It's worth bearing in mind that slide-rafts simply didn't exist at the time. Any rafts would have been stored separately, and I don't know if the Connie even had slides. (Perhaps someone will comment.) Even in the 1960s and 70s, on long-haul aircraft like the VC10 and B707 the rafts were separate from the escape slides.
(BTW, on the VC10 and BAC 1-11, it was also necessary to deploy the slides manually by dropping them from the ceiling and attaching them to lugs in the door-frames. IIRC, later-model B707s had them mounted in the doors and pre-attached to the door frames by a girt bar. But they did not double as rafts. I can't remember at what stage the automatic deployment of slides as the door opens became the norm on narrow-body aircraft, but all wide-bodies had that manual/automatic system from the start.)
Accessing an inflatable dinghy - perhaps lowering it from the ceiling - and deploying it was quite a performance. Stowage in the wing T/E might be a mixed blessing, tonytales?
Re the aforementioned A320 Hudson ditching (which I believe the investigation defined semantically as a forced landing on water), most of the full-load of passengers had to take to the wings because, as Dave implies, the rear slide-rafts could not be deployed, the two rear doors being partly submerged due to a nose-up attitude. That would have led to about half the pax being forced to evacuate by the over-wing exits (two per side). The pairs of overwing exits each have a rearward slide that, IIRC, is not convertible into a raft. But there may have been other factors.
[As an aside, this thread caught my attention particularly because later in that same month I was passenger on a L749A of SAA from Lusaka to London. One of the many sectors was Athens/Ciampino, but I don't remember if we were aware of the AF accident.]
Last edited by Chris Scott; 18th Mar 2018 at 22:52.
Reason: Clarifying ambiguity in para 4. Para 3 enlarged.