You are sitting in your airliner and the handsome, pretty or in a non-binary sense cute, elegant, lovely or in a non exclusive way charming, fine, interesting or personable flight attendant is standing in front of you to demonstrate the safety features of your aircraft. Hopefully if you enjoy the airline pilot guy enough to be listening to this you might have more than just a passing interest in what safety equipment there is onboard the average big, well equipped, airliner.

Most airlines show the gender-specific pronouns that are typically used to refer to people in the way they identify

Door Arming controls

Girt Bar system that can be found on older style aircraft

Steph beside ‘her’ emergency exit

Slide use in theory and in practice

Disobeying safety instructions can lead to increased danger and possible loss of life

The early days of air travel

Jack Grant, an Australian, who invented the modern inflatable slide and won the Cumberland trophy

Aircraft safety equipment

Halon (halo-genated hydrocarbons) are the world’s best fire extinguishing chemicals but banned from manufacture

Safety cards through the history of aviation

Images are used under a Creative Commons licence with thanks to Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, Airbus, Oleg Bkhambri (Voltmetro), Boeing, Dr Steph, Marc-Antony Payne, Qantas Airways Ltd, John Collier, the Library of Congress, The Museum of Civil Aviation and SOC.