It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally on flights the flight attendants add to the normal rigamorale for take offs and landing a direction that you must open the window shade.
What possible effect on safety during take offs and landings does the position of the window shade have? If the pilot needs to look out my window back in Row 15, I’d say that we are already toast.
Sua
Perhaps it’s a courtesy to the passengers with inside seats who might want to look out of the window during the takeoff and landing. After all, they also ask you to pull down the window shade during the movie. (Which drives me nuts, as I’d much rather watch clouds than most movies, but that’s another issue. Anyway, the point is that not all requests from flight attendants have to do with safety.)
Thanks, Joey
This is just a WAG but maybe sme passengers get more nervous when the shades are down and they can’t “witness” the takeoff from all windows. The ones who can’t stand to see the takeoff could simply close their eyes.
Purely a WAG and the answers given in the other thread give more good ideas but it makes sense to me.
Well, I used to be a flight attendant, so I can add a couple of things from my experience in addition to all the things said in the other threads:
The only thing regulation specifies AFAIK is that the cabin light needs to be on par with the outside light, so if there’s an evacuation, the passengers’ eyes don’t have to adjust to a new light level. Hence, during the day if it’s really light outside it would make sense to open the shades.
However, during training we were never told to do anything with the window shades, so maybe it’s just one of those things that some people add to the PA on their own.
I was told by a flight attendant that the reason for that rule is so that if there is an emergency, someone **outside ** the plane can better see into the interior of the aircraft, to locate passengers, find the fire, etc,. This makes sense to me.