> How many deaths do you expect keeping passengers from being distracted at these times would prevent?
As of today: 379.
As of today: 379.
Incredibly, people can walk and chew gum at the same time. This includes the ability to refocus their attention when they experience unusual events.
You're not allowed to use laptops or have the tray down.
For example, I wouldn't take a $10 cheaper flight which prohibited using my phone, but I probably would take one that gave me a 1" narrower seat.
No. They can't. That 'refocus' you mention is proof of that.
it's getting old having to say over and over again that this isn't actually the case : humans switch contexts and lose focus -- you're not as good at multi-tasking as you think, nor is anyone.
So , people can walk OR chew bubble gum , and if these choose to they can pay contextual switching costs between the two to make outside spectators believe that they can do two things at once.
Don't fall for the ruse, there is a cost even if it's a small one.
Similarly, in a disaster i'd rather be surrounded by fit young soldiers without cell-phones -- alert and aware -- than I would be surrounded by the typical multi-variant airliner crowd that must have their attention drug away from the device by the sound of crunching metal.
It's obvious to me that a group of alert and ready people will outperform 'the other group' in an escape in nearly every metric, i'd hope that the same would be obvious to the other humans trying to escape fiery wreckage alongside me.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7075496/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking
OK.
I have no problem with the idea that humans can re-prioritize; but I do have a problem that people seem to think that the re-prioritization effort comes for free, instantly. We don't work that way as humans.
people seem to think that the re-prioritization effort
comes for free, instantly
1. You seem to be assuming the alternative to "using one's phone during a landing" is some sort of highly aware ready state. In reality it's probably bored snoozing or half-snoozing. It's a red-eye flight after all.
2. You seem to be assuming that "evacuating a burning plane" is some kind of split-second thing, like a quicktime event in a video game. In reality, at least for this incident, there was a span of a significant number of seconds between "impact" and "plane slows down enough for emergency slides to extend and evacuation to begin." 30, maybe 60 seconds.... I'm not sure, but there was no real positive action for a passenger to take during that time. Shifting attention away from one's phone certainly has a nonzero time cost, but not remotely comparable to the time it took for the plane to come to a full stop.
Again, you're dealing in hypotheticals, while the actual reality of this incident (phones in use, orderly exit achieved, all lives saved) contradicts whatever it is you are imagining.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5jSyaj_JwE
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_358
The FAA mandates that aircraft are able to be evacuated with-in 90s:
* https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...
Even for something as big as an A380 in its 800+ passenger configuration:
* https://www.flightglobal.com/airbus-a380-evacuation-trial-fu...
* https://simpleflying.com/aircraft-90-second-evacuation/
The difference between 180s and 90s is 90s: if (e.g.) ~30 people out of ~350 passengers (<10%) take an extra 3 seconds each because they are not aware of their surroundings, that time is eaten up.
Seconds matter.
1. Passengers on JL516 were not permitted to use their phones during landing.
2. I'm proposing that we start allowing them to use their phones.
3. If we did that then all 379 passengers would have died [1] because evacuation would have taken longer than the time before the plane was engulfed in flames [2]
Except #1 isn't the case: passengers were allowed to be on their phones and were doing so. And so #2 isn't the case either: I'm proposing maintaining the status quo.
And even if we had granted #1 and #2 I don't see how you get #3 because even if the extra time were entirely eaten up by 30 distracted passengers this wouldn't get you 100% dead: people don't leave in a single batch determined by the speed of the slowest person. There are multiple parallel exits, and each exit operates serially.
You are right that it does not necessarily follow that 100% would be dead. AC 797 had a flash fire after 90 seconds, and only about half the people died. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯