There is evidence in psychology studies about human reaction to catastrophes such as this. People often default to habitual behavior, possibly because active decision making may be "disabled" as responsible regions of the brain get overwhelmed.

It reaches an extent where people are entirely incapable of unbuckling their seatbelts because a more common and therefore default mechanism for unbuckling is the one you would use in your car. And that works entirely different from the ones in planes.

https://consumerist.com/2016/07/12/why-are-there-seatbelt-de...

Okay, maybe having a short preflight safety briefing that people would actually pay attention to and that told people that would help. Or maybe just scare the crap out of everyone.

My point is that people in unfamiliar situations, particularly stressful and panicked ones, tend to stop thinking and revert to familiar behaviors. For most people, that's gathering their stuff before leaving. Their behavior will never change based on legal penalties applied months later. To get them to behave differently, they have to practice the different behavior beforehand.

Parking is a normal, common activity with no reasonable expectation of panic or stress. People have plenty of time to think about what they're doing. That's why legal penalties are an effective deterrent. I have no idea what would lead you to believe that the situations are comparable.

Yet. I have been in plane on fire and I did grab my backpack.. I didn't really act consciously, and somehow I had rationalized the order "everyone, get out now!" as some kind of random evacuation exercises. (European in my teens back then and one of my first flights)

Maybe instead of pointless court cases, lots of publicity about correct behavior for the same effect.

Commercial? What happened?

Probably not for the reasons you mentioned.

That doesn't mean it's not a damn good thing to say if you want to be popular on the internet. Hard-line opinions about Bad Things(TM) always win virtue points regardless of whether or not those opinions are well informed.

Secondly, I find it hard to believe that anyone who has had to act in moments as extreme as this would have such a harsh view of others who had never been in such a situation.

I spent a good portion of my adult life in extreme situations and I can tell you people do not operate with their conscious minds. They do not really "make choices", things just happen. This is why training is so important for people who might encounter extreme situations.

Please be more gracious to these people.

If those problems were solved, airlines could forbid taking anything with you to the cabin with other passengers and evacuation would be easier.

Do you really think that something happens to bring down a plane and they just let the people who took their baggage off the plane during the emergency to just go home with their baggage? I can't believe this has to be explained to anyone.