but because the cost of being unprepared is measured in seconds.
Your eyes are slow to adjust
The core reason for dimming the lights has nothing to do with the plane and everything to do with you. The human eye does not switch instantly between bright and dark. When you walk from a sunlit street into a dark cinema, there is a stretch of helpless blindness before shapes resolve. That process is called dark adaptation, and the slow part of it can take many minutes to complete.
Now imagine an emergency at night. If the cabin had been brightly lit and the lights suddenly failed, every passenger would be momentarily blind at the worst possible
There’s more to discover. Continue to the next page for the rest of this article.moment, groping for an aisle they can no longer see. By dimming the cabin before takeoff and landing, the crew lets everyone’s eyes pre-adjust to lower light. If the worst happens and the interior goes dark, your vision is already partway there. You can find the floor-level escape path lighting, the aisle, the exit signs.
The lights are dimmed so that if the cabin loses power, your eyes are already
