Originally Posted by
Excargodog
Please see below:
https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/new...s-14869499.php
Now I won’t mention
which airplane manufacturer hired a bunch of college kids my freshman year at the University of Washington and bused us to their nearby facility for an aircraft mockup evacuation test. But I can tell you that except for a couple of freshmen footballers from my dorm, I don’t think one of us tipped the scales over 170#. I was about 155#(ah, those were the days...
)
But there sure weren’t any people on the bus who were mobility impaired, or blind, or fat...and I know damn well there were no dogs or mini horses. They instructed us, had us do three ‘dry runs’ at progressively faster speeds and then did one run they actually timed. Not sure if that was actually for certification or just for some proprietary sales pitch. But it sure seemed a little....artificial.
It's kind of dammed if you do and dammed if you don't, as if you have people with disabilities, older people, animals, etc., people are going to get hurt during the demonstration. Obviously they are going to get hurt during the real thing, but convincing those demographic groups to participate with the real or even certain possibility that they'll get hurt in the process is probably not a good selling point.
We did computer modeling at the university with the A-380, given how many exits, how many people can fit through the exit at once, how many people would be using each exit, speed data, and so on. During optimal conditions, everyone as an "able bodied adult" moving at the normal speed a human is capable of in those conditions, everyone could get out in 90 seconds. While some other teams tried some more complicated approaches, our team went with a simple way to simulate some slow-downs. Given a few "slow downs", like a 30% of the population moving at half speed, there was no way it would work, it blocked the egress and the time went significantly more. This could probably be done fairly well with ergonomic data on rate of movement, the hardest part would probably be modeling getting out of the row, maybe need test data for that, but it would at least significantly decrease the injury issue. One significant conclusion from the computer modeling was that those in first-class had a higher probability of evacuating successfully due to the increased space, being able to essentially move double-file, etc.