Shanghai Yummy

I am troubled by the "dumbening" of safety regulations and other important information. We are frequently told what to do without being told the far more important why of the matter. There are certainly many reasons one could debate for and against this policy, but it nonetheless disturbs me. I understand safety instructions need to be as simple as possible to penetrate as large a cross section of the population as possible. However, I believe that people need to be told why they are doing what they are doing instead of just what to do. Most people out there, I would argue, have the intelligence to assimilate that information and use it to greater effectiveness than just the "dumb" instruction.

So having flown nearly three quarters of a million miles, I finally figured out why we are told not to inflate the life vest until after we have exited the aircraft. This may be obvious to some of you, but it certainly wasn't obvious to me. And I would wager that the vast, vast majority of you hadn't even wondered why. Well, I'll tell you why:

If you inflate the life vest before exiting the aircraft, and the aircraft then fills with water past the height of the door, you will have a lot of trouble swimming down against the buoyancy of the vest to get down to the door opening and out of the aircraft.

This revelation came to me earlier today after being in the back of my mind for a good ten years. I'm glad I figured it out on my own, but this is the sort of thing that needs to be shared with us when we're told what to do. I absolutely hate being told what to do without a reason, and I would argue that many people feel the same way. We'd get more people doing the "right" thing if they knew why they were being told to do it.

PGP Signed Entry