety instructions. We must be entertained by clever videos featuring rapping robots, texting nuns, joking flight attendants, some animated, some real, but all very very… uh… FUN.

Delta does a cute take on the 1980s with passengers done up with big 9-5 hair, as well as characters from Star Wars.

Turkish Airlines has employed Manchester United soccer dudes to do the deed.

Etihad has a prayer from the Qu’rn.

But passengers — it seems — just love it, especially the (real) rapping flight attendant on Southwest.

OK, can we talk? As we head into the crazy busy holiday season, I started thinking about my most recent flight. I went to Denver on United, a well-traveled route that began at New York’s LaGuardia, sometimes known as the armpit of airports. (Were the TSA people vigilant in their duties? They were not. They were entertaining themselves discussing their psychics and speaking into their phones, and don’t get me started on the sandwich at CIBO that cost 10 bucks and you wouldn’t feed to a half dead cat.)

So I board my United flight. And then, well, this is my first time to experience the “fun” video.

Rhapsody in Blue, the great Gershwin music comes up. We’re in Paris. A handsome pilot is drinking his café at a bistro, then rises to tell a perplexed guy to mind the security instructions. Cut to New York, where a pretty flight attendant is in the back of a New York cab instructing the driver on using his seat belt. (Really?) Hey, there may be turbulence, this demonstrated as the cab bounces over the cobblestoned Soho Street (my street, as it happens).

This is confusing. What if I’m a first-time traveler and I can’t quite see why we’re now in an open-top tour bus in Vegas, where we get info about the exit row, and in Japan are taught to “familiarize” ourselves with an origami plane. For some reason, the luggage goes overhead into a palm tree on a tropical beach. And when that plane bounces you around, or worse still, has real problems, are you thinking about the adorable kangaroo? Frankly I gave up minutes ago. (And now I have to suffer through United CEO’s bragging about his company’s patriotism for hiring veterans.)

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No video is better than Air New Zealand’s made by Peter (Lord of the Rings) Jackson. You are welcome on board to “Middle Earth” by a flight attendant with pointy ears, bathed in a strange other worldy light. On board are people with hairy feet. Gandolf is at the controls. The Golum is crawling up the aisle to show you the security lights, and at the end, Jackson himself finds that gold ring on the floor.

It was definitely a step up from Air New Zealand’s previous attempt: a collaboration with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit models.

But the winner of the most offensive (though plenty of others feature women in bikinis — and less), is Aeroflot’s video. This little film is in slow motion, where sexy flight attendants in red and very high heels caress their lovely faces as they whisper (to a guy) to turn off those electronics.

Though not as offensive as Aeroflot’s, gorgeous crew ladies in red have often featured in Sir Richard Branson’s world. Safety videos for Virgin America and Virgin Australia are full of good time flight crews, a lot of dancing and sometimes Sir R himself.

My next flight will be to London on Virgin Atlantic. This is an airline people swear by, so I’m giving it a try. The safety video is sensational. It begins with a snoozy passenger who is wakened (or is he dreaming?) by finding himself in movie land: cowboys in an old saloon are stowing luggage about the bar; a film noir parody forbids smoking; a Beatles bit teaches you in psychedelic (Lucy in the Sky?) about the slide, if you have to get out of the plane. There’s also a fantastic Bond segment and a Hal (2001), instructing us about electronics.

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Mike Maloney, the head of Art and Graft, who made the video, told the London Telegraph: “Just as the Virgin passengers are about to set off we wanted to take them on a little journey of our very own. Mirroring the usual apathy toward safety messages we created a surprising and playful series of genre-based film scenes to convey all the necessary information.”

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Apathy? Is this where we are? (Curious that even after the terrible crash of Branson’s Galactic Two air shuttle with two dead, we’re still to take safety regulations as entertainment.) Can’t we sit still for three minutes? This is serious stuff. Give me Quantas’ or British Airways’ reassuringly straightforward safety instructions.

Anyway, I’m sure glad that the wonderful Captain Sully Sullenberger, who landed a plane on water in the Miracle on the Hudson, wasn’t watching cartoons during his safety training.

Oh, and five minutes after I watched it, I can’t remember anything about the Virgin Atlantic video except how much fun it was. But where was it I should put my head in crash-landing? And the inflation vest, was that the bit with the yacht, the babe and the killer lobsters?

WATCH: Some Airlines are Giving Their Safety Demos a Serious Overhaul

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