By Sara Ward
Associate Editor
By now, it seems like everyone has seen a version of Harlem Shake videos on YouTube. This recent craze involves one person dancing at the beginning of the video and ends with an entire room of people joining in while “Harlem Shake” by Baauer plays in the background.
The videos can come across as hilarious or just plain annoying to viewers, but the Harlem Shake has gained a new adjective in a recent video featuring high-altitude dancing on board a plane: dangerous.
According to a March 1 CNN article, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has become concerned with a video showing dancers 30,000 feet in the air.
Granted, dozens of Harlem Shake videos take place aboard planes, but those videos occur safely on the ground.
The Colorado College students who filmed the video claim they followed every regulation during the 31-second video taken on a Feb. 15 Frontier Airliners flight, and the flight crew let them use the plane’s public address system to tell the other passengers about their intentions, according to the same article.
While the students who filmed the video say they had the approval of the flight crew, a plane was the wrong place to film the Harlem Shake.
It may have seemed funny that the Harlem Shake would occur on a plane of all places, but it also presents a safety issue. If there had been turbulence while the plane was in flight, the passengers on the plane, who obviously weren’t wearing their seat belts during the video, could have been seriously hurt.
The Harlem Shake sensation makes people laugh, but the risk of someone being physically harmed should have stopped these students who made the video from going along with the idea.
I, like most people, enjoy a good joke or a humorous video. But I have to draw the line when dangerous instances are being filmed just for the sake of a funny dance.
Some may argue the FAA are party poopers trying to spoil the students’ fun, but it shouldn’t be taken that way. I think it’s smart for them to want to investigate this occurrence because the flight crew should have decided against the students filming the Harlem Shake onboard.
I’ve been on planes numerous times before, and because of that, I have to admit that I usually never feel unsafe on them. This sense of security may lull some into the belief that injuries don’t occur during flight.
That’s only true if people take the necessary precautions to keep themselves safe onboard.
“Turbulence injuries are the most common type of injuries, and they are virtually eliminated when people are in their seat belts,”said Steve Wallace, former director of the FAA’s Office of Accident Investigation, in the same article.
The video only lasted 31 seconds, and no one got hurt, but that doesn’t mean an injury won’t occur the next time someone tries something like this.
This kind of behavior can’t be encouraged onboard an airplane. When safety is a concern, the flight crew should always take every precaution in order to keep every passenger safe.
These students and flight crew only got lucky that no injuries happened, and hopefully in the future they will think before they try something else.
Even if the FAA looks into the incident and finds that the actions of both the students and flight crew were okay, this should still serve as a reminder for people to think before they do things like this in the future.
People will do anything to have that 31 seconds of fame, but that shouldn’t come before the safety of others.
