99% Invisible - 422- In The Unlikely Event

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

If you’ve ever flown on a plane, you’ve been directed to study the safety briefing card in your seatback pocket. Every passenger plane, commercial or private, has to have safety cards on board. Mo Laborde is a reporter who has been collecting safety cards for almost ten years, and one day she started wondering how the modern safety card came about. In The Unlikely Event Buy The 99% Invisible City

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Do you remember airplane travel? Backing into a tin can with 200 other people all breathing each other's air? Well, these days most of us are still avoiding planes. But in the before times, when we boarded a flight, we all received the same familiar set of instructions. set of instructions. If you've ever flown on a plane, you've been directed to study the plane's safety briefing card. Every passenger plane, commercial or private, has to have safety cards on board.

And if you're like most people, you probably never bothered to examine it too closely. That is, if you've even looked at it at all. I always look at these things. As soon as I sit down on a plane, I pull out the safety card. Today, I'm gonna be talking with producer Mo LeBorn about why safety cards might be worth a closer look. Hi, Roman.

Hi, Mo. So you're saying you always pull out the safety card? Yeah, I mean, what can I say? I just love airplane safety cards. Honestly, I think I love them a little bit too much. I don't just look at them. I collect them. I've been collecting for about 10 years. 10 years.

So when you say collect them, what do you mean? Well, whenever I fly on the plane, I just snag the card and I put it in my backpack. So you just take them? Is that allowed? I actually don't. Is that a problem? It's a a question because it's technically not allowed, but I just have such a strong clopdomania for this one object today in my collection.

I have about 300. That's cool. So why do you have 300 safety cards? I think it's that for me, I fell in love with them because they're like safety-themed comic strips. Like, outfits of the women are stuck in the 1960s. There are little girls wearing Mary Jane shoes and Bobby socks. And it's just so, the way they look is so fascinating to me.

But more than that, like I am especially fascinated with the way that they depict a plane crash. Like it's this alternate version of events where there's no blood, there's no wreckage from the crash. Nobody's distressed, and their hair doesn't even get messed up. Like it's so obviously the opposite of what an actual plane crash would look like. Absolutely. When I see these cards, I always think of the movie Fight Club,

where Brad Pitt's character is just, it's outright mocks the way that people look on these cards. Emergency water landing 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows. The illusion of safety. And then like later on, you see Ed Norton and Brad Pitt replace the normal safety cards with cards where everyone is like freaked out and panicking. Yeah, and I think that the Fight Club scene gets at something about how most of us think

the cards aren't actually necessary. Like at some gut level, we just assume that if we're in a crash, everyone's gonna die. But then after I began collecting them, I started looking into the history of these cards and where they come from. And basically, what I learned is that we have that all wrong. Safety cards work. Really? I would not have thought that.

Yeah, reading a safety card can save your life. But also, it turns out that safety cards have played a central role in our evolving understanding of how to survive a plane crash. Alright, we'll tell me more. What is it that we owe to the safety card? Well, to answer that, first, we have to go back a ways. To a time when safety cards were pretty much useless. In fact, they weren't even really about safety.

Because in the early days of passenger airplane travel in the 1930s, there was no regulation at all about what should go in the cards. And in the beginning, airlines had to convince people to get on planes because people were scared to fly. So the early cards were all about soothing passengers, telling them on the idea that air travel was safe and glamorous. And they were essentially just miniature versions of those travel postcards, like little advertisements for the airlines. So here, let me show you a really early card. This one was made by Imperial Airways in the 1930s. Oh, okay, this one says Imperial Airways comfort and convenience, and there's little cherubs

carrying a fat, fancy man in the hammock. That's lovely. That is not the depiction of air travel in any way, shape or form. No, it's a fantasy. And if you open it up, all of the instructions pretty much are all text. Okay, so here's some of this. Okay. To inflate the belt, hold the air bottle, which you can feel inside the belt in the left hand and press lever B upwards with the right hand. That is not very clear. Do you know what that means? No, I really don't. And sadly, this card is characteristic of the whole first wave of safety card design

throughout the 30s and 40s. And to be fair, by the mid 60s, things that improved a bit. You start to see these things called fleet cards, which were almost like spiral bound booklets that contained the safety instructions for multiple plane models in multiple languages. But that often just made it harder to find the correct safety information because there were so many pages to flip through. So how did we get from that to the kinds of cards that we're familiar with today? Well, things really started to change in the late 1960s when airlines started noticing a troubling pattern when it came to crashes.

Impact survival was possible, but not escape. Dan Johnson is a psychologist who specializes in airplane safety. And he says that in the 50s and 60s, air travel was growing increasingly safe. Plains crashed less often. And when they did crash, thanks to design improvements, those crashes were less fatal, all of which should have added up to more survivors. But unfortunately, those survivors were not always getting out of the airplane time to survive. And I have to say, this is the part of the story that made me throw out everything I

had assumed about airplane safety. Because it turns out that if you're in a serious crash, it's not the impact that kills you. There's very few accidents that kill everyone aboard. Instead, what kills you is what happens next. It's the smoke and fire inside the cabin after the crash. So the key to surviving is getting out of the plane as fast as possible. Huh. I guess I never thought about it that way before, that the important thing is just exiting the plane. Yeah, and this is the realization

accident investigators had in the 1960s. They calculated that in your average crash, people had about 90 seconds to get out of the plane before it became, quote, unquote, unservivable. But again and again, they found that passengers weren't making it out in time. In one accident, quote unquote, unsurvivable. But again and again, they found that passengers weren't making it out in time. In one accident, for example, there were 101 passengers aboard

four survivors. And the people who were killed were not killed as a result of the impact, but because they couldn't get out to the door. That's so dreadful. It's nightmare fuel. And it was a nightmare for the airline industry too, which is why, in 1968, Douglas aircraft decided to improve their safety record by hiring Dan, along

with another guy named Bo Altman. I had never been on an airplane in my life. That's Bo. Like Dan, he's also a psychologist who specializes in airplane safety. But back when he was first hired at Douglas, he says he didn't know the first thing about air travel. Well, I still like, but I'd never been on one of those great big monster airplanes. So the first time he entered a proper passenger plane was to give it a safety inspection. And my first inclination was when I entered the back door of the airplane was where are the exits.

And I could not see any exits. I could only see the door which I came through. And I said, well, how does a passenger know where to go in the event of an emergency? So he started walking through the airplane and he noticed all the doors were covered with curtains. And why were they covered? Was it just for aesthetics? Oh yeah, they didn't want anybody to know that there was a possibility of an emergency exit there. They didn't want to talk about safety at all. And then he took a look at their safety cards. So I looked at and I said this is is terrible. Is it all in three languages? And no pictures or nothing, it was just read it and weep. And I said, we've got a problem here.

We need to teach passengers how to get out of that airplane in a hurry. So Bowen Dan decided to fail in a company together to improve airline safety procedures. They called it the interaction research corporation, and their specialty was running tests in mock cabins full of research participants. So Dan and I did tons of work on how do we get 450 people aboard that airplane off everybody off, including the crew in 98 seconds. And they would start by making each test as realistic as possible. They always made sure that there were X amount of people under the age of 6 and so many people over the age of 70. And they have only been given their passenger briefing that it would be on a regular airplane.

And then they would just toss a smoke bomb into the fake plane cabin. Then, boom, lights go off. Emergency, emergency evacuate, evacuate. Release your seatbelt, release your seatbelt. Get up, get up, get up, move, move, move. Get to the exit. And then when they got to the exit, they would be 15 feet above the ground and they had the jump into an inflatable slide in the dark and they'd never done it before. And trying to get everyone moving as fast as possible, these experiments could actually get dangerous. I have no doubt. Yeah, they got a lot of him. We tried to provide as much realism as we could

without hurting people. We still hurt a lot of people. Early. Yeah, a lot of people got hurt jumping out of the slides. But nevertheless, we did it. It was for the greater good. Yes, yes. And their tests were an information gold mine. All the participants would be wearing numbered vests

indicating their seat number, their age, their gender. And Bowen Dan would be filming the whole thing to see who went where and who did what? I figured that I had looked at about 10,000 people over 10 years looking at whether they sat down at the door still, how long they waited until they followed the behavior of the passenger in front. So, for example, with that thing Dan just mentioned, whenever people sat down at the door before going down the slide, they found that it took an extra half second per person. And if you've got maybe 100 passengers going out of a door, then that's 40 or 50 seconds.

But if you need to get everyone out in 90 seconds, then 50 seconds is more than you can afford. So I thought the jumping on the slide was a structural thing, but that's actually just a time thing? Yeah, I thought that too, that sitting down would like damage the slide. Yeah. No, it's all about getting the passengers out as quickly as possible. Oh, that is fascinating.

Yeah, but one of the most important things Bowen Dan learned was that one of the best ways to get out of the airplane on time was, surprise, to read the safety card. Wow, they're important. They really are important when they had people read the safety cards and when those cards had the relevant information, the evacuation times improved dramatically. So they began applying what they learned in the experiments to the design and improved dramatically. So they began applying what they learned

in the experiments to the design and the cards. And we said, okay, how can we improve these? And then we said no words, just pictures. And then Bowen Dan would test the cards out on the public and see if people could understand the illustration. We'd say, we've got a second here, Mr. We've got something here we'd like for you to take a look at and tell us what you think.

And we have to have 90% understandability or we're not going to sell this card. And the result was cards that look a lot like the cards you see today. They used pictures to tell the entire story of how to exit the plane. And they zoomed in on specific important actions like how to open a door. And there were also things that you might not consciously notice, but which apparently really help,

like using red for all the exit-related arrows, and pretty much having no text on the card, except for the word exit. Huh, yeah, I've never really thought about that, that exit is the only word. Yeah, they just contained all these visual strategies that nudge the reader towards comprehension. And as a final little design flourish, instead of like getting swallowed up by the seat back pocket, their cards actually fit, so the title would just peek out and sort of entice the passenger to open it up. And when they look down, all they could see was just in Intriguing, just in case, just in case what?

This is the ABC evening news with Harry Reesner and Barbara Walters. Good evening. Yesterday the averages caught up with the 747. Two of them, both on charter flights, both on the ground, collided at Tenerife Airport in the Canary Islands. The Tenerife crash in March of 1977 is the moment where Boeing Dan's cards really were put to the test. Because it involved two large planes, it's still the single deadliest aviation accident in history. Why it happened is kind of up for debate, but basically a 747 belonging to KLM, an airline carrier, collided on take-off with

a Pan Am 747 that was still on the runway. And the KLM plane tore the roof off of the Pan Am plane. Oh my god. Yeah and on the KLM plane everyone died and that easily could have been the case with the panamplain too. It got very hot inside the panamplain because of the fuel. Fuel leaking down from the KLM plane into the cabin. So at a certain point the conditions in the cabin became unsurvivable. But 67 people did survive. And it turned out that Dan and Bo designed the safety card for the Pan Am 747, meaning their card was the one on board the plane with the survivors.

And one of the at least that I talked to said that if it wasn't for the safety card, he and his wife would not have gotten out of the plane. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. Apparently, this one couple, Paul and Floyd HECK somewhat famously escaped the crash while clutching a safety card in their hands. I actually have a copy of that safety card. Okay, so let me check this out. So it says 747, just in case, dot, dot, dot, and you open it up. And it's really like the modern card. You know, like, has opened up the door, jumping onto the slide, the layout of the plane. And it's, it is a quantum leap forward over the ones you showed me earlier that were all

text, you know, and beautiful pictures, but really just, just impenetrable. Yeah, it, it seems like one that would save lives. Exactly. And they really saw the fact that there were survivors in Tenerife as kind of a vindication of their work. And after Tenerife, Bowen Dan actually testified before Congress about the need for better airline safety procedures. And it's around that time that the all-visual safety cards became the standard throughout the industry.

So, did they learn anything else from the trustee at Tenerife? Like, were the things that they discovered that they could have done better even? Yeah, that's a great question. Given that some of the survivors said the safety cards definitely helped them, why weren't there even more survivors? And they found that there are really two big hurdles preventing people from absorbing the information in the safety cards. The first is that when the crash happened, a lot of people just froze. Some of the survivors gave us some information on they were going down the ILA to get to an exit

and there were people sitting there with their mouth open. They didn't know what to do, they didn't know what to move, they didn't do anything, they just sat there and died. Investigators at Tenerife found that some of the victims were still buckled in their seats. Like they were so shocked, they couldn't even unbuckle their seatbelts. Yeah, it is pretty creepy, but it's also apparently common in plain crashes. It's called tonic immobility, and psychologists think that this is like a primitive defense mechanism, because one way to get a predator to leave you alone is just to play dead. And it turns out that this explains the thing that from the beginning I have found the most perplexing about the safety cards.

Why in the world of the safety card is everything so orderly and sort of panicless? I think that there's a fear of being in an airplane accident and anything that we do that might increase that fear would probably increase the incidence of tonic immobility. The placid faces, the perfectly quaffed hair. The very thing that Fight Club is making fun of, it turns out that that is not like a shallow corporate marketing decision. Dan says the bloodless design is at least partially about keeping passengers from panicking even more and maybe even freezing up.

So you mentioned that there are two big hurdles. One is that the people freeze up before using the information on the cards. What's the second big hurdle when it comes to safety cards? The second hurdle is something that we talked about at the very beginning of the story, which is that nobody reads them. Nobody reads the cards. Besides you. Yeah, it turns out that the little Justin case teaser doesn't really work that well. You're going to get a lot of people, this is I am not going to do that. I don't want to read this. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to do anything at all about it. Period. I want to get to Dallas and I don't give a **** about anything else. I mean, period. I want to get to Dallas and I don't give a sh** about anything else.

I mean, that's their attitude. Dan told me that even today, only 3 or 4% of passengers ever pick up the safety card. Is this why they now do safety videos, you know, not relying solely on the cards? Well, the videos help up to a point, but even the briefing videos have their limits. Like, they work really well with first-time flyers, but they still fall flat, just like the cards, when it comes to frequent flyers. So you get the cards, you get the videos, and also things like the flight demonstrations, but I wonder if there's any other way to reach the most resistant passengers.

Like, have they tried other things to inject the necessary information into people's brains? So there are some other methods that airline companies have tried to get passengers' attention and they haven't gone that well. Bo told me about this one carrier Eastern Airlines that tried an experiment. They had everybody to come into the facility 15 minutes early and then they had to go to this room and they got to pass passenger safety briefing in the room Then they went out of business Both as the cards the demonstrations the videos they all help get more information across to more people

But in the end the information will always hit this wall of resistance among passengers We try to teach them. We try to encourage them. We do all those things, but people's attitudes stick, and you can't change that. You cannot change that. So you have to look at it and say, how many people can I trust to do what they're told to do? Probably 30%. 30%. But what do you do? You have to play the odds. That's all there is to it. So really, when it comes down to it, if I really want to survive a crash or some kind of

problem on an airplane, the final step really rests with me. I have to watch the video. I have to read the card. Like, this is my responsibility is. The final step really rests with me. I have to watch the video. I have to read the card. Like, this is my responsibility is take that final step. Yeah, and oh my God, I'm just cringing. Like, I feel like at the risk of turning this whole story into a PSA, it really is the truth that we all have to actively participate in taking our own safety seriously.

And I still, I love the cards. I just see them a little bit differently now. Before doing all this reporting, to me, they were just like physical, laminated artifacts of people pretending to have control in a crisis. Like, they were enduring, because they were so futile, because they didn't matter. Yes, that's like the main reason that I took them from place. But now, and I know I'm gonna sound like I'm goody too to say this, but the next time I board a plane,

I'm gonna pull out the safety information card, and I'm gonna read it, note where the exits are, how to open the door, and then when I'm finished, I'm gonna put it back in the seat back pocket and hope that the next person reads it too. We come back, we'll talk to some of the people who actually draw safety cards for a living and find out why you really want them to do a good job after this. So we're back with safety card criminal, Mo the board. So Mo, I know that there was some stuff that we couldn't fit in the piece and you talked

to other people besides Bowen Dan. Yeah, when I was researching this story, one of the things I learned is that Bowen Dan had all these great innovations, but you know, neither of of them are artists, like they don't draw the cards. So I got really curious about who it is that does the drawing, like what actually goes into creating one of these things. So I called up Brock Fisher and Larry Bruns. When you tell people, this is what you do, what does most people say? Um, one I get a lot is that's a real job. Or that pays the bills.

I get that one quite a bit. Most people don't say anything. So the first guy you heard is Brock and the second guy's Larry. Together they comprise Air Safety Art International. And, adorably, they are a grandfather, grandson, safety card design duo. Ha ha ha duo. Nice.

I love it. Yeah. And apparently, major airline companies have their own in-house design teams. But smaller airlines turn to companies like Brock and Larry's to make their safety cards. And they also do a lot of private jets and helicopters, which means that they have a lot of fancy clients, some of which they could tell me on the record and helicopters, which means that they have a lot of fancy clients, some of which they could tell me on the record and some of which they couldn't.

Okay, yeah, I can tell you. I did Taylor Swift's Falcon jet. Really? Yeah, I don't know if it's the same one she has now, but I did want to Taylor Swift's briefing cards. Yes, I confess I was star struck. I was very impressed. But even more impressive is that Larry is the guy who

did all the drawings for Bowen Dan's first visual cards back in the 60s. Turns out he's Bow's brother-in-law. So this is like a family family business. Totally, yes. Which means that Larry helped develop the classic safety card look. The retro clothes and the crisp clean lines and of course no words. Words in a briefed card just kill me and unfortunately they're out there. And for the past few years he's been teaching his grandson Brock all the secrets of safety card illustration. Oh so okay we have to hear some secrets of safety card illustrations. What are they? I mean what what goes into designing a safety card that maybe I am not noticing?

Well, the big goal is that grasping the information presented in the card should feel effortless. So it's trying to make sure that it's a little story and that the whole story makes sense without someone going, whoa, wait a minute. And that little story is the story of how you get off the plane. And it starts with making sure you understand where you are in the cabin. That's one that kind of gets me when I'm on an airliner, is if I'm looking at the card and I look up, do I see the same thing? And then they need to make sure that each scene in the narrative has only like a few key

details that stand out. Things like, if in that aircraft that handle is bright red, we need to show it bright red, not a generic gray or black. It needs to be red, because if that's the only thing you remember, at least you know what you're looking for. So the premise is that I'm panicking. I just have this glowing red handle in my mind's eye from the card, and I'm just thinking red handle, red handle, and then when I see it, I'm like, success,

then next step. Exactly, yes. But even conveying that is a lot of work because all the details you see in the card have to exactly match what's actually in the aircraft. So the passengers don't get confused. So Larry and Brock told me that they need images or samples of all of the objects in each

carrier's version of each different plane. Right. Like, you would be shocked at how many different types of door handles there are. Or safety vests, there are. There are so many types of inflatable safety vests. Larry and Brock say they've drawn about 150 types of lifefests and rafts. I never really thought of that, but that's totally true. Yeah, it has to be exactly right, or it doesn't really do its job.

Yeah. And the same thing goes for all the different actions that the passengers are expected to perform. Because they need to accurately convey what each of those actions look like, but also feel like. When we draw people, we have them carry weight. Like we add muscle shape inside the lines. We kind of like show them bending and the creakles in the shirt. So it looks like he's heaving this raft.

So we create the illusion of mass and weight really quickly. And that means that they've also ended up with a vast library of customized character poses. So in the end, we probably have, I don't know, we've never done the math. There's got to be a thousand different characters, and 985 of them are me, so. So.

So. So. Yeah, this is the final safety card secret. Many of the characters you see in their cards, regardless of what they look like on the page, really, they're just, brock, like, they're just based on photos of him in a nice pair of slacks on a dress shirt. People actually like, why is that for that? They'll start to look and be like, it's just the same guy in every situation on this card.

That's so good. This is my favorite fun fact, because when Brock's body type won't do, they just recruit anybody. Like, they're cousin, they're spouse, they're friend, to come put on business casual, or like a flight attendant outfit and pose for the cards. We've for some reason, recruit waitresses from restaurants that we used to go to when we were in Bellingham. We asked them if they want to make an extra 100 bucks,

and they usually say yes. We were, really? It just come out of my house and pretend to be a crash card model. Yeah, and they actually asked me if I wanted to be a safety card model. Oh my god. Did you say yes? Yes, I was like... Of course. It is super niche and super cool. They haven't had an order come in where they need basically a woman to do a very specific action yet, but when they do, I'll be there. Oh, this has been so much fun. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Roman. 99% invisible was produced this week by Mo the Bored, edited by Joe Rosenberg, mixed by Bryson Barnes, music by Sean Raell. Delaney Hall is the senior producer, Kurt Colstata is the digital director, the rest of the team is Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris Barube, Vivian Le, Katie Mingle, Abby Medon, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to the Johan Pill, who we spoke to for this story about the history of safety card design, but whose voice we didn't get to include.

Some of the images Mo and I looked at are actually from an incredible book he put together with co-author Eric Erickson. It's called Design for Impact, and it contains images of safety cards from different periods all over the world is absolutely gorgeous book and it's just so much fun to flip through. If you want to check it out, we'll have a link on our website, 99pi.org. We are a project of K-AIL W-91.7 in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row, which lives at the far corners of North America, but is centered in beautiful downtown,

Oakland, California We're a founding member of radio topia from pierrex a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world Find them all at radio topia.fm You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI or we're on Instagram and read it too. You can now order our first book, the 99% Invisible City at 99PI.org's Flash Book. We have links to purchase that anywhere you get your books including Signed Editions and the Audio Book and if you did get a book and enjoyed it. Review it somewhere.

It's a huge help to us when you review it in lots of different places. For all your other 99PI needs, look no further than 99ipi.org. From PRX.