In the Name of Safety, Airlines Can Dance if They Want To – Wall Street Journal

In the Name of Safety, Airlines Can Dance if They Want To â€" Wall Street Journal

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 | News

By DANIEL MICHAELS

Air safety is serious business. So, more and more airlines are making it silly.

Thomson Airways uses cute kids. Air New Zealand does a disco extravaganza-starring Richard Simmons. More airlines are amping up their safety videos with humor and goofy gags â€" just to get fliers’ attention. WSJ’s Daniel Michaels reports.

Almost anything is worth trying to get stupefied passengers to focus on the required announcements about fastening seat belts and finding exits.

Air New Zealand has run videos with naked flight attendants, an obnoxious puppet and 1980s exercise guru Richard Simmons.

Virgin America uses freakish cartoon characters including a well-dressed fish. And Philippine carrier Cebu Pacific has played Lady Gaga.

“You see some of these and say, ‘Holy smokesâ€"can they do that?’” says Kevin Hiatt, vice president of the nonprofit Flight Safety Foundation and a longtime airline pilot. “But it gets the point across.”

Airline passengers are a tough audience. Road warriors tune out briefings, while novice fliers can freak out at talk of water landings and lost cabin pressure. But the Federal Aviation Administration and other regulators require carriers to hit the high points on every single flight.

Many flight attendants appear equally bored about the drills. Some repeat it dozens of times each week.

Southwest Airlines was among the first to acknowledge that the incantations are mind-numbing and often obvious. So the airline encourages staff who deliver the recitation to pepper it with one-liners like, “If you haven’t been in a car since 1957, this is a seat belt….”

Southwest founder Herb Kelleher says a man once called to say the announcements weren’t “appropriate.”

“I asked him whether he listened to them. He said, ‘Yes.’ I then asked him whether he listened to the safety announcements on other airlines. He said, ‘No,’” recalls Mr. Kelleher. “End of telephone conversation.”

Electronic entertainment systems in the 1980s brought recorded, video safety briefings. Most were as listless as the live presentations were.

In 2000, Virgin Atlantic decided to have fun, producing an animated video with light touches. A fat passenger struggles to push his seat belt below his paunch. Others snore, wrestle with oxygen masks and set off the toilet smoke detector.

Virgin founder Richard Branson says it is logical that passengers will pay more attention if they smile, but he regrets not hitting on nudity. “If there’s anything that involves [being] naked, I wish we had come up with it first,” he says.

Recently, more carriers have been loosening up. Mr. Branson launched Virgin America in 2007 with an animated film that includes a buck-toothed nun who scrambles to turn off all her electronic gear and a matador seated next to a bull. The announcer urges passengers to see whether the nearest exit is behind them, but one man yawns and returns to his book. “Go on…we’ll wait,” says the announcer.

Virgin America

Virgin America’s animated safety video featured a funny nun.

Marketing Vice President Porter Gale says people at dinner parties have quoted lines from the video to her, like a description of the printed safety card: “Not only does it have pretty pictures, but it has important information…”

Some ideas went too far, though. The FAA pressed Virgin to cut its sarcasm “for clarity of message” and nixed a polar bear that resembled a dog because passengers might get distracted trying to figure out what it was, says a Virgin spokeswoman.

Turkish Airlines last month unveiled an apparently standard video briefing. Interspersed are scenes of soccer stars from Manchester United goofing around with safety gear.

Striker Wayne Rooney sneaks up behind two teammates and yanks the tags on their life vests to inflate them. “Well, it’s not a toy,” scolds the announcer. When the two chest-bump with the inflated vests, the narrator loses patience: “Now, come on, guys, this is serious!”

Few airlines have tried to amuseâ€"or shockâ€"as much as Air New Zealand has. In 2009, it produced a video titled “The Bare Essentials,” starring naked employees. Uniforms were painstakingly painted on, down to the kerchief ruffles.

Staff deliver the briefing with just a glint of irony. Even frequent fliers should “take…a second look,” says a flight attendant, raising her eyebrows.

Hours of nudity during the shooting didn’t keep employees from participating, says Mike Tod, marketing general manager. “We had no shortage of people wanting to get involved.”

Last August, ANZ redirected the country’s rugby mania in a video with passengers decked out like a stadium of crazed fans and pilots sporting striped referee shirts. When a buff star player brushes past a swooning flight attendant, she grabs an oxygen mask to demonstrate how to use it.

The next video starred a furry, wisecracking puppet named Rico, who interrupts the presentation. A flight attendant announces the briefing will begin “before we take off.” Rico blurts out: “Before we take it off?”

This year, the airline tapped Mr. Simmons for an aerobics-theme video called “Fit to Fly.” For it, the carrier transformed a jetliner mockup, normally used for designing cabin interiors, into a disco with a lighted floor reminiscent of “Saturday Night Fever.”

Mr. Simmons sports a tank top with ANZ’s logo in sequins for the “safety exercise.” He leads staffersâ€"including Chief Executive Rob Fyfeâ€"and local celebrities, all clad in Reagan-era leggings, leotards and headbands. Passengers definitely pay attention.

“The movies are usually the stuff of dinner-party table conversation,” says Richard Fraser, a media executive in Auckland who flies frequently. He says the Bare Essentials video captured the country’s “edgy creative” spirit, while the rugby one was funny. But the recent two videos are “cringe-worthy,” he says.

Not all carriers go for laughs.Cebu Pacific Air got fliers to ogle last fall with live in-flight choreography. On one, female flight attendants buckled seat belts and donned life vests to Katy Perry and Lady Gaga recordings. A week later, a male crew boogied to the 1982 hit “Safety Dance.” On both flights, standard briefings were first delivered on the ground.

Britain’s Thomson Airways used children dressed as flight attendants in its video. The girl who explains how to use a life vest is barely bigger than it. The charter carrier auditioned 900 youngsters for 12 roles, but filming still required “many takes,” says Thomson’s customer services director, Carl Gissing.

Despite all efforts, even the most creative airlines acknowledge passengers don’t think of safety announcements as entertainment.

“We promise to do everything we can to make sure you have a safe, comfortable flight,” says the bored-sounding Virgin America narrator. “Not least of which is ending this speech now.”

â€"Kaveri Niththyananthan contributed to this article.

Write to Daniel Michaels at daniel.michaels@wsj.com

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