What: Taban Air Tupolev TU-154M en route from Mashhad to Kish Island in the Persian Gulf
Where: emergency landing in Mashhad
When: August 7 2009
Who: 150 passengers
Why: 40 minutes into the flight, the plane had a technical “glitch” (electrical problems affecting several systems) forcing the pilot to declare an emergency.

George’s Point of View

This incident follows the death of 17 and the injury of 30 in Mashhad on July 24, 2009. At that time, an Ilyushin jet with skidded off the runway and struck a wall.

And a little more than a week before that, on Wednesday July 15 a Tu-154M went down 16 minutes after takeoff from Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran.

No airline named “Taban Air” is listed under the IATA membership website.

Although this flight did land without death or injury, it appears that Tehran has some airline safety issues to work out.

If I didn’t believe I was going to be safe on a plane, I wouldn’t get on it. It should go without saying. Most people probably feel that way, except for the ones stuck in countries whose airlines are on the EU banned list.

But apparently, British Airways isn’t so confident. They are offering a four hour class in how to crash. That is, they are going to charge passengers to teach them how they want passengers to behave in a crash, to increase their likelihood of survival.

Excuse me? This is not like a Drunk Driving class where the driver, the one in control of the vehicle, is being taught something. These are passengers, stuck in a flying sardine can, strapped into their seats. There’s not a whole lot passengers can do but sit there. Beyond that little sideshow performance by the attendants before every flight, other than avoiding hysteria, what else can passengers do? Flap their wings?

I am on the fence about whether or not such a course is a good idea. On one hand, I can picture a poll taken by airline patrons who have written in their own question, asking what to do in case of a crash.

Pray.

Maybe flight attendants just get tired of answering that question, “What can we really do to survive, if we crash?” They probably hear it frequently. Maybe someone asked Sully, and Sully said, “Be calm.”

In most cases who survives a plane crash has a lot to do with age. When there is one single survivor, it is usually a child, and I don’t think there’s anything that a class offered by British Airways can teach to make anyone younger. There are seats that may be marginally safer depending on how the plane crashes, but everyone can’t sit in them. That would cause a plane crash. (It reminds me of a recent crash of a plane where some smuggled creatures escaped their confines, scared everyone from one side of a small plane to the other, and of course, it got off balance and crashed.)

I can also picture a boardroom with a bunch of accounting types trying to figure out new revenue streams. They ask themselves what do passengers want?

The answer? To get to their destination in one piece.

But they’re already selling them tickets. What else can they do to squeeze the market? I mean, what else can they do to make the passengers happy?

“Eureka!” one of them shouts, “Let’s offer plane crash safety classes.” Maybe this one means well at the time. Maybe when he suggests it, he thinks it should be free. Or maybe he is just hoping his shiftless out-of-work brother-in-law could get hired by British Airlines to teach the classes, so he’ll move out of the spare bedroom.

So in that imaginary planning meeting I referenced before, the British Airways guy with the calculator says “And charge them for it!”

Their documentation says that British Airways believes a class will “make passengers safer…by giving additional skills and information.”

Does this mean they are withholding information that would make passengers safer?

If there’s something new or special that should be taught about living through a flight, (people, consider that I am writing this article while ON a slow plane from China,) then this is something EVERY passenger must know, and it must be included in the price of the ticket.

The whole scheme of this class seems problematic to me. We passengers are already buying your tickets. Charging us to make us safer on your flight…that seems not only hypocritical, it seems like the ultimate in avariciousness.

What are you going to do next if a plane crashes? Make the people who didn’t take the class leave the plane last? Do they get to die first?

The announcement indicates that this program was developed for BP staff who regularly end up on EU banned list flights on planes that skydivers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot parachute. Maybe the class really just scares people off of those banned airlines, and onto British Airways planes, which are more expensive but a heck of a lot more likely to get you there intact than an airline that doesn’t pass the EU safety criteria.

Anyway, British Airways, if you’re listening, this is not just a product that you got stuck with to make some money from. This is something you should be offering to all your passengers, for free. Have some stars (Tom Cruise reprising his Top Gun role, Meg Ryan reprising her aerophobic character in French Kiss, or maybe the cast of that new Pan Am series.)

Record the class. Give it out as a DVD with the tickets. Sometimes you have to put away the calculator.