Flying the friendly skies
Posted by Dalton48 on 04 Jun 2008 at 06:56 pm | Tagged as: Travel
Sit back, relax, and enjoy this report from a recent short flight in Africa, sent by Gmail chat:
so, we’re sitting there, and the stewardess comes around to give us the spiel about the exit row. she’s wearing a jaunty yellow scarf, is very sincere, and is telling us we better be prepared to open the door. shows us where you pull the handle, then goes “the door will fall on you, and its heavy, but don’t worry, hold this spot at the bottom to brace yourself.”
and then says “now this is really important, you need to look out the window to assess the situation outside, if there’s fire or something, just yell to me at the front of the plane to tell me the exit is blocked and i’ll find another exit for you.”
and then says “so, once you open the door, you need to throw it toward the back of the plane on the outside, it’s really important that you do this. it will be really chaotic, and people will be running around trying to save themselvesbut the pilot wont’ have time to turn off the engines, so you need to throw the door toward the engine to block it and force it to turn off.
if you don’t do that, you’ll get sucked into the engine and die”
“i don’t mean to scare you, but i pray that nothing happens. thank you, have a pleasant flight.”
After that little speech, I dearly hope there were free drinks available.
Only tangentially related, but reminded me of the title of David Sedaris’s latest book, “When you are Engulfed in Flames”, apparently taken from a safety instruction poster in Japan.