Air Canada Jazz recently announced the airline will be removing passenger life vests from their flights.
The move is aimed at reducing weight on aircraft and thereby reducing fuel consumption. There's a Transport Canada regulation making life vests mandatory on flights 50 nautical miles from shore and since Jazz doesn't typically fly that far from land, they won't be breaking the rules. On routes where they did get more than 50 miles out, the airline plans to adjust the route to bring them within the limit.
Incidentally, the 50 mile run is there since Transport Canada figures that an aircraft at altitude and no more than 50 nautical miles from shore can glide to a landmass if need be.
Some are very upset, claiming it's a safety risk.
Some of the local loons are using it as yet another example of how people upalong don't give a damn about Newfoundlanders.
That generates nothing more than a big sigh.
As someone who has kept track of aviation issues for a fair while, your humble e-scribbler had a hard time recalling the last time a commercial airliner ditched, let alone successfully.
There have been a few spectacular crashes in which the aircraft was pretty far from in control which, by the way would be pretty much the only time when a life vest would be of any demonstrable use beyond helping to find your remains.
Turns out that since 1970 there haven't been any such landings on water anywhere on the planet by commercial airliners according to the guys at Freakonomics. 150 million commercial airline flights and 15 billion passengers and not a single person has been able to use the 15 second instruction (30 secs in bilingual Canada) let alone use the vest.
It's interesting to see that in all the comments on this two year old article, there isn't one that contradicts the life vest/water landing thesis. Not one. Even on one aviation forum, the contributors had a hard time coming up with a contemporary ditching story in which the passengers would have been able to don life vests ahead of the time the aircraft hit the water.
What you do see are a couple of examples of aircraft on final approach landing short of the runway which, just by happenstance, abutts a body of water. It's highly unlikely any of those passengers did anything beyond head for the nearest exit once they got over the shock of the crash.
Interesting that Air Canada doesn't seem to have used the safety issue very much if at all in defence of its decision.
They'd have a pretty powerful argument or so it seems.
-srbp-