Airline Safety Video Round-up

Both Air New Zealand and Qantas released new safety videos over the past few weeks.

Air New Zealand - A Journey to Safety

Sustainability features heavily in Air New Zealand’s latest safety video, ‘A Journey to Safety.’

The video follows a young girl who transports a lost takahē (a flightless bird indigeneous to New Zealand) to his new home with help from the airline and New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC).

Air New Zealand says that it is leveraging the power of its safety videos (which have collectively generated more than 180 million views over the past decade) to highlight New Zealand’s biodiversity crisis.

It builds on Air New Zealand’s eight-year partnership with DOC, to protect and enhance New Zealand’s natural environment.

The airline says that through this partnership it has helped transport 3,200 threatened species to safe havens, funded pest traps across 38,000 hectares of the country, and supported marine science and research within New Zealand’s marine reserves. New Zealand’s landscapes are also a feature in the video, with the Murchison Mountains in Fiordland, Tiritiri Matangi in the Hauraki Gulf and Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari in Waikato all making an appearance.

Last year we wondered whether we’d reached ‘peak safety video.’ Evidently not - Air New Zealand announced on 5 March that the video had been viewed 27 million times in a week, making it the most viewed safety video ever. Airline Marketing Monthly | March 2020

Qantas - Qantas 100

Most airline safety videos are between 3-5 minutes long. Qantas has come out with an eight minute production. Why? Because the airline is celebrating its centenary in 2020 and the new safety video looks at 100 years of Qantas history.

As a result, the video features everything from 1940s flying boats to 1980s mullets, as viewers are given a tour of the last 100 years of Qantas.

The video is set to different instrumental versions of the Peter Allen anthem I Still Call Australia Home and tailored to the musical style of each era.

Various crew uniforms from throughout the decades were sourced from Qantas’s own collection and retired Qantas crew.

The Qantas centenary video has resulted in a huge amount of media pick-up worldwide, including The Daily Mail (the world’s largest online English language newspaper), the New Zealand Herald (which described it as ‘epic’), and Business Traveller.

Qantas has also created a very impressive micro-site, which looks at how the video was made and looks at different uniforms and innovations from each decade.