According to a recent study, passenger satisfaction with airline service rose for the first time in many years. Mine didn't. My complaints are many, but they mostly stem from my dissatisfaction with the fiction that the airlines promulgate about passengers surviving a crash anywhere other than on the Hudson.
Who cares if the seat cushion can also be used as a floatation device? Hanging onto the seat cushion in the water just gives the sharks longer to sense the presence of your dangling legs and bulbous seat cushion, which has enlarged your profile to resemble a big, fat, marine mammal.
Likewise, when the flight attendants in New York demonstrate how to inflate the life vests as the plane taxis down the runway en route to London or Paris, I know that if the plane touches down in the Atlantic Ocean, none of us will survive the frigid water. So what difference does it make if we are wearing life vests? Actually, I'd rather sink quickly instead of floating for hours in the cold water until my heart eventually stopped.
The oxygen mask instructions are worse. The flight crew does not want anyone to focus for long on the possibility of a crash landing, so they try to distract the passengers with a lot of instructions. They want you to focus on the order of the tasks at hand. After the oxygen masks descend, they instruct you to pull the cord toward you, and then do something or other to release the flow of oxygen, and then put the mask over your nose and mouth. Breathe normally -- the way you would if you were not plummeting to your death. And always put your mask on first -- to heck with the children whose faces are turning blue.
And what exactly is the point of the oxygen? So we can all be lucid while we are plummeting toward the earth at hundreds of miles an hour with two engines out and no hydraulics? I'd rather be in an oxygen-deprived stupor watching the in-flight movie with a glass of wine, if those are going to be my last moments of life.
Lastly, I don't need to know anything about the inflatable slide that I will slide down feet-first on my derriere in the event of a water landing because in the event of a water landing we will all be dead. No one will be sliding anywhere, except into the afterlife.
So, instead of yapping on and on about the life vests, the seat cushions, the oxygen and the slippery slide, I would rather hear the flight crew inform all of us that in the event of an unintended water landing, the beverage cart will be moving through the aisles at warp speed and the drinks will be on the house.