Safety extending beyond the cabin: A social semiotic study of the multimodal engagement strategies in Chinese preflight safety videos

Abstract

Flight safety remains a top priority in the aviation industry, with preflight safety videos (PSVs) playing a critical role in preparing passengers for potential emergencies. In recent years, airlines worldwide have increasingly incorporated multimodal resources into PSV design. However, limited research has examined how these resources are configured to engage passengers and enhance safety communication. Drawing on visual grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), the study adopts a social semiotic approach to explore how the concept of safety is multimodally constructed in PSVs and how passengers’ safety information retention is enhanced. The dataset comprises 15 PSVs released by 10 major Chinese airlines between 2019 and 2025, totaling approximately 80 minutes. The analysis identifies four primary multimodal engagement strategies: 1) deployment of pop-up visual aids; 2) variation in camera shots during safety demonstrations; 3) coordination of video character’s embodied modalities; and 4) sociocultural recontextualization of the cabin environment. The findings suggest that PSVs engage viewers by presenting a concept of safety that extends beyond the physical cabin, enriched with culturally meaningful semiotic resources.