This is nowhere near a bad thing to look at while you eat your breakfast.

The thing with air commuting is that I spend a lot of time listening to air safety briefings. Now, if I can’t get a direct flight and must connect through Vancouver, I will listen to the same briefing 2 times.

In less than 2 hours.

In 2 official languages.

At an average of 10 minutes a go, this means that I will lose 40 minutes a week to instructions on what happens if the plane crashes.

You might nod and tell me that this is good, that we should be conscious of safety. You might say that repeated instruction means that I am more likely to survive a crash. You might, if you were that sort of a person, suggest that this is the best 40 minutes of my week.

I dearly hope you are not.

Consider this – flying is, conservatively estimated, over a thousand times safer than driving. If you drive in a very major metropolitan area, you will die a great deal more often.

Now, if we really are so namby-pamby about safety, tell me, why on earth do I not hear a safety briefing when I get in my car to drive it to the airport? Indeed, while I was discussing ranting about this to Mr. Spit, some moron in a jacked up pick up truck cut into our lane and very nearly killed us both.

Yet, no one would stand it if we had to listen to a safety briefing on the finer points of signaling and braking and going the speed limit every time we sat in the driver’s seat. No one would stand it, although we actually drive the car, and I assure you, I don’t drive the airplane.

Consider also this salient little fact. As near as I can tell, from an exhaustive 10 minutes poking around the internet, if you are in a plane crash, you are in one of two potential scenarios.

Either the pilot and the air traffic control tower will figure out a way to bring tons of screaming steel to a stop on a handy horizontal surface, or they will not. Oh, sure, in the case of the landing, you may not actually be able to use the plane again, and the 50 year old business man in the seat next to you, who really needs to lay off the beer and hot wings may have his heart attack a few years sooner, but you aren’t actually going to die. Indeed, it’s not likely you are going to be mortally wounded.

If they cannot figure out how to bridge the gap between air and ground in a sensible manner, you will die. No, really, I mean that. There actually is no middle ground. Either the plane lands and people get off it more or less in one piece, or they don’t get off it at all. You don’t hear of a situation where the people who listened to the in flight safety briefing and read the stupid little card survive, and the rest of us dolts who were contemplating what we could buy from the in flight liquor options and whether or not we were getting cookies or pretzels, died.

Interestingly, from both reading and from Mr. Spit (who did actual things with actual fighter planes when he was in the actual air force) I have gleaned a single safety tip that might actually make a difference. Not particularly between living and dying, because I’ve established that has nothing to do with you anyway, but from what makes  the difference between walking off the plane, wading through the stuff  they spray on the runway and having to be wheeled off with two broken legs.

Wear your seat  belt when you are sitting down. Stay seated most of the flight.

So, I vote that we skip the in flight safety briefing and the stupid card. You can use that 10 minutes to settle my mind about whether or not the airline has run out of little bottles of gin on this flight and the eternal question about pretzels or cookies. You could replace the stupid card with a magazine that I might actually want to read.

And you wouldn’t have made me any less safe.