A few years back a generous client sent me on an ‘underwater helicopter escape training course’. Perhaps it wasn’t the real name, but it’s the best name to describe it.

It was the type of thing you see on TV for oil rig workers etc, you go to a swimming pool, wear flight clothes, get strapped into a chair inside a metal frame which simulates being a helicopter, the frame gets winched up, and then you get dropped into the pool and you have to escape the wreckage. And then they do it agian but this time they turn it upside down. And then again in the dark with flashing lights etc.

Great fun I thought. So there we were, me and 4 or 5 colleagues, in the pool for an hour or two, doing all sorts of escape training. First time was just release belt buckle and swim for the door, out and up. Phew, I’ve survived a terrible crash. Second time was release buckle, swim for door, find there’s actually a big hulking metal frame door in the way, open, throw it out, swim out, swim for surface. Phew, with less of a smile. Then again, but this time the seat you were escaping from was a few seats back within the heli-frame from the door, with the metal door in it’s place, in the dark, with lights flashing around you, upside down, etc etc. Phew.

All good fun, until you try it. And even though there’s someone watching over you and they have scube diving air tanks to breathe from whilst you have two quivering nervous little lungs of air, you can’t help but feel slight panic. All very realistic. I can still see it now in my mind.

Then after we’d all evacuated the heli-frame in various ways, we were told to get into the pool which had water at 20 degrees centigrade, and we had to swim around there for a while until we were cold and tired. Then a life raft was thrown into the pool which we had to inflate, turn over the correct way and climb inside etc. All not as easy as it sounds. And once you’ve done it a few times in a pool all good experience which sticks in your mind.

Then we all had to link together in the pool, form a sort of human chain, good for keeping you together in the rough open seas, not drifitng away from everyone else and from the crash site never to be heard of again, never to file your pics, never to file an expenses claim again.

Now of course, here in downtown central TokyoLand getting into a life raft isn’t something I do much, but as photographers we do fly a lot, or get in helicopters more than the average salaryman, so it was all good experience and a course I’m glad to have been on.

Some of that experience/ learning from that day I carry over onto normal airline travel. No matter what the pretty stewardess tells me I always have my own little routine. I always check for a life vest under my seat, I always take an aisle seat – thus you won’t have to climb over/around an obese American on the way out, and I always count how many seats are between me and the Exit- thus, in the dark, underwater, all hell breaking lose, you can make you way to the exit and know roughly where it is. Don’t get me wrong, I have no fears of flying, just I like to be prepared.

Think I’m worrying unnecessarily ? You want the window seat in the middle of the plane, the one with a great view out over Siberia by night ? Here’s an article which talks of a report which may change your mind.

Doors to manual and cross check.