Reality Airlines
How the safety briefing would sound if airlines told the truth
Welcome on board Reality Airlines and thanks to y’all for traveling with us. We know y’all have a choice of carriers and frankly with our margins and our annoying demand-based pricing we’re thrilled to have y’all here occupying our seats. Except for those of you who discovered we’ve over-sold the seats as a matter of routine in order to protect our margins and so won’t be traveling with us on this flight after all. Sorry ‘bout that, y’all.
OK, now listen up. We all know that your boarding process was a mess, but our marketing folk tell us you’d hate us if we boarded you rationally, from the rear forward and with the window seat passengers first. So we let y’all just jostle and get annoyed with each other instead of being annoyed at us. Sure makes our lives easier! But no matter how banged up and hostile y’all feel in consequence of all of our boarding hassle, we want y’all to listen up and pay attention to our good ol’ safety briefing.
Y’all know the usual schtick: life vest under your seat, brace position, all that crap, right?
Well, not here. Nosiree.
Here at Reality Airlines we give it to y’all damn straight.
First off, if we do end up having a hard landing, or what the media loves to refer to as a “crash,” then basically we’re all fucked. Sure, we could probably save y’all by simply having the seats facing backward but once again our marketing folk tell us most of y’all would sure hate that. So we keep y’all facing forward, which is a very undesirable position to occupy in the event we, ahem, “crash.”
As for the brace position, well let me tell y’all: it’s just about the worst possible position to assume ’cause it puts all the impact force onto the smallest and most vulnerable vertebrae you have which means you’ll certainly snap your neck. If you live, you’ll be a quadriplegic. Don’t worry though; your chances of surviving will be pretty much zero. Now if y’all weren’t so fat we’d suggest you get your feet up against the back of the seat in front of you and put your forearms over your thighs to cushion your head, but the fact is y’all are a big ol’ bunch o’ jellies who likely can’t even touch your toes without a long stick in your hands.
You wanna know about them life vests the other airlines make a big fuss over? Fact is, the only water landings in aviation history where everyone didn’t get all mushed into itty-bitty pieces were just after takeoff and down onto placid water. So: low speed, flat water. In which case y’all really don’t need life vests.
But if we go down over the sea, do y’all seriously imagine this airframe can stand up to a 500-mile-per-hour impact into twenty or thirty foot high waves? This thing would have to weigh a few hundred tons more to be strong enough to take that kind of beating. And then it wouldn’t get off the ground. So we don’t bother with those life vests; we’d rather stock a few more miniature bottles of hard liquor ’cause it makes a whole heap more sense.
We do have some pretty nice oxygen masks, but here’s the funny thing: they work by mixing two chemicals that release oxygen for y’all. The side-effect is a weird burning smell. The other airlines don’t tell you about this, which means in a real emergency a lot of folk take off their oxygen mask ’cause they think there’s something wrong with it! How hilarious is that?
Damn, it sure makes us laugh every time.
If we hit a snag while we’re still on the ground, we know ten percent of y’all are gonna start screaming and running around like headless chickens, getting in everyone’s way and probably creating enough of a hazard that y’all will sure get us all killed. The rest o’ y’all will likely try to get your bags out of the overhead bins even though that’ll block the aisle and also get us all killed. We’d like the airlines to issue us with electric cattle prods but they won’t do it; the marketing guys say you’d be unhappy and y’all would rather burn to death.
Basically we’re hoping that there’s at least one current or former special forces operator on board who can grip y’all and move y’all the fuck out of the plane before we all die.
OK, that concludes our brutally truthful safety briefing. All in all, it’s a damned good thing that the absolute safest way to travel is by commercial airline. Otherwise the dumb-ass garbage safety briefings the other airlines do would have pretty damn serious consequences.
Have a great flight and see y’all soon, y’hear?
