Evaluation of Wide-Body Transport Category Airplane Evacuation Slide Training Technique and Injuries

At the request of AFS, the Cabin Safety Research Team performed an archival review of training events at their wide-body airplane cabin simulators with participants evacuating via an airplane evacuation slide. The purpose of this review was to evaluate if evacuation slide use technique differed as a function of participants use or deviation from the trained evacuation technique, and if the slide technique used was related to the frequency or likelihood of participant injury. This review found that most evacuations recorded during these training events used the trained techniques, and that it was not possible with this data to utilize inferential statistical techniques to determine if slide technique leads to higher rates of missed landing and/or injuries due to imbalance of observations between the groups using the trained techniques (n = 1202) and the groups deviating from the trained techniques (n = 72). A comparison of frequencies showed that the trained techniques had a lower rate of missed landings (12.23% - 13.79%) than other techniques (50% - 83.33%). Significantly more data would need to be collected to balance the observations in each group of participants deviating from the trained techniques to utilize inferential statistics with sufficient power to detect if there is a statistically significant effect not observed in the sample by chance. This review also found that the trained technique is relatively safe, given the low number of missed landings and injuries observed over the number of training events and individual evacuations observed. Finally, given that the technique most observed in this archival review was the trained technique, and there were still missed landings and injuries using this technique, there must be some other underlying factor influencing these outcomes that would be better determined by a more controlled study of slide use techniques.

• Dataset URL:
  • https://doi.org/10.21949/1530059
• Dataset URL:
  • https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/73122
• Record URL:
  • https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/73109
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Supporting dataset available at: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/73122; https://doi.org/10.21949/1530059
• Corporate Authors:

  Federal Aviation Administration

  Civil Aerospace Medical Institute, P.O. Box 25082
  Oklahoma City, OK  United States  73125

  Federal Aviation Administration

  Office of Aerospace Medicine, 800 Independence Avenue, SW
  Washington, DC  United States  20591
• Authors:
  • Weed, David
  • 0000-0002-5184-6933
• Publication Date: 2023-11

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Appendices; Tables;
• Pagination: 12p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Airplanes; Aviation safety; Evacuation; Safety equipment; Training
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Education and Training; Safety and Human Factors; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01907845
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: DOT/FAA/AM-23/XX
• Files: NTL, TRIS, USDOT
• Created Date: Feb 12 2024 10:31AM