Southwest Airlines will require cabins to be prepared for landing earlier in order to protect cabin crew from injuries at the end of each flight. Starting December 4, flight attendants will have to be seated earlier – so they’ll require passengers to prepare for landing when a flight descends to 18,000 feet instead of waiting until 10,000 feet.

According to an internal memo,

As first announced last week in the Leader Update and video by Steve Murtoff and Lee Kinnebrew, VP Flight Operations, significant advancements in our descent procedures that reflect our unwavering commitment to Safety and well-being of our Flight Attendants will begin on December 4.

Inflight Safety and the TWU 556 Health and Safety Committee have been integral in developing these new procedures. Together, we have shaped procedures that prioritize your Safety and are fully aliged with our Company Safety objectives of preventing Flight Attendant Injury.

A summary of the December 4 changes include:

• At top of descent, the Pilots will make a required PA to inform the cabin that the descent phase has begun.
• At 18,000 feet, the Pilots will make one high-low chime, indicating the start of sterile flight deck. This chime serves as your cue to secure the cabin for landing and to be seated and secured in your jumpseats.

This procedural adjustment-Flight Attendants securing the cabin 8,000 feet earlier during descent-reflects years of research and your reporting through our Safety Management System (SMS). The evaluation of thousands of data points from Flight Attendant and Pilot reports paired with information from the Flight Data Analysis Program (FDAP), confirmed that seating our Flight Attendants earlier should reduce Flight Attendant injuries by at least 20%. Inflight and Flight Ops will validate the effectiveness of these new procedures, and if we do not achieve the desired result, we will conitnue to find solutions. We are also committed to sharing updates on these findings periodically.

This change requires final passthroughs of the cabin earlier. The final “please prepare for landing announcement” will come 8,000 feet earlier so that crew can finish their duties and be seated sooner. For customers this means,

• cabin service will end earlier
  
• beverages will be collected earlier
  
• seats will have to be placed in their upright and locked position earlier
  
• carry on bags and personal items will have to be stowed earlier

For awhile I used a convertible notebook instead of my more traditional ultraportable laptop. I don’t care about using a tablet most of the time. The only reason I liked my Lenovo Yoga was so that I could move into tablet mode during takeoff and landing when you’re supposed to have laptops stowed but you’re still permitted to use tablets.

I frequently want to eke out every last minute of productivity from my flights. Even though the size of that device was probably larger than it should have been to continue use, when converted into a tablet that’s the mental bucket crewmembers always put it in and none ever asked me to put it away.

I’ve been back to a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and while noting that not all crew enforce putting laptops away, I always put it away when asked to do so and then just switch to my phone. I don’t like the idea of putting the laptop away earlier than necessary. Here it won’t be for landing as much as ‘earlier so that flight attendants see it’s away before they themselves sit down’.

United has moved to laptops away earlier, too. And flight attendant safety sounds great, especially when flagged as 20% improvement, though this projection remains off a small base and this doesn’t represent the same risk necessarily as abusive passengers or clear air turbulence.

Airlines should retain at least two agents at boarding gates to watch for inebriated customers, rather than the current cost-cutting trend of single agent boarding – the change to preparing the cabin for landing is a way to prioritize safety when it doesn’t cost the airline extra money.

I’d note that putting my laptop away on early on Southwest is maybe fine, because their inflight wifi so significantly lags the industry. These days only Frontier and Allegiant, which don’t offer wifi, are worse.