Actually Worth Watching

Airplane safety videos are designed to break you. Everyone knows this. They strap you into a narrow seat for three hours, the cabin goes dark, and some voice starts explaining emergency procedures like they’re reading a phone book from 1987. The actors look dead inside. The cameras look older than the plane. You pull out your phone or stare at the back of the seat in front of you, waiting for it to end.

Virgin made one that’s actually good. That’s the whole story, really. Not good for a safety video—good. Engaging. The kind of thing you watch instead of escape from. I don’t know if it’s because Richard Branson likes messing with convention, or if someone at Virgin just got tired of how aggressively bad these things are everywhere else. But somewhere in that airline, someone decided that something trapped people are forced to watch doesn’t have to be unwatchable.

Most carriers don’t bother. Their logic is sound: you’re stuck. Why spend money making it good? Virgin figured out the inverse. People are stuck for hours before and after that video. Maybe they’d rather remember you as the one that didn’t waste their time.