How to exit a burning plane

After landing gear on an American Airlines jet caught fire in Denver, many passengers grabbed their bags before sliding down the evacuation chutes. Aviation reporters Leen Al-Rashdan and Harry Black talked with industry experts about why that's so dangerous. Plus: AI ticket pricing, tariffs' effects on college dorms, startups after founders leave and the PhD Project's Trump problem.

If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

If you check clips of the evacuation of an American Airlines flight at Denver International Airport late last month, one thing is hard to miss: Many of the passengers have their luggage in hand. There they are hurtling down the emergency slides clutching large bags (or even small children alongside their bags), tumbling onto the tarmac and dusting themselves off, walking toward the terminal, carry-on over their shoulder as smoke engulfs the aircraft following a fire in its landing gear. Footage from inside the cabin shows flight attendants frantically pleading with passengers to move quickly and leave everything behind. And some people obviously felt there was sufficient time to whip out their smartphones and film the proceedings.

A safety video for Qatar Airways features Kevin Hart alongside flight attendants. Source: Qatar Airways/Youtube

Airlines spend untold sums on pre-takeoff safety videos. Kevin Hart cracks jokes on Qatar Airways', hobbits make an appearance on Air New Zealand's, and British Airways' invokes the feel of a Victorian romance. But the showbiz sparkle can't seem to persuade travelers to follow one of the most basic guidelines: In an emergency, leave everything behind. "People evacuating with their belongings are prioritizing their possessions over the lives of others," says Mark Kammer, director of operations at Dynamic Advanced Training in Dubai, which provides courses for flight crews. "Every piece of carry-on that was taken is potentially the body bag of someone who was robbed of the opportunity to safely evacuate."

Commercial aircraft are designed so everyone on board can get out within 90 seconds using half the available exits, though in a real-life emergency, it's rarely that fast. In what's considered a success, it took a bit more than 10 minutes to evacuate most passengers from a Japan Airlines plane that caught fire after colliding with a smaller jet on the runway last year. The good news: Although the plane was ultimately reduced to a charred skeleton, everyone on board escaped via just three exits.

Some evacuations go horribly wrong. In 2019, 41 of the 78 passengers and crew, mainly those seated toward the back, died when an Aeroflot jet crashed in Moscow. After the plane skidded to a stop, some passengers insisted on grabbing their carry-on bags before leaving the burning wreckage, according to Nick Butcher, former head of the Cabin Safety Office at the UK Civil Aviation Authority. "There was an awful lot of cabin baggage coming out," he says. "And some of it was quite large. I'd hate to say that people died because of it, but I suspect they did."

Flight attendants spend weeks in training for all kinds of situations, from a sudden drop in cabin pressure to making emergency landings and evacuations in water, the jungle or extremely cold snowy areas. They learn firefighting techniques, first aid and the use of safety equipment like life vests and oxygen masks. But little can prepare them for one of the greatest risk factors: the recalcitrant traveler who doesn't understand this simple choice of your luggage or your life.

Countries and airlines have been cracking down on unruly behavior on flights, including smoking and standing up before the plane has come to a complete halt. The cost of ignoring flight attendants' orders can be a ban from that carrier or from flying altogether and, in extreme cases, civil penalties and even criminal prosecution.

But finding ways to discourage carrying luggage during an evacuation might prove difficult. With increasing numbers of people skipping the check-in line and hauling their bags to the plane, everything is right there, in the overhead bin or under the seat. One idea is automatic locks that close in an emergency, though crews often stow flashlights and other equipment in the overhead bins. And, Butcher notes, "some passengers may try and force them open if they're locked in an emergency evacuation to get their baggage out, who knows?"

ANOTHER POTENTIAL NIGHTMARE FOR PASSENGERS: Fetcherr, an Israel-based software startup, has created a pilot artificial intelligence program that replaces today's ticketing models with a head-spinningly complex one, featuring many more fare classes with prices that swing wildly from one moment to the next. Max Chafkin reports on a white paper written by a Fetcherr co-founder about the possibilities and the pushback: AI Flight Pricing Can Push Travelers to the Limit of Their Ability to Pay

In Brief

Boeing's St. Louis-area defense factories are striking for the first time in almost three decades after union members rejected the company's modified contract offer.
President Donald Trump said he'll announce a new Fed governor and a new jobs data statistician in the coming days, two appointments that may shape his economic agenda.
Last week's data caught up with the kind of economy that company executives and consumers have long described this year: flashing some warning signs.

Dorm Room Essentials Hit by Tariffs

Illustrations: Sean Dong for Bloomberg Businessweek

Back-to-school shopping season kicked off early this year. More than two-thirds of Americans started prepping for the school year in early July, the highest share since the National Retail Federation started tracking this back in 2018. "Consumers are being mindful of the potential impacts of tariffs and inflation on back-to-school items," says Katherine Cullen, a vice president at the trade association.

Shoppers' attempts to get ahead of President Donald Trump's tariffs may prove to be futile. Inflation, as measured by the consumer price index, rose 0.3% in June, the highest monthly reading since January, with companies passing through the cost of the duties starting to show up in household furnishings and other goods. Many economists and analysts expect higher customs duties to meaningfully show up in data for July and August, as retailers finally exhaust their pre-tariff inventories.

College students (or, more likely, their parents), who have bills that can easily run to four figures, are likely to feel the pinch, with many dorm room essentials among the goods hit hardest by tariffs. That's according to a Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of federal trade data for April and May, when a 10% duty kicked in for most countries, as did a short-lived but still painful additional 125% rate on China.

Take a tour around the room as Andre Tartar examines the costs: Tariffs Will Make Outfitting College Dorm Rooms More Expensive This Year

'I am on Noah's Ark or am I on the Titanic'

Illustration: Dalbert Vilarino for Bloomberg Businessweek

Dominic Perella was prepared to be yelled at when he addressed about 100 employees gathered at the posh Silverado Resort in Napa, California, for a staff retreat last August. Days earlier, Perella had become Character.AI's interim chief executive officer when the company announced that Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, the renowned artificial intelligence researchers who founded the startup three years earlier, had exited for Google as part of a $2.7 billion licensing deal with the search giant.

During a no-holds-barred Q&A, Perella's employees—who'd previously known him only as general counsel—grilled the new boss about Character's future. "What are we going to keep doing? What are we going to stop doing? How are we going to shift our resources?" Perella recalls them asking. "Having your founder leave is a big change," he says. Still, he insists the company is doing well by the standards of startups that have gone through a novel form of transaction known as a reverse acquihire. "We were left much better positioned than some of the other folks."

Character is one of at least six startups that have gone through a reverse acquihire during the current AI boom. The name is a variation on what's known as an acquihire, where a company buys a startup as a way to get its employees on its staff; the new twist is that a Big Tech company pays to hire a startup's top talent and license its technology but not acquire the company itself. The remaining crew is left to pick up the pieces.

Kate Clark and Shirin Ghaffary write about the phenomenon: What Happens to AI Startups When Their Founders Jump Ship for Big Tech

An Effort to Dismantle the PhD Project

Photo illustration: Oscar Bolton Green; photo: Getty Images

In the mid-1990s, Denise Loyd was a civil engineer and project manager on big construction projects. The work was challenging, but she found herself increasingly fascinated by office dynamics—especially as one of very few women in construction management. "My male colleagues, not in an obnoxious way, mostly interacted with me through the lens in which they were used to interacting with women," she says. They'd treat her like a secretary or their wife or daughter, "but not as much as a peer." This was particularly interesting to Loyd, because she's also Black and, as she puts it, "my race was salient to me coming out of grad school."

By 1997, Loyd, today a professor at the University of Illinois Gies College of Business, decided she wanted to dedicate herself to studying these dynamics in management. "I always kind of wanted to get a Ph.D., mostly because it was as high as you could go in education," she says. But she didn't really know what was involved. As far as she knew, no one in her life had a Ph.D. Black people earned just over 3% of all doctorates granted in 1997.

Since 1994, a group called the PhD Project has pursued a modest mission: to help students from underrepresented groups enter business doctorate programs. But now the Trump administration is investigating many of its university partners. The effort to dismantle the PhD Project appears to be the first salvo aimed at business schools in a broader campaign to wipe away all traces of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at every US school with federal funding.

A PhD Project conference helped put Loyd on the path to her degree, writes Robb Mandelbaum, but the group is now under threat: Government Steps Up Campaign Against Business School Diversity

Palantir Surge

525%

That's how much Palantir's stock has climbed in the past year, an unstoppable rally that has yielded gains for investors and created monumental wealth for its early employees. Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar has now joined four other co-founders as a billionaire.

Texas Redistricting

"We're not walking out on our responsibilities; we're walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent."

Gene Wu

Democratic leader in Texas House

Democratic lawmakers said they left Texas on Sunday in an effort to temporarily block Republicans from redrawing its congressional maps—an initiative pushed by President Trump to help retain GOP control of the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms.