We’ve all seen the videos. Passengers evacuating an airliner following an accident or serious incident, their hands full of carry-on baggage. It happened last month in Iran after a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 skidded onto a highway. It happened in May in Moscow after a Sukhoi Superjet 100 burst into flames during an attempted emergency landing. Forty-one people died in that accident. It has happened in the past decade in Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas and Dubai.
Commercial aviation accidents and incidents are increasingly survivable because of improvements in technology and materials, but passengers ignoring flight attendant instructions to leave behind carry-on bags and get off the plane are an ongoing safety risk that the industry has not been able to sufficiently mitigate. It’s time to redouble our efforts.
In 2009, Transport Canada issued an advisory circular that said passenger surveys indicate that members of the traveling public want the responsibility fo…
