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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

30 years ago I was in an emergency landing due to engine failure situation (flight attendants take away your shoes, practice crash position, rearrange the passengers etc) and the thing that stuck out the most for me was that everybody did as they were told. No self righteous people; it was clear to everyone why there are flight attendants aboard and that they were key to your survival. The evacuation was orderly, though the follow up was lengthy (e.g. everybody’s passport was still on board).

More recently I’ve seen pictures of people evacuating down the slides with their luggage! Seems incredibly dangerous, not just for the slide experience but in slowing down evacuation. We had no fire in the cabin but what if we had?

Oh yeah, you know the stereotype of the press sticking their camera in your face to see how freaked out you are? It does happen in real life.

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You’re not supposed to take anything on the slides. No luggage. No shoes. Just you.

But it is ignored. Which is sad, people could really get hurt.

Your right though the fact as many people comply as they do is kind of incredible given how people act in other situations.

Why in the world do you have to take your shoes off before going down the slides? I could understand jackets or jewelry, but shoes?

High heels are not OK, for obvious reasons. Regular shoes are fine.

Ahh that makes way more sense. Thanks.

Not just high heels, but also many boots have sharp protrusions (e.g. lace hooks on some hiking boots and work boots, metal decorations on goth and cowboy boots)

Huh. That sounded wrong so I googled it. I thought it was all shoes.

You’re right. What I said above used to be true. That seems to have been questioned in the 90s and in 2000 the FAA finalized a rule changing it.

The current recommendation (https://www.faa.gov/travelers/fly_safe/information) say you can keep your shoes on but to remove high heels, as you said.

A bit of googling says it was changed because of passengers injuring their feet on the terrain/debris after crashes. Additionally modern slides are much tougher than they used to be and won’t tear from shoes and probably even high heels.

But I bet high heels are probably not a smart thing to be wearing on possibly uneven debris covered terrain in an emergency when you need to move fast and safely.

Learn something new every day.

They confiscated all our shoes. Crashing into someone at the bottom with shoes could be a problem too.

As silly as it might seem, you do something enough times and oddball rare things happen .. this is an instruction intended to reduce:

* shoes | boots with sharp objects embedded in soles (glass, bent nails)

* extra spikey high heels,

* work boots with hard edged metal hooks for laces,

(etc) causing damage to both inflatable slipways and to other passengers.

How often has a passenger going down an emergancy slide caused a rip that deflated that slide?

Not very often .. and aircrew are taught to issue instructions that make that as an unlikely occurence as possible.

And if something gets caught on the slide as you go down you could fall a dozen or more feet onto hard asphalt. Friend fell on a slide and got a compound leg fracture.

Also, try to swim/stay afloat with shoes ... Apart from young athletes, most people will drown within a minute

I dunno — when I go camping by canoe, I keep my hiking boots on all the time: paddling, portaging, and yes, when having a swim during a break for lunch or after making camp). A disabling injury could be fatal.

Are you "young" and "athletic", by any chance ?

Many shoes have hard, sharp parts that could damage the slide, even to the point of complete deflation. There is no time to assess whose shoes would be safe and whose not, so the blanket rule is "no shoes".

Yeah, according to the linked article 5 - 10% of people are injured using the escape slides, which is why they waited for the stairs in this case.

They took out per shoes away so that was that. According to a parallel reply, they no longer do that.

I was in a hotel fire evacuation once and the stairwells were all blocked because everyone brought every piece of their luggage with them.

Disgraceful.

People evacuate with their luggage because in times of high stress, we fall back on habit. What do we do when it's time to leave an aircraft? We make sure we have all our belongings with us!

That's just one reason why it's important to listen to the safety briefing, even if you've heard it before. The repeated drill helps us to remember what to do, even when there's added stress.

I don't really think the phenomenon is anything other than people selfishly wanting their belongings to be saved over another passenger's life.

This seems a bit too misanthropic. The risk-reward is more nuanced. If I take my stuff, odds are everybody will still be okay, and I'll have my stuff.

I’ve always wondered what happens after an emergency landing. Do you just kinda sit there and wait for bags and personal belongings to be offloaded? And then wait for another flight out?

Honestly, each and every one of those people should either be charged with reckless endangerments, put on an no-fly list or both. It really pisses me off when I see that. F**ing entitled idiots.

I remember there was this video of a plane in Russia that was on fire, multiple people died. And you see people walking away with their luggage, can’t help it think people would still be alive if it wasn’t for those who so urgently needed their suitcases.

People don’t follow the rules when they don’t trust their government for providing sane rules.

Case in point when you provide an example with Russia. Other example is Covid.

Oh great.

Fire creates smoke. Smoke quickly makes people unconscious, then kills them. It doesn't matter whether you trust the government or not, whether you follow the rules or not, whether you hold your luggage or not, if you can't get out of smoke, your fate is pretty much set in stone. Putting the blame on people who never had the time in the first place, and couldn't supernaturally turn to liquid and go through the door all at once is like telling that those who were robbed could've trained themselves to run faster.

Although you can argue that Titanic could survive, if only had it blasted bass-boosted <anthem of a proper country>.

People don’t follow the rules because they are self-centered assholes who believe they are the main character of a movie, and they value their own personal convenience and comfort over the lives of other people they see as NPCs.

People aren't taking their luggage with them during an airplane fire because of their distrust of The Deep State.

Would it be possible to make an even more negative interpretation of this comment? I don’t think so.

You irritation (to the extreme, I mean you just linked the deep state with assholes) is probably due to powerlessness in fixing the issue, let alone interpreting it properly.

However, it is still a widely-acknowledged idea that an unhinged state like the former-USSR-newly-Putin-land makes people afraid of not being able to feed themselves the next day.

I don’t suppose you oppose the idea that when the state organize something, civil servants’ interests are so badly aligned with the proper execution of the plan that it’s a shitshow every single time. And with entirely incompetent people in power, one’s better off doing the opposite of what regularly-proven liars tell them to do.

If you’re upset, is it because you envision lying as a normal form of citizen management? How’s that going for your camp? Do you feel that people trust you?

I'm not saying that there aren't people out there motivated by government distrust--I'm sure there are, maybe more in Russia--I don't know, I'm not Russian.

I'm saying that's not the common case. If you pick 100 random people out there who are disobeying some safety rule, where the outcome is greater convenience for themselves, I'd be willing to bet money that at least 90 of them are doing it out of selfishness and not some principled distrust of the government.

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