New American Airlines Safety Video Leaked

The new American Airlines safety video certainly would have been released by now if not for the current global pandemic. It features the airline's new uniform. Seeing this gives me a sense of normalcy.

"Safety At Scale" was produced by Dallas-based Charlie Uniform Tango and I believe the voiceover is Janie Smith:

While American Airlines has largely been using the slogan (internally) "caring for people on life's journey" and that makes an appearance here - "it's our honor to care for you on your journey" - this video ends with 'we fly so you can soar'.

18 months ago Air New Zealand's safety video "It's Kiwi Safety" had a cast of 600. It's not clear how many people appear in 'Safety at Scale' but the meaning here seems both suggestive of the number of cast in a couple of key scenes, using people to do things like form the American Airlines logo and a no smoking sign, and to suggest just how large what was in normal times the world's largest airline.

Besides the number of people in the video there's nothing especially remarkable about the new American Airlines safety video. While there are people in mocked up aircraft seats in a warehouse, it's a little bit less of an homage to the Air France safety video than their most recent one was.

This new video isn't as chic as the last one. Still, it's visually interesting. It doesn't make a play at humor, though at the 2 minute mark a cabin crew member breaks formation slightly to wave at the camera. Other than a desire to use the airline's new uniforms in this video - which matters for consistent branding for the airline - I'm not sure there's an improvement even compared to this video produced a decade ago. It's a very normal airline safety video, though, and normal is what I think we'd all like to return to.

Update: The video was very quickly removed from Vimeo. What is American Airlines hiding? I grabbed a copy and decided to upload a clip that's just 18 seconds long, which I think represents a fair use to illustrate a newsworthy item.

Update 2: American Airlines shares,

>We're proud to be moving toward a new safety video that features dozens of American Airlines flight attendants and team members from a variety of workgroups in our new uniforms. This version is not yet final. We're excited to share this video once it's final later this year.