Lives worth more than luggage

IN A WIDELY SHARED VIDEO clip about the Moscow plane fire that killed 41 people on Sunday, some passengers can be seen trying to grab their luggage even after the fire was already quite fierce. China Daily writer Zhang Zhouxiang stresses the essential principle in such an emergency should be "forget your luggage":

What happened in Moscow is not an isolated incident. Two months ago, a flight from Beijing to Los Angeles had to land at Anadyr Airport in Russia due to a fire alert. Yet when the pilot successfully landed the plane at the airport, many passengers were busy grabbing their luggage despite warnings from the crew that the plane might explode at any time.

Fortunately, the fire alert proved to be a computer error, but it was still an emergency and the passengers should have evacuated the plane as quickly as possible.

In 2013, a woman on an Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash landed in San Francisco was photographed dragging her luggage behind her when the passengers evacuated the plane. The photo spread online, and she was widely criticized.

It seems some people are still ignorant about why passengers are instructed not to get their cabin luggage during emergency evacuations.

First, every second matters in an emergency evacuation. It might take 10 seconds for someone to grab his or her luggage from the overhead bins, during which time they will be blocking the aisle. Those 10 seconds might mean life or death for those behind the luggage-taker.

Second, since passengers' bags can be quite heavy and bulky, they might hurt someone or block the passage of people behind if they fall as someone opens the overhead bins.

In both cases, innocent passengers lose the opportunity of survival because of the selfish deed of the passenger who insists on trying to taking his or her luggage.

Last, when the luggage-taker comes to the inflatable slide together with his/her precious luggage, there is even greater risk because he/she now has to jump onto the inflatable slide with it which may possibly pierce the plastic slide.

Should there be an emergency landing and passengers need to evacuate the plane, they should forget about their luggage and obey the orders of the cabin crew, who are trained to get everyone off board as quickly as possible.