The Card Is Being Corrupted

Air Safety Week, July 12, 2004

Concerns of the Association of Flight Attendants:

Putting non-safety information on the emergency safety card distracts the passenger from the purpose of the card - to provide essential information necessary to passenger survival in an emergency.

This is not a trivial concern. AFA has been in the forefront of promoting the safety and effectiveness of emergency evacuation procedures and equipment for decades. According to a study, cited by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), one of the recommended guidelines for the design of emergency information cards was that "a simple, uncluttered, systematically organized card format enhances acceptance by the reader." (NTSB, Safety Study, Airline Passenger Safety Education: A Review of Methods Used To Present Safety Information, NTSB/SS-85/09, p. 13, Washington, D.C.)

The cited study stressed the importance of determining the information that passengers needed to know and the best educational approach in the delivery, such that retention of required information is enhanced. ("Passenger Emergency Briefing Cards: Recommendations for Presentation Style," H.B. Altman, D.A. Johnson, D.I. Bolm, Eighth Annual SAFE Symposium Proceedings, Vol. 2, pp. 455-474, 1970)

The following case is one example of how concise safety information, combined with flight attendant verbal instructions, can markedly improve on the use of emergency evacuation slides. Tests were conducted to determine if safety card improvements would increase the flow of persons per slide and thus decrease the time to evacuate the airplane. It was shown by Douglas [Aircraft] that the evacuation rate could be increased by adding the instructions "JUMP, DON'T SIT" to the safety card and by having the flight attendant shout "JUMP" at each exit. These instructions were effective in preventing persons from sitting at the top of the slide, and subsequently were incorporated on safety cards and in flight attendant evacuation instructions. (NTSB/SS-85/09 at p. 13)

The Safety Board has testified that the problems associated with passenger safety education had to be addressed in a systematic program to determine exactly what and how much information needs to be presented and can be assimilated by the flying public, and how best to present the information to improve comprehension and retention. (id, p. 9)

The information on each aircraft's country of final assembly could be placed somewhere other than the safety card. The approach of adding it to the safety cards may have been thought to save printing costs, but apparently the cost of adding information to the safety card, which may distract the passenger from that which is essential to his or her survival, was overlooked.

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