Australian flag carrier Qantas has just released its latest safety video for 2024, and it’s yet another big-budget production, with the airline taking us on a whistle-stop world tour, touching down in some of the favourite places of the airline’s employees and frequent flyers.
It’s a beautiful video with stunning scenery that will inspire wanderlust as we learn about the personal lives of airline employees and frequent flyers, but what has all this got to do with safety, you may ask?
For brief moments, the stars of the nearly ten-minute video touch on regulatory safety messages that airlines must, by law, share with passengers prior to departure. You just have to concentrate to catch these moments.
The sheer length of this latest video is enough to stretch the attention span of even the most nervous of flyers to its very limits.
It’s more than five minutes into the video when Lachlan (a Qantas frequent flyer who lives in Lapland) suddenly holds up a safety card and briefly mentions that the aircraft is fitted with emergency escape slides.
Lachlan does at least tell viewers (the ones who are still paying attention at least) to leave all their hand luggage behind in the event of an emergency, but contrast this with the latest safety video from Japan Airlines.
Clocking in at just 3 minutes and 45 seconds, the JAL video dedicates an entire section to how to evacuate safely and highlights the dangers of stopping to take personal belongings in the event of an emergency.
Some commentators have even suggested this video helped prepare the passengers on the Japan Airlines aircraft that collided with a Coastguard plane at Tokyo Narita Airport on January 2.
Would Qantas’ latest safety video do the same?
Back in 2013, the Qantas safety video was just four minutes long, but it has been getting longer and longer over the last ten years. In 2017, the Qantas safety was just over six minutes long. A year later, a new video broke the seven-minute mark, and by 2020, the video was stretching to more than eight minutes.
At this rate, where will we end up in a few years time? There could actually be situations where the pilots have to wait for the safety video to end before taking off. What a waste of time and fuel.
A spokesperson for the airline, however, reached out to explain that the version of the safety video uploaded to YouTube (as seen above) was just one of 75 different versions, and this particular ‘cut’ was on the longer side.
On some aircraft, the video will be of similar length to the existing video – yes, that’s correct, still more than eight minutes long.
Qantas Chief Customer Officer Catriona Larritt also said in a statement that they wanted to make a video that was as “engaging as possible, in particular for regular flyers who might otherwise tune out.”
The latest Qantas safety video is visually stunning but ill-conceived.
I understand being cutesy and such but honestly they should not allow such a thing. The safety message is lost. The FAA came down on Southwest and other airlines to tone down the comedy routine safety speeches a little bit (or rather to require certain things to be said verbatim or follow parts of an approved script). Any frequent flyer would tone out this 10 minute video (just like after the first time on a round trip of 4 flights the Virgin America song stopped being novel, not to mention monthly flights after that). And it’s way too long. I’ve been to airports where we’ve had to sit and wait for the safety demo to be done to take off (mostly small) but that was 30 seconds after a 2-3 minute taxi, not sitting another 7 minutes. And then having the crew have to walk through for compliance. Ridiculous.