I spend a large part of the year in Indonesia. It is very common for boarding pass issuing clerks to assume that expatriates want the leg room of an emergency exit row seat. Typically, they will give you that type of seat unless you refuse.

Although a westerner might be more savvy if an emergency occurs, I suspect that even someone like me who is fluent in Bahasa Indonesia would have difficulty communicating in such a situation. Therefore, I think it's a bad policy to assign these seats to expatriates on a default basis.

I took a flight on Thursday where a 4-year-old was seated in the emergency exit row along with his mother (ethnic Indonesian but probably a Dutch citizen) and aunt (ethnic European, probably Dutch). It took about 5 minutes for a stewardess to swap all three of them into another row.

I began wondering how water landings are tested. I assume the safety procedures are approved by testing of components: does the raft float with necessary weight capacity? does it pop open properly when the door is opened? But is a total field test ever done, other than when a water landing actually occurs? Has anyone in this forum experienced a water landing?

The picture on the safety card for the aircraft I was on (Boeing 737-ER) shows everybody HOLDING the flotation raft rather than sitting on it. This leads me to surmise that the raft might sink if a lot of adults sat on it.

Has any airline (especially outside the US and other western countries) ever tested the supposedly "universally non-verbal" picture instructions on the safety card to determine whether the instructions are followed correctly in a wide variety of cultures?

In a region where ferries are routinely overloaded, I worry that most people surviving a water landing would instinctively board the raft rather than hanging onto its side with their lower body dangling under the water's surface.