I have just emailed the following to the CAA at [email protected]. (The ISI stands for Inward Safety Information). I encourage those of you who dislike the video to also send an email to say that you didn’t understand the safety message in the video - it doesn’t need to be long. If enough complaints are filed, the CAA will have a statutory obligation to act. All complaints are also logged into the CAA’s safety database.

I am writing to notify a safety complaint regarding Air New Zealand’s current safety video.

On [date] I flew Air New Zealand from [origin] to [destination] on board an [aircraft]. The safety video played on board was “Kiwi Safety”. The video was presented in a way which obscured all essential safety messages and did not, in my opinion, adequately inform me of the necessary safety protocols to be obeyed in the event of a emergency. In particular, the safety instructions are buried in an audio track under multiple examples of street slang which is not common knowledge to the majority of the population and is presented to a distracting and difficult to understand cadence (the “rap”), the effect of which is to completely obscure the necessary safety instructions. While there were written subtitles, they were too small to read and because they did not match the distracting audio rap, could not properly be digested. I am a native English speaker.

I do not have any confidence that the video adequately discharges its requirement of informing passengers of the safety obligations and protocols to be followed in the event of emergency. This is especially so given the significant number of foreign passengers carried by Air New Zealand for whom English is not their first language.

The CAA is not Air New Zealand’s marketing arm. It is an agency with statutory responsibility for aviation safety. Given the serious safety deficiencies identified above, it should not have approved this video.

Please confirm that the CAA will start taking its statutory responsibilities seriously by immediately de-certifying the ‘Kiwi Safety’ video for use as a safety demonstration and requiring Air New Zealand to comply with its safety obligations. Safety is not a joke. If the video is not de-certified, and there is an emergency resulting in loss of life or injury to persons, I will rely on this email to show that safety concerns were raised with, and ignored, by the CAA.