Behold the airline safety card, that humble piece of paper or plastic wedged unceremoniously into the seatback of every commercial airplane you’ve ever been on. You know, the one with the diagrams depicting how to save yourself in the event everything goes very, very wrong on your flight to Tuscaloosa, even though it almost certainly won’t. The one that somehow manages to be equal parts toddler chew toy and AvGeek collectible; oft-overlooked visual furniture that reminds you of your own mortality.
When was the last time you picked it up and gave it a good browse?
That’s the issue that The Interaction Group (IRC) CEO Trisha Ferguson endeavors to solve every day.
“There’s often this avoidance in looking at the card until it’s absolutely necessary,” says Ferguson from her company’s office an hour south of Seattle.
Nestled between an auto-parts store and a martial arts academy, nothing about the IRC’s 5,000 square foot facility (one of two) screams ‘industrial-level safety card production shop.’ And yet a sizable chunk of the world’s safety cards begin their lives here, in this otherwise unassuming retail zone.
Experiments in evacuation
The company traces its roots back to the 1960s, when Dr. Daniel A. Johnson, an accident psychologist, teamed up with Dr. Beau Altman while at Douglas Aircraft to study crash survivability. They quickly came to a realization: crashes were often considerably more survivable than previously believed.
“It wasn’t [just] the impact that was causing death and harm, it was [also] the evacuation,” said Ferguson. Altman and Johnson spent over a decade pouring through accident reports, interviewing survivors, and running tests to figure out how to improve evacuations and post-crash survivability.
They famously ran full-scale evacuation tests with real aircraft and real people, including children and the elderly. This was not a simple, ‘everyone get off the plane as fast as you can but we leave the lights on’ scenario. The pair worked full-tilt into making the experience as realistic as possible. In something that definitely feels like it wouldn’t fly today, the pair filled the cabin (again, with kids and the older folks alike), cut the lights, toss in a few smoke bombs and record what happened.
They also ran studies to understand how people used safety equipment provided to them, filming participants as they navigated everything from using seat belts to donning life jackets. Spoiler alert: we aren’t as good at using these as we think we are.
Altman and Johnson learned pretty quickly that the presence of safety cards improved survivability.
Johnson eventually ventured out on his own, founding IRC in 1971. Since then IRC has continued to run tests, as well as consult and design safety cards, safety videos, and other factors at the crux of aviation safety and human factor psychology.
While a form of safety cards first became federally mandated in the mid 1960s, the card as we know it today didn’t become required until 1978. It was then that Johnson, alongside Altman, pushed Congress to adopt many of the regulations that have since become standard across both the US and the globe.
No one reads the safety cards
Yet even still, it turns out the safety card has to accomplish a lot of things to be successful. And that starts with just being noticed at all.
“We’re a company built on human behavior,” said Ferguson. “And our studies show that if we make the card easy and attractive, people will read it,” she said.
The first tricks are placement, and size. “In most countries the card has to be within reach of the individual in the seat at all times,” she said. It does no good for the card to exist, but be stuck in an overhead bin, for example.
Related, it has to be easily visually sighted, which in this case often comes down to a matter of size. Make the card too small and it’ll easily get lost, either at the bottom of the seatback pocket or shuffled amongst the menus, Wi-Fi cards, and duty-free magazines that it typically shares space with. Make it just right and it’ll stick out just above all the noise, easy to see and ready to roll. Plus, much like placement, size is often a regulatory requirement: “it has to sit up above the seat pocket,” says Ferguson.
From reading to recognition
The next hurdle is converting someone from registering that it’s there, to wanting to engage with it. And even better, understand it.
Historically this has been the card’s biggest challenge. Prior to the modern designs we see today, many early cards were text-heavy and image light. Others weren’t even cards: plenty of carriers buried the information deep inside thick ‘welcome aboard’ booklets well into the 1960s. And that’s of course if they had any printed safety information on board at all.
As IRC founders would discover, that was the wrong approach.
“Studies show the more text you have on a page, the less likely it is to even be picked up,” said Ferguson.
Illustration is where it’s at, she says, adding that “people consume illustrated instructions at a much higher rate than they consume text.” Interestingly, that also means no photos, which “detract from the content of the information,” said Ferguson.
Illustrations have a number of advantages over text beyond simply being more visually approachable. For one, they’re language neutral. “We eliminate language from our cards as much as possible, other than what is required [by regulations],” Ferguson said. Factors such as reading comprehension levels and how different cultures literally approach reading (left to right vs right to left) add complexity to text that illustrations don’t necessarily share.
Illustrations are also more accommodating of inclusive representation, something aviation, and by extension safety cards, have struggled with in the past. “We took a look at our cards about a decade ago and weren’t happy with our standard,” she said. As a result, Ferguson says they’ve become proactive with airlines about broadening representation on their cards, including everything from body types to hair textures, gender representation to diversity of skin tones.
It’s an effort that pays off: “We know if passengers see themselves reflected in the illustrations of a card, they’re much more likely to continue to consume the information and consume it at a higher level,” she said.
Still, it’s not quite as simple as swapping out text for doodles. “It can’t be so busy that people are overwhelmed by it,” said Ferguson. But it also can’t be so minimal that people are left with questions either. “You have to be cognitive of human behavior and consumption of information,” said Ferguson.
Which means “it has to be done well. It is colors, it is fonts, it is the size of the font, the size of the illustrations, the flow of the card,” Ferguson explained. “Is all of your over water evacuation material in one area, so that as the brain is thinking about what to do in a ditching situation it’s all in one spot?”
“Colors evoke emotion in all of us,” she added, noting that red and blue are more likely to get the card picked up in the first place. Red and green are also more likely to call attention to critical parts of the card. Factors like stroke weight, otherwise known as the thickness of a line or text, can make reading a card feel heavy and plodding versus lighter and easier.
Accuracy in the depictions is also critical. Simply having a lifejacket emoji isn’t enough, says Ferguson. It has to look just like the type of life jacket that the airplane has on board. If the carrier swaps out for a different brand or model, that means issuing a new card. Same goes for just about everything else on the airplane, from seat type to exit location to medical devices to O2 masks to door handles to, well, you get the idea.
That accuracy not only extends to an object’s illustration, but also to its usage. We might chuckle a little bit at the seemingly overkill explanation of how to fasten a safety belt, or how to put on a life jacket. Yet IRC studies from the 60s and later routinely showed that people overestimate their abilities.
“There was a failure rate of 80% with in-person life jacket donning tests,” says Ferguson, who shows me a contact sheet from a test to prove it. People kept assuming aviation life jackets were the same as maritime, she said.
The result is the detailed, step-by-step walk through you’ll see today on every card for both adult and infant life jackets.
Oxygen masks are similarly underestimated by passengers. “Studies done by IRC showed passengers thought they had more than two or three minutes to put on the oxygen mask, when in reality it could be as little as twenty seconds,” said Ferguson. And that’s before often putting them on incorrectly, she added. The result, another illustrative sequence that also includes a timer.
Exit doors are another area that seem obvious on their face, but turn out to be more complicated. The main doors on Boeing 737s open by pulling a handle counter-clockwise, while Airbus A320 family jets require pulling up.
Even aboard a specific type, differences abound. Aboard Boeing 737NG models, over-wing exit doors automatically open away from the cabin at the pull of a handle. Try that on a 737 classic and you’ll be going nowhere awfully fast. As a result, you guessed it, door operation is a required part of the card.
Others are less obvious, like the orientation of the airplane itself on the card. “Those evacuation studies showed human behavior is to return to the point of entry instead of the closest exit to you,” said Ferguson. The solution was to orient the point of view as top down, with every exit marked. It’s also why the “your closest exit may be behind you” is part of the verbal pre-flight safety briefing (along with both of the above examples).
Even today, after decades of experience, every new card is focus-tested for comprehension by an outside firm. This is done by groups in the United States, and, if applicable, in the card’s soon to be home country (i.e. a card destined to Gulf Air would be tested in Bahrain and the US), Ferguson says. “If it’s not understood by 90% [of participants] or more, we go back to the drawing board; change colors, change font sizes, change how it flows,” and then try again, she says.
In large part thanks to IRC, regulatory requirements are now the single largest guideline for what will or will not be on a card. That includes everything mentioned above, at least on part 121 US carriers, plus 45 additional pages of regulations, says Ferguson. Some of the more obscure, if not invisibly obvious, include the country of final assembly of the aircraft and a strict ban on any non-safety related information like advertising or menus (so long, page buried in the welcome aboard booklet).
Whether all of that intention and time works is a bit of a squishy question. Stats aren’t exactly easy to come by, but Altman himself noted in a 2020 interview with the podcast “99% Invisible” that only something like four percent of passengers are thought to actually pick up and examine the card.
And that may yet be a misleading statistic, especially given how incredibly unlikely it is that you’ll ever need to act on the information found in the card.
Ferguson earlier pointed to two high-profile examples, the infamous Tenerifie disaster (1977), and the hijack-induced ocean ditching of Ethiopian 961 (1996). In both cases, Ferguson says, surviving passengers credited the on board safety card as a key component to their survival.
“Ultimately, it’s important information,” she said,” and when you need it, it’s right there and it’s accessible.”
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Christian Stubø says
I did once encounter a safety card with B&W photos, on a weathered Northwest Airlines DC-9 in 1993 (it was the domestic leg of the journey when I was going to USA as a highschool exchange student, so the precise year stands out). It was very difficult to decipher what the photos were supposed to show – it probably didn’t help that the cabin crew doing the safety announcement machine gunned the words out about as fast as a US auctioneer.