The fastest evacuation time recorded during the simulations exceeded the FAA's time limit by nearly a minute.
The study, published in AIP Advances, saw researchers simulate 27 different airplane evacuation scenarios in case of a dual-engine fire in an Airbus A320, one of the most common narrow-body aircraft in the world.
However, in every scenario, the evacuation time exceeded the required 90-second limit set by the United States Federal Aviation Administration , and elderly travelers were found to have the largest impact on plane evacuation time. “While a dual-engine fire scenario is statistically rare, it falls under the broader category of dual-engine failures and critical emergencies in aviation", said paper author Chenyang Zhang in a statement. "History has shown that dual-engine failures and emergencies, such as the famous ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ involving Captain Sullenberger, can happen and lead to severe consequences.standards.”In the study, the researchers examined three different cabin layouts with three varying ratios of passengers aged over 60 and three different distributions of these elderly travelers. The researchers used computer-aided design models of the plane cabin as well as evacuation modeling software to simulate the behavior of travelers on board. The researchers found that “the proportion and location of elderly passengers have the largest effect on evacuation time,” the AIP noted in a statement. The cabin layout that produced the fastest evacuation time accommodated a total of 152 passengers with two rows of first-class seats at the front, and 30 elderly passengers evenly distributed throughout the cabin. However, this layout “still required 141 seconds for all the passengers to reach the ground, much longer than the FAA mandates,” the AIP reported. Prior research has shown that cognitive decline in elderly people can affect their situational awareness as well as delay decision their making, while reduced dexterity in these populations can become worse in high-stress situations, such as a plane fire. The researchers hope that their latest findings will help facilitate ways to speed up the evacuation process, for example, by sharing additional safety briefings with elderly passengers, the AIP said. The researchers said that babies, children and pregnant women also present unique challenges during a plane evacuation, and the team plans to investigate these factors in their future work. “We hope these findings help airlines proactively mitigate risks,” Zhang said. “By understanding how passenger distribution affects evacuation, airlines could potentially implement more strategic seating arrangements to optimize safety without compromising operational efficiency.”Zhao, X., Xia, Y., Zhang, C., Meng, T., Yang, G., Chen, H., & Zhang, Y. . Effect of elderly passenger distribution on A320 aircraft evacuation under dual-engine fire scenarios.
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