shsachdev

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Hey HN! I dissected over 113 airline safety videos and tracked their evolution. You can find the spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EOMxpdxIsaQk19bhDJEz...

That’s super slimy of them — a while back I had spent some time investigating fake reviews on their platform [1] and also found that their moderation team has no strict processes in place to deal with bad actors.

[1]: https://www.careerfair.io/company-reviews