An aircraft evacuation can be life or death. Seconds can count. You don’t want passengers delaying everyone getting off the plane by grabbing their carry-on bags. You don’t want anything puncturing a slide, either.
The FAA has issued a new Safety Alert warning airlines that passengers collecting bags contributes to delayed evacuations and that this can compromise “survivability during time-critical emergencies involving smoke, fire or structural damage.”
The agency is recommending that airlines update their emergency evacuation procedures – including safety videos – with “standardised, concise messaging stating that all bags or personal belongs must be left behind with no exceptions.”
This comes about because every time there’s an evacuation, passengers are seen grabbing their bags. Here’s video of one carrying their rollaboard down the emergency slide and tumbling with it across the tarmac.
Following an APU failure aboard a @laserairlines MD-80, passengers were evacuated due to smoke in the cabin. Regrettably, most passengers exited with their carry-on luggage, resulting in avoidable hazards. pic.twitter.com/7FsfZ3Zkuk
— Enrique Perrella (@Enrique77W) April 29, 2024
Stopping For Selfies Is The Problem We’re Ignoring
We’re focused on passengers grabbing carry-on bags, but there’s a difference between taking a purse from underneath the seat in front of you and stopping for the rollaboard in the overhead bin above your seat. And bags may not even be the biggest impediment to a rapid evacuation – everyone slows down their exit to stop and capture the moment for social media feeds.
Plane passengers slammed for grabbing selfies during evacuation: ‘Incredibly stupid’ https://t.co/LVgq68yXnn pic.twitter.com/If4UqzOvMb
— New York Post (@nypost) March 9, 2023
Here’s a passenger is filming their evacuation with a carry-on bag in one hand and drink in the other.
Video shows frantic moments passengers make their way out of RedAir flight 203 after landing gear collapse & fire at MIA…some use emergency chute @WPLGLocal10 pic.twitter.com/LJKJtzLqnh
— Janine Stanwood (@JanineStanwood) June 22, 2022
We can remind passengers not to take their bags but how about reminding them not to pose for selfies before exiting the aircraft? They’re putting everyone in the aisle behind them at risk!
People Don’t Learn From Safety Videos
The FAA quite reasonably wants safe and efficient evacuations during an emergency, but there doesn’t seem to be much connection between that goal and… telling everyone this is what they should be doing in safety videos.
Passengers may worry that they aren’t getting their stuff back any time soon if they leave it behind, and also that if they take their stuff with them probably nothing bad happens to them. Maybe something bad happens to someone else, but even if that bothers them they likely aren’t thinking about it in the moment.
Entertaining And Engaging Safety Videos Can Be Worse
Entertaining or creative airline safety videos can increase attention, but they often reduce retention of the actual safety information.
- Penn State / Gong, Pan et al. (2025) — “Examining the Dual Function of In-Flight Safety Videos in Safety Management and Destination Marketing” – 214 participants watched safety videos from flagship airlines. Some videos had tourism or destination-marketing content while others did not.
Videos with tourism/local content improved viewer impressions of the destination and influenced travel intentions. But those same videos resulted in about 11% lower recall of safety protocols than videos without that content. Overall, subjects averaged only 2 out of 5 correct answers on basic safety true/false questions even immediately after watching.
- Molesworth et al., UNSW (2015) — 82 participants viewed one of three safety videos: (a) standard briefing, (b) humorous video, (c) movie-themed set. Humorous themed versions improved mood and engagement, but recall of safety information was lower in the more entertaining versions. The “standard” video recall was about ~53%, movie-themed about ~47%, humorous about ~35%.
- Chittaro & Buttussi (2015) Participants compared a VR/immersive serious-game format simulating an aircraft emergency versus a standard safety card. Retention was measured immediately and one week later. The immersive serious game had better knowledge retention (both immediately and after a week) than the safety card. Also, it was more engaging and aroused more emotional/fear response, which seems to help with retention.
Baseline retention is low even for standard videos. Creative, fun, or tourism-rich safety videos often do better at grabbing attention or making the viewer feel positive, but the extra visuals, music, and narrative can overload attention or distract from key safety content, leading to lower recall. Immersive formats like virtual reality might achieve both engagement and retention, making the “experience” more salient, not just passive watching.
At Least They’re Not Calling For Locking Overhead Bins
The FAA has recommended several measures for combating passengers bringing carry-on bags with them during an evacuation. In addition to education through safety videos, they have suggested locking overhead bins and ending checked bag fees so that there are fewer carry-on bags in the cabin. Safety is always an airline’s number one priority, but it isn’t that high of a priority.
Locking overhead bins, though, isn’t much of a solution and would probably make things worse.
- There are still plenty of underseat items passengers will bring with them
- Locking bins will slow down evacuations more as passengers stop and yank on the bins, clogging the aisles wondering why they can’t get the bins open?
In that moment, many passengers won’t remember that the bins are locked even if they’ve been told!
How High A Priority Is Solving This?
We don’t have a good solution to passengers slowing down evacuations by taking their belongings with them. At the same time, there’s never been an evacuation where this has been truly critical.
No official accident report I’ve read attributes a fatality to bag retrieval, though they often warn that it’s risky. could have caused more deaths if circumstances were slightly different.
The NTSB report on American Airlines Flight 383 from Los Angeles to Chicago in 2016 actually makes clear that the “NTSB has not identified any accident evacuations in which delays related to carry-on baggage caused injuries.”
So this is a risk, and we should think about how to address it, but it’s hardly the biggest risk in aviation. I worry much more about air traffic control close calls for instance.
Lock overheads with notice and large visible locks
Great AI art with the selfie. Really puts things into perspective. Tick that toc!
I wonder how people with infants are supposed to evacuate. Is it dangerous to evacuate carrying a baby?
You evacuate with your lugagge, you just lost any right to sue or for compensation of any kind.
Sounds a bit like the people who think it’s “cute to pose with Yogi” and go up to the bears in Yellowstone despite repeated warnings that these are hungry carnivores. One factor may be that people hear safety warnings so often that eventually they just tune them out. Or maybe making everything equally important doesn’t help. There are records of passengers who died because in over water crashes they inflated their life vests inside the aircraft and were trapped. They were told not to do this, but they were told a lot of other things too (seat upright, brace, belt tight, etc.). All are important, but together these might be too much to process, especially when stressed.
Theft and lost luggage are so common in the air transportation industry that between those things and airplane personnel lying about a lot of things, people just don’t believe what they are told.
The JAL video on this topic is predictably great – animated people to get people to watch but no nonsense information and it accentuates this topic with a non-animated FA that appears on screen when someone tries to take their luggage during an evacuation. Everyone should just copy that and we can move on. Agree phones are also a big issue but people seem to care more about their phones than anything else in life, so…
@drrichard — Good comparison. I’ll add several folks do get gored by bison in Yellowstone each year, too. And, a few others boil alive in the thermal springs. Talk about ‘yikes.’
Back in 2019 I flew ANA to Tokyo, and the safety video did mention not to take selfies or bring luggage during an evacuation.
It’s around two and a half minutes in to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2IZP5NhaKM
So sick of the selfie culture in general and it’s especially egregious when evacuating a plane. When did we become such a narcissistic society?
@Peter — Clearly it worked for JAL, especially following that a350 accident in January 2024, within all 379 people evacuated in under 20 minutes.
Also, ANA has a similar portion of their safety video as well, advising against taking carry-on or selfies during an evacuation.
Yeah, not sure it works as well in other societies… wish we’d take note.
@Travelgirl — Always has been, just better technology.
That’s so ratchet.
We have people that are more than happy to leave this Earth having a selfie of themselves being engulfed in burning jet fuel being aired on Tik Tok.
Besides the FAA banning the narcissistic morons taking selfies as they evacuate or grabbing their luggage, the FAA/airlines should have a “minimum dress code”. By that, I mean NO shorts, pajama pants and flip flops and the like. Having intentionally jumped down an emergency slide during my training, those that wear minimal dress, such as above, are the ones that my crews and I know are going to be injured or killed in an emergency. The ONLY thing I take with me if I “jump” is my passport, wallet (which are in a pocket) and my iPhone (which is on my belt). That’s IT! Ignorance can be rectified. Stupid is forever. To “Alan”: I agree 100%. To “Travelgirl”: These are the same people who post EVERYTHING about their miserable lives on social media, from bowel movements to baby’s first step, to grandma in her casket and think that people really give a damn.
“We have people that are more than happy to leave this Earth having a selfie of themselves being engulfed in burning jet fuel being aired on Tik Tok.”
Nothing would make me happier! Same with idiot reporters stading in the middle of a hurricane telling people to stay inside. It’s God’s way of thinning the heard.
Unfortunately in the case of a plane evacuation, it could harm innocent people. That’s where the problem lies.
Websites & the evening news publishing people’s evacuation videos just encourages more people to film when they’re in an emergency situation.
Thanks, Gary. In your final section, you state: “We don’t have a good solution to passengers slowing down evacuations by taking their belongings with them”. IMHO, there is a good solution, make it dramatically clear (Kiosk at Check-In, TSA Screening Area Postings, On-Line Safety Videos, FA Announcements, Press Articles, etc) that anyone taking baggage or taking selfies in the event of an evacuation is an automatic $ 10,000 fine, no exceptions. This isn’t hard.
Once the airlines have the excuse to do so, expect an outright prohibition of carry-on bags and most “personal items” in the cabin along with checked-bag fees doubling to cover the increased volume and handling costs.
On the plus side, this would provide strong incentive for packing light, and just might create a market for third-party baggage delivery services similar to what already exists for things like golf clubs.
I question how accurate the surveys are on the retention percentages. It depends on the setting in which those tests were made. If it was an actual study where participants were instructed to watch a video that would be different than pulling random passengers after landing to ask them about the video. If it’s the former, you are starting with the premise that 100% of the people actually watched the video. But in real life everyone who has been through one of these knows that half the passengers aren’t even watching to begin with. In that case I’d rather have 60% of the plane watch it and retain 40% of it than starting with the marker that half of the pax didn’t even lift their heads from their devices to watch. Also, fines and airline bans for anyone who takes a bag or a selfie should be a good start.
How about passengers who violate emergency evacuation rules and Airline instructions receive a lifetime ban from the FAA? It should increase compliance at least a bit.