Questions and Answers

Hi Lucky,

With yesterday’s Dynamic Air fire and the recent BA incident at LAS we’ve seen two real-life examples where an aircraft in distress took significantly longer than the FAA mandated 90 seconds to evacuate.

Some of the delays were caused by selfish passengers who insisted on taking their belongings with them, but no one, including the FAA should be the least bit surprised that pax behave that way. It is inevitable that some people just aren’t going to do as instructed. Perhaps pax taking bags with them should be included in the evacuation tests.

Putting unruly passengers aside, I suspect the root problem is ever-tighter seating configurations with more seats crammed into coach.

Do you have an opinion on whether the FAA regulations should be updated? Further, do you think airlines would actively push back on the FAA given the economic impact of fewer seats on each plane? If yes, could such lobbying be effective?

Thought this might be an interesting topic…

Doug.

[USER=1038]@Douglas McVehil[/USER]

Welcome.

Thing to remember about those 90 seconds evacuations, they are done with airline staff or volunteers that know they will be evacuating. They were never truly realistic.

But tighter Y probably makes things worse for the simple reason that there is now more people for each door.

In the case of Dynamic you also had the problem that it seems to be the cabin crew that started the evacuation and not the flight crew.

This lead to among other thing that right side engine was still running and flaps on the right side wing was not down meaning that the rear chute/slide was blowing in the wind literally and evacuation over the right side wing was not possible since the chute could not deploy.

Since the left forward probably not being use much due to the flames they only had 2 usable slides, even so 6 minutes are 2 long for just over 100 passengers and crew.

Fire response also seemed slower in FLL than in LAS, but that might be because where the planes were compared to the fire station.