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Comment by shsachdev | Hacker News Reader

Hey I’m the author of the article! Happy to answer any questions :)

Would it be legal for airlines to replace the video with a quiz, for those passengers who opt in? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43608141

I don't think the current video format is very good for retention. Putting it in the form of a quiz could help frequent travelers actually memorize the information over time, which could in turn save lives.

https://www.retrievalpractice.org/

I don’t know whether it would be legal, but I 100% agree with your suggestion - a more active form of learning would be more effective. Professor Molesworth (the expert I interviewed for the article) actually suggested that airlines should make passengers count how many seats away from the emergency exit they’re sitting - again, making that a more active process.

There’s also the argument that to improve retention, the regulatory body should decrease the amount of “key safety messages” that need to be included in the videos (which ends up being around 35-45). If you decrease that number, retention of the info you do mention should go up.

Why do you think airlines spend so much money on these safety videos when they're almost exclusively shown to people who are already customers of the airline? The 2m YouTube example you gave is great, but 1. that's probably an exception to most safety videos and 2. the vast majority of safety video views are probably uninterested folks in cramped seats with earphones in. Do you think that's the best use of marketing dollars? What about making the actual product (flight experience) better?

Good question. I asked myself the same thing. Since airlines are mandated to produce a safety video regardless, the ROI they really have to assess is against that incremental spend on making the video cinematic/entertaining. And if you factor in that potential to go viral and get good PR from it, as well as the fact that they can produce a video once and reuse possibly for X years, the incremental investment doesn’t sound that unappealing. Also: traditional methods of advertising (say renting a billboard) are just as expensive, if not more.

It’s a captive audience which you can directly target for retention. In 3 months when they go to buy another plane ticket they’ll remember the catchy funny video and associate that airline with positive feelings when making a choice.

I have no special information, but some of these seem targeted at least partially to internal marketing and morale. For instance, I have seen what appear to be employees (probably union members) delivering a lot of these lines.

I would expect it's at least slightly better for morale, recruiting, and retention. I also expect that executives and middle managers move to use these as an opportunity to reinforce corporate values, whatever that means to them.

Good point, yes - the director of the United video (Karim Zariffa) told me that during the shoot the employees were highly invested (they didn’t want to make a mistake on camera) and the whole shoot likely helped boost employee morale.

> Why do you think airlines spend so much money on these safety videos when they're almost exclusively shown to people who are already customers of the airline?

It reinforces the brand. Virgin gets to show it's sexy. ANA that it's fun but sophisticated. United that it has four neurons firing across the enterprise.

How did you make the plots? Given the audience (general public) I find the cloudy backgrounds and superimposed images quite engaging.

Thanks! So the plots were designed by one of my editors Zachary Crockett (https://x.com/zzcrockett?lang=en) - I think he uses Photoshop :)

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