Should you never wear high heels on a plane?

Do you remember the golden days when air travel used to be glamorous?

When men and women alike would dress up just to travel on an airplane?

The days when the leg room in economy class was so generous that you wished you had a second set of feet just to fill the space?

Nope, neither do I.

Because that was like sixty years ago.

These days, many folks couldn’t dress more down to board a plane if they tried. And while high heels might not be the most practical footwear for flying, they’re being positively discouraged by some people who claim to know best.

Ironically the people who so often advise against wearing heels on flights are flight attendants who often have to wear heels themselves.

Yet no airline has actually prohibited its passengers from wearing heels. And nor does the FAA want to ban them.

Most airlines don’t even have dress codes in economy class. Those airlines that do have a dress code either only require that passengers wear some footwear or prohibit bare feet, which are different ways of saying the same thing.

So, should you really never wear high heels on an airplane?

And, if heels aren’t banned from flights, why do the media regularly report “experts” who say that you shouldn’t wear heels on a plane?

The most dramatic reason given for not wearing heels on a plane is that the plane might crash. The argument is that your stilettos will hamper your escape, making it slow for you to get out and meaning you might puncture the emergency slide on the way down.

Let’s give this argument its dues. Yes, it is possible to think up hypothetical emergency situations where you might have to escape from an aircraft.

And in those situations it is more likely that you’re going to have more difficulty doing that in sky high heels than in flats.

It’s even possible to find a real life example in the Miracle on the Hudson.

When US Airlines flight 1549 ditched into the Hudson River in 2009, all 155 passengers and crew managed to escape.

One female passenger reportedly walked out onto the wing in three inch heels. She was trying to her shoes off, holding onto the woman beside her, when she slipped off the wing and into the water. The heel-wearing passenger was successfully fished out.

Even so, it is not clear whether the passenger actually went overboard because the heels offered little purchase on a wing covered in jet fuel and water. “I don’t know if it was a wave or what, but I slid right off the wing into the water,” she told the Washington Post.

The report did speculate that the passenger might have regretted her choice of heels that day, but there was no quote to that effect. “They were very cute,” was all the passenger actually said about her shoes.

But on the other hand, evacuation procedures do not always call for the removal of high heels even on emergency slides. And not having any footwear on can make an exit much more dangerous if there is debris in the plane or on the ground.

But should we really choose what we wear for a flight based on the hypothetical contingency that there is going to be an emergency situation and you might need to escape?

Is this really just the 2020’s version of a mom’s warning to “wear clean underwear in case you get hit by a bus”?

Where would it really end? Should you wear a fireproof suit in a storm to protect against being hit by lightning? Or wear a helmet when you board an Uber to better survive a crash?

If you break things down statistically, commercial aviation is extremely safe. The chance of a crash is extremely small, the chance of it being survivable is smaller still. And the chance of high heels being the difference between life and death is so small it really doesn’t bear thinking about.

Feature image credit:  Archives New Zealand from New Zealand, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.