Is or isn’t safety a laughing matter?

I am writing in response to Chuck Goudie’s column, “Southwest emergency shows safety is no laughing matter.” It piqued my curiosity as a regular Southwest customer, though I confess it left me puzzled.

The column’s headline implied fault on the part of Southwest, some action (or lack thereof) that placed Southwest’s customers in jeopardy, yet said column was preceded by a news article that reported NTSB board member Robert Sumwalt’s opinion that the cracking which likely caused said ‘Southwest emergency’ “... could not have been spotted during routine maintenance”.

In his column, Goudie then proceeds to imply that passengers on Southwest flights would be better informed as to emergency procedures if Southwest flight attendants didn’t attempt to insert humor into the presentation of said procedures, an implication he later contradicts by admitting that the FAA “... even suggests that jazzing up (the presentation of safety procedures) is a good thing”.

Assuming Mr. Goudie has been on at least as many non-Southwest flights as I have, wherein safety procedures are presented in such a dry fashion as to cause most regular fliers to either zone off or escape into the pages of the latest Skymall catalog, why would increasing passengers attentiveness to said procedures be a bad thing?

In fact, as the pilots and all but one flight attendant and passenger seem to have known the procedures well enough to properly put on their masks when needed, where is the proof that making emergency procedures “a laughing matter” is a bad thing? As Mr. Goudie never answers his own implication, I can only assume his headline was meant to entice readers at the expense of the facts ... which is indeed “no laughing matter.”

Tim Nunes

Lisle