The new Air India inflight safety video is a wonderful idea, blending India’s cultural heritage—through the showcase of classical dance forms of India—and airline safety! The perfect mix of heritage and modernity!
No. This is NOT my view.
This seems like the most expected intended reaction to Air India’s new inflight safety video, made by the agency McCann Worldgroup India (conceptualized by Prasoon Joshi), with music by Shankar Mahadevan and directed by Bharatbala (of A R Rahman’s Maa Tujhe Salaam fame).
This is the video:
I do not think this new Air India safety video is either well-conceived or well-produced. I had the very same reaction to Vistara’s inflight safety video from August 2020, using the Yoga theme.
In fact, I have the same reaction to most fancy inflight safety videos that prioritize the thematic elements more than the actual communication of safety-related demonstrations. The primary aim of these safety videos is to impart crucial information that can potentially save lives (both self and others). But the more thematic—and theatrical—these videos get, the further they move away from imparting valuable information because the theme distracts people from it.
I do understand the need to engage people in what is otherwise a boring demonstration of functional information. But after having seen so many such videos—most of which are made these days for virality online rather than engaging inflight passengers—I think the intent has moved significantly away from engaging the people inside a flight to being virally shared online.
So, let me talk about both those aspects in my criticism: not well-conceived and well-produced.
Let me start by addressing the issues I found in the Air India video, under not well-conceived.
Is the ‘dances of India’ theme a good idea to blend with inflight safety demonstrations? Sure. It’s a great concept, no doubt. But I’d argue that any theme can be made to blend with inflight safety demonstrations.
Vistara blended Yoga, in 2020.
KLM (Netherlands) blended the famous Delft Blue Tiles (city of Delft, Netherlands) as a theme in a hugely imaginative way for its safety video in 2015. The entire safety instruction was made with over one thousand hand-painted Delft Blue tiles and they used stop-motion photography to animate them!
Alaska Airlines (yes, the one where the door flew off recently; they reused the 1982 hit ‘Safety Dance’ by Men Without Hats for their video) and Malaysian Airlines have made music videos in 2020 and 2022, respectively!
Virgin America made a dance video in 2013, featuring musician Todrick Hall!
Virgin has also done a supercars-themed safety video in 2016!
American Airlines’ 2016 safety video uses the theme of lights and mirrors, in an impressively choreographed package.
Singapore Airlines made a tourism brochure of Singapore through its safety video in 2017.
Turkish Airlines blended the LEGO movie in 2019!
And Korean Air, understandably, made a BTS-themed safety video, in 2019.
Air New Zealand blended The Lord of the Rings theme (called ‘The Most Epic Safety Video Ever Made’), in 2014.
Air New Zealand is particularly known for making a lot of themed safety videos, most of which gets shared a lot online. Here’s one more from them – a wacky fitness-themed video!!
They also made a swimsuit special in 2014 and it, understandably, generated enough backlash for trivializing the entire point of safety videos.
Air New Zealand also was forced to drop an expensive rap music video given the terrible response it generated when it was first released.
You see that any theme or topic can be made to blend with the safety demonstration requirements. In India, that means we can make one with the cricket theme if need be. We can make one with the theme of temples. One around the rivers of India. One around Indian handicrafts. Any theme can be used as a concept.
So, giving marks for the choice of the theme (dance forms of India) is pointless. It’s like the lowest-hanging fruit – THE most obvious way to induce feelings of pride in Indians.
Still, let me commend McCann and Air India for choosing a theme, one that is, of course, representative of India’s heritage.
But, let us look at how well the theme has been conceptualized within the need to communicate inflight safety instructions.
Before the video gets to the theme, it shows an excited little girl (a passenger) looking at the crew member and then at the Air India brochure in her hand. The voice-over says, “Note that the location of the safety equipment in this aircraft may vary from other aircraft”. What do we see on the screen at this point?
An airline-window-shaped item (one that Air India uses prominently) manifests out of the printed brochure and the little girl holds it in her hand, like a magical object! I do understand that this creative device becomes the window to start bringing the thematic elements, but consider it from the perspective of new fliers and not frequent fliers. Wouldn’t that voice-over (safety equipment) and visual confuse new fliers into imagining that shape (where does one find it?) as some sort of safety equipment? The visual device is meant to entertain, but the entire point of a safety video is to start with safety first.
This creative device, of a child looking through a magical shape made contextual sense in the first ad by Air India (made by McCann) because it was an advertisement first, without the need to convey safety instructions.
In the safety video, though, the use of the device jars, even as the voice-over talks about safety equipment!
Coming to the theme itself, the new safety video features 8 classical and folk/traditional Indian dance forms: Bharatanatyam (Tamil Nadu), Odissi (Odisha), KathakaLi and Mohiniyaattam (Kerala), Kathak (Uttar Pradesh), Ghoomar (Rajasthan), Bihu (Assam), and Giddha (Punjab).
Of these, Bharatanatyam, KathakaLi, Mohiniyaattam, and Kathak get movements contextual to the dance forms (mudras) linked to specific inflight safety instructions.
But in Odissi, the performer merely sits in the imaginary seat without any specific context to her dance form (which has already been performed without context before that part). In Ghoomar, the imaginative idea to showcase emergency guidance lighting through lamps on the floor is beyond the dance form itself – a backdrop item. Kathak’s usage to showcase exits in the aircraft is pretty well thought of, but the subsequent use of the same dance form to make a point about oxygen masks seemed like a force-fit with no context to the dance movements. Bihu and Giddha get the worst kind of representation – in the former, the poor performer is simply a prop for the life vest, while in the latter, the performers seem unusually pleased to see a safety instruction card together, both completely removed from their actual dance movements!
I feel that the need to integrate the theme lost steam mid-way after a good start where the team made a real effort to utilize the dance forms’ nuances into their need for communicating specific safety instructions.
I also found some residual ideas from the Vistara (Yoga) video being carried over to this new video, even though the Vistara video was by the agency FCB India, while the new one is by McCann India. In specific, the idea is around showing skeletal/semi-transparent imagery of the plane’s relevant interior because the location of the theme is so far removed from the actual plane in both cases.
For instance, consider these shots:
Because there seems to be a considerably larger emphasis on the theme, I feel the actual intent of ensuring that people get the safety instructions takes a back seat (no pun intended).
But do consider the fact that most fliers are already adequately familiar with these instructions and may not engage with them unless presented in a manner they have not seen yet. From the point of view of such fliers, this video may be useful indeed. But if you see it from the perspective of infrequent fliers or new fliers (An estimated 3% of India’s population flies on a regular basis!), chances are that they may be gawking more at the thematic spectacle than imbibing the safety-related points being made. The theme is used in an expansive, showy sense and it is easy to get distracted by it than see it merely as an ornament around a relevant set of instructions.
Now, let me address the second aspect of my criticism: not well-produced.
One aspect of the production—the overall quality of the audio, video, and performances—is visibly excellent. But this aspect of the production is a given, considering the money the Tata Group can throw at it.
However, even if we look beyond the theme-related production values, there is one area where the new video fails abysmally. It had the opportunity to be truly up-to-date, on the back of recent airline mishaps and near-mishaps like Alaska Airlines’s flying door (January 5, 2024) and more importantly, the Japan Airlines crash (January 2, 2024)!
So much has been written about the latter already – about how Japan Airlines handled the post-crash emergency, and how well-behaved the passengers were. One specific aspect, in the context of the new Air India safety video, deserves to be highlighted.
Take a look at the Japan Airlines safety video – it has parts that do not usually form a standard part of most other airline safety videos!
‘Leave your baggage when you evacuate’.
‘Carrying baggage will block the aisle’.
‘Baggage and high-heeled shoes may damage the slide’.
‘When sliding down, stretch forward your arms, incline your body forward, and look at the landing point’.
‘We will ask you to assist other passengers after sliding down’.
‘Move quickly away from the aircraft’.
This is not unique to Japan Airlines alone. Consider the safety video of another Japanese airline – All Nippon Airways. It released a new, non-themed safety video in October 2021.
This video has all the detailed evacuation-specific instructions and also has an extra line that is so utterly relevant to present times: “Photography is prohibited during evacuation”!
All Nippon Airways’ previous safety video had a theme: Japan’s traditional Kabuki theater. This too includes the detailed evacuation-specific instructions that you see in the safety video by Japan Airlines!
The 2010s was a decade when a LOT of airlines were consistently releasing many thematic inflight safety videos, one more imaginative than the other. After the pandemic hit the planet in 2020, that seemed to have slowed down considerably.
Air India’s new video is one of the newest, from this perspective. And it comes 2 months after the 2 mishaps that started 2024 (the first week of January 2024 was very, very bad for the aviation sector). The least Air India and McCann could have done is consider how relevant—to the present scenario—the set of instructions is. They could have spent a bit more time on the instructions as they had done for the theme, which obviously took a lot more of their time and effort.
One could argue that the information specific to evacuation (what we see in the safety videos by Japan Airlines and Air Nippon Airways) is not seen in any of the other airline safety videos anywhere in the world, and hence, Air India is right in sticking to the basic script. But consider the fact that all 379 onboard survived the Japan Airlines crash – the 367 passengers and 12 crew disembarked in 18 minutes! This is one part due to the training imparted to the cabin crew, but also in another part due to the relentless insistence on evacuation-related safety instructions – the instructions are very clear and specific, anticipating the worst possible scenario (including “move quickly away from the aircraft” after evacuation).
To not consider the Japan Airlines mishap of January 2024 while scripting this elaborately thematic safety video is a huge missed opportunity for Tata and Air India (and McCann). You could still argue: “How does all this matter in a country where people stand up from their seats as soon as the plane begins landing despite the helpless crew desperately requesting passengers not to?”. Sure. People will do what they want. But that doesn’t absolve a professional airline to not relentlessly communicate the right safety measures and moves.
The primary focus of an inflight safety video is safety. It’s not entertainment. If many other airline brands swapped the priority (to put entertainment first) in the previous decade, Air India had a very, very recent incident that should have informed them to do better. But the new safety video looks like a remnant of the previous decade’s excesses as if nothing has changed.