A shocking video shared by a passenger who was on board the Frontier Airlines plane that hit a trespasser as it was speeding along the runway at Denver International Airport on Friday night shows people discussing what belongings they plan to take with them, ignoring flight attendant pleas to leave everything behind.
The video starts inside the dark and hazy cabin, showing passengers packing up some of their belongings, rather than moving towards emergency exits, and ignoring an order from one of the flight attendants who can be clearly heard shouting: “LEAVE EVERYTHING!”
Passengers ignore the flight attendant and, instead, the person taking the video says to her traveling companion that she also plans to take her belongings with her.
The video shows several overhead bins open and empty as the slow evacuation continues, with some passengers checking behind them and scooping up their belongings from their seats before slowly moving into the aisle to head towards the emergency exit.
Clearly frustrated with the amount of hand luggage being taken off by passengers, as well as the slow pace of the evacuation, one of the flight attendants takes to the public address system and attempts to reason with the passengers:
“Please leave all belongings; your belongings are safe, your lives are more important!”
The response? One of the passengers scoffs and says that her belongings are more important.
Once at the bottom of the slide, passengers can be heard laughing and joking, crowding around the vicinity of the aircraft and ignoring a flight attendant barking at them to move away from the aircraft.
It’s truly a shocking scene, but one that has become increasingly prevalent in emergency aircraft evacuations over the last few years.
Frontier Airlines F9-4345 from Denver to Los Angeles on May 8 struck a pedestrian who had scaled a perimeter fence as it was speeding along the runway for takeoff. The victim was partially ingested into the right-hand engine, causing a small fire that was quickly extinguished, but which led to the cabin filling with smoke.
The pilots performed an emergency stop on the runway after they received reports of smoke in the cabin. They then ordered an evacuation via the emergency escape slides.
During the emergency stop and evacuation, around 12 passengers and crew were injured, with five being transported to the hospital.
The incident has once again posed a serious and increasingly concerning question for the airline industry: How can passengers be stopped from putting their own lives and the lives of other passengers at risk by delaying an evacuation to retrieve their hand luggage, which could, in turn, damage and deflate an evacuation slide?
Unfortunately, so far, airlines have done little to answer this question, despite a series of recommendations from specialist aviation non-governmental organizations and regulators like the Federal Aviation Administration.
As recently as late 2025, the FAA issued a “Safety Alert to Operators’ or SAFO to U.S. commercial airlines, urging them to take action to ensure passenger compliance with evacuation rules.
While the FAA stopped short of mandatory action, the agency is pushing airlines to implement a slew of recommendations, which include:
- A thorough review of emergency evacuation procedures, crew training, commands, and emergency announcements to press home to passengers that they must leave all hand baggage behind.
- Update pre-flight safety briefings to make it clear to passengers what to do in an emergency, using standardized and concise messaging to make it clear that hand luggage must be left behind with no exceptions.
- Display posters and other visual content in airport terminals, demonstrating appropriate evacuation behavior and consequences of non-compliance with crewmember commands.
Aircraft are designed to be evacuated in just 90 seconds with only half of the emergency exits operational, but recent real-life evacuations have exceeded that strict time limit by a long way.
Aircraft manufacturers commonly simulate evacuations in mockup planes with volunteers, but these simulations never account for passengers delaying the evacuation by opening overhead bins to drag their heavy bags out with them.
Later this year, the International Air Transportation Association (IATA), a trade body that represents the vast majority of global airlines, plans to commence a major study investigating the psychology behind why passengers not only risk their own lives, but the lives of other people, by stopping to get their luggage in an evacuation.
