As mentioned in the comments for the post, and as I can remember in recent flights, if you drop your phone you’re supposed to alert the cabin crew immediately. Now I understand why.
We need a word for uselessnessification. WTF are they afraid of, that they omitted the critical information from the announcement?
It would be helpful if the announcements eluded to this, as a pax I’m not going to want to bother anyone especially if i think it’s just another dumb pointless rule.
But you also don't really want to mention fire as you're beginning a flight.
Even Qantas cut the scene in Rainman where Raymond histerically doesn't want to board an airplane since Qantas is the only carrier that never had a fatality.
The concern isn't really revenue loss.
> and noone freaks out,
Plenty of people freak out and create safety issues and distractions. Anything you say during the safety briefing, you're making a tradeoff between slightly preparing sane, attentive passengers better and increasing the worry of anxious passengers.
FAA rules are written in blood. They may be overbearing and often tedious, but they are far from dumb and pointless. Those rules are from other government agencies.
AFAIK it never did, but could have done.
The airline charges money to let you choose your seat, and obviously, no one had paid.
There is an FAA rule saying you have to listen to safety instructions from the flight crew, but apparently there is no rule saying that crew members can’t issue blatantly false “safety” orders to prop up the marketing department’s numbers.
The more airlines abuse this, the more people will assume that new FAA rules are also bullshit.
Not knowing why it's a rule, and being too self-righteous to look it up, doesn't make it "blatantly false".
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/651/
I had it happen to me once but as instructed didn’t move the seat (had to move to another one for landing as it was stuck in the lie flat position).
After landing the maintenance crew had to completely dismantle the back of the seat but they found the phone. The pilots and crew were obviously a bit annoyed as they couldn’t disembark the aircraft with me still on board. But much better result than having to declare PAN PAN.
How does that work on a completely full flight?
This isn’t hypothetical, they put this in the safety talk since it has happened and obviously by reports like this, continues to happen!