If you found yourself inside a burning metal box, what would your first instinct be? For some people, apparently it would be to preserve the moment with a selfie. I can sort of see the appeal--if it works out, you have a really great new profile pic. If it doesn't, well, you and a bunch of other people just died of smoke inhalation because you're a jackass.  On Tuesday in Las Vegas, some passengers exhibited this evolutionary phenomenon when a British Airways flight caught fire prior to takeoff at McCarren International Airport. After photos surfaced of passengers of the London-bound Boeing 777-200 on the tarmac with their carry-on items, several veteran pilots took the social media to explain just how stupid this was. 

While flight crews tell people to leave belongings behind in an evacuation, pilots say they seem increasingly inclined to grab whatever they brought on board. And sometimes even a selfie or two. “We’re always shaking our head,” said Chris Manno, a veteran pilot with a major US airline who took to social media Wednesday to slam those pictured on the Vegas tarmac with bulky cabin bags. “It doesn’t matter what you say, people are going to do what they do.”

I fly a lot, and I understand how you might become desensitized to the safety precautions on planes. I'm pretty sure I haven't paid attention to the pre-flight safety spiel in 10 years, and it's very easy to not buckle up after coming back from the bathroom. It's so rare that an emergency happens on a commercial flight that all of the safey and evacuation instructions seem overbearing and unneccessary. The thing is, they're really not. Sometimes emergencies happen. Sometimes your plane catches fire. And in these cases, you are legally required to listen to the flight attendants, and I 100% guarantee that they will never say, "Please follow the lighted strips to your nearest emergency exit after you grab your wheelie-bag out of the overhead compartment." Not only does this slow down evacuation, carrying bulky bags can actually cause injuries, or even botch evacuation altogether if a bag rips an inflatable slide. In the wake of the Las Vegas incident, the AP reports, the "chief of the Association of Flight Attendants union, which does not represent the British Airways crew, said she expects federal investigators will find that baggage slowed down the evacuation and caused some of the injuries, " and pilot Patrick Smith of the blog Ask the Pilot said in a blog post,

I cannot overemphasize how appallingly unsafe this is. Luggage slows people down and severely impedes their access to the aisles and exits, and it turns the escape slides into a deadly slalom. This time it’s particularly striking, because while most evacuations are precautionary, this one was a full-blown emergency. The airplane was on fire. If that isn’t reason enough to leave your things and get the f**k off the plane as quickly as you can, then heaven help you. Yet time and time again we see this. Flight attendants are yelling, “Leave your stuff!” but not everyone listens. People are digging through the bins for their computers and backpacks; here’s a guy coming up the aisle with a 35-pound roll-aboard. On YouTube you can find selfie videos from idiotic passengers who thought it was cool to film themselves going down the slide.

Thankfully, no one seems to have been seriously injured in this case, although 27 people were sent to the hospital with cuts and bruises. So please. Don't do this. Don't be that person. It's incredibly dangerous, and you're making people who take normal, non-life-threatening selfies look bad. And if you have a friend who Instagrams the time they were delaying evacuation on a burning plane, please publicly ridicule them.