Passengers often ignore in-flight safety videos. But this 'honest' one has 8.4 million views

“Greetings from the cockpit. This is your captain speaking.”

It’s a phrase frequent flyers know well.  

Only this isn’t a pilot. And what follows isn’t the same ol' in-flight safety talk.

Rather, it’s the opening salvo of a now viral YouTube video from travel journalist Doug Lansky, who delivers a near 7-minute "honest pre-flight safety demonstration ... that airlines are afraid to show you.”  

The tongue-in-cheek video has racked up 8.4 million views, an impressive achievement for a fake version of a safety briefing that most travelers ignore.

Lansky said he was inspired by a discussion he had with a pilot he sat next to on a flight years ago.   

When the safety demonstration video began, “I noticed he wasn't paying attention to it. And if you travel a lot, nobody really does,” said Lansky. “So I said ‘What would you say, if you could say anything?’ And he rattled off a bunch of stuff.”

Lansky said he then posed the same question to others in the aviation industry.

The video, he said, is “a composite of these different conversations I've had with pilots over the years — what would they say if they could do the safety test, and they weren't bound by the legal team of the airline?"

The premise of the video is that the aircraft’s entertainment system is down (“so we can’t show you the $2 million safety video that an ad agency did for us”), and thus the pilot is going to deliver a “real safety talk” to passengers.   

The video advises passengers to practice unbuckling their seatbelt (“I know you all know how to use it but that’s because you’re not losing your sh*t right now”). Lansky said that research shows that when people are panicking — say they’re upside down or in a smoke-filled cabin — they tend to press the seatbelt buckle,