As many airlines are reducing indulgent first-class offerings to incorporate more business-class seats on their planes, it can be hard to tell exactly what the differences are between the two front-of-plane cabins.
05.01.2024 - 23:55 / thepointsguy.com
The crash between a Japan Airlines passenger jet and a Japanese coast guard plane in Tokyo this week is resurfacing questions about standards used to evaluate whether aircraft can be safely evacuated during emergencies.
It took about 18 minutes to evacuate Japan Airlines Flight 516, an Airbus A350-900, the Wall Street Journal reported. That's despite aircraft certification requirements that the plane could be evacuated within 90 seconds, even with half of its emergency exits blocked, and tests that demonstrated that the plane met that target.
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Although five of the six crew members aboard the coast guard aircraft were killed, all 379 passengers and crew members aboard the JAL flight escaped safely, even as the plane caught fire and smoke filled the cabin. Only a dozen minor injuries were reported — things like bumps, bruises and sprains from the trip down the evacuation slide.
The flight attendants on board have been widely credited with keeping passengers calm and helping ensure an orderly evacuation, while the modern design of the aircraft is seen as having helped to slow the spread of the initial fire, giving passengers time to escape.
Still, the discrepancy between the theoretically achievable 90-second window and the time it took to evacuate in Tokyo has raised old questions about whether that window is even possible, whether certification tests reflect real-world conditions and whether redesigning the test would have unintended consequences.
Legislation introduced in the U.S. in late 2022 by Sens. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., would require the Federal Aviation Administration to test evacuation times using a more realistic setting.
"Putting 60 people on part of a fuselage of an airplane and pretending that no one has carry-on baggage, and there are no children and senior citizens on board" doesn't reflect real-world conditions, Duckworth told TPG in a Zoom interview at the time. "I wrote the legislation because I saw that these tests were not being done in a realistic way."
A modified version of the legislation is included in the pending bill to reauthorize the FAA, which is expected to pass this year.
Duckworth — who sits on the Senate subcommittee for aviation and was a helicopter pilot for the U.S. Army before losing both legs during combat in Iraq — renewed calls to address the evacuation standards this week following the JAL crash.
"What happened in Tokyo this week was a tragedy, but one that could have been much worse—and while we won't know the full details for some time, I have been warning that something like this could happen in the U.S. for a long time now," Duckworth said in a
As many airlines are reducing indulgent first-class offerings to incorporate more business-class seats on their planes, it can be hard to tell exactly what the differences are between the two front-of-plane cabins.
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