There's phone footage from inside the burning plane, so apparently your theories don't correspond with reality. Always quite annoying when that happens. Been th

There's phone footage from inside the burning plane, so apparently your theories don't correspond with reality. Always quite annoying when that happens. Been the death of many a theory. people seem to think that the re-prioritization effort comes for free, instantly Here are the two biggest flaws in your thinking: 1. You seem to be assuming the alternative to "using one's phone during a landing" is some sort of highly aware ready state. In reality it's probably bored snoozing or half-snoozing. It's a red-eye flight after all. 2. You seem to be assuming that "evacuating a burning plane" is some kind of split-second thing, like a quicktime event in a video game. In reality, at least for this incident, there was a span of a significant number of seconds between "impact" and "plane slows down enough for emergency slides to extend and evacuation to begin." 30, maybe 60 seconds.... I'm not sure, but there was no real positive action for a passenger to take during that time. Shifting attention away from one's phone certainly has a nonzero time cost, but not remotely comparable to the time it took for the plane to come to a full stop. Again, you're dealing in hypotheticals, while the actual reality of this incident (phones in use, orderly exit achieved, all lives saved) contradicts whatever it is you are imagining.