Did anybody else enjoy watching the LIVE TV documentary programme broadcast August last year, from the College of Aeronautics at Cranfield University who are researching the general issue of cabin emergency evacuation?
During the programme there was a very successful mass evacuation of members of the public from the top deck of their A380 class simulator.
As anybody who has studied the airliner emergency evacuation business knows, there are two issues
1 How you get people from their seats and out of the exits.
2 How you get people who have gone through an exit down to the ground.
The first issue can be a real problem if people are in fear of their lives and from an engineering point of view is much harder to guarantee (or even provide a high chance of success) than the second.