Can we open our minds a bit re evacuation problems? – Are there not two issues?
1 What goes on INSIDE the aeroplane prior to passing through the exits
2 What goes on OUTSIDE having passed through the exits
Professor Helen Muir at Cranfield led the way, post Manchester, in sorting out the variables of human behaviour inside the aircraft, leading to an understanding of how the interior and the exits need to be designed to improve flow rates. She initially did this using gantries built outside an old Trident for the people to exit onto. I don’t see why the internal arrangements such as door sizes and positions, lighting, effects of smoke, bulkhead layout, etc cannot be tested for the 380 (or any other large aircraft) using this (safer) technique.
For complete certification of an aircraft the slides, tubes or whatever have also to be developed and tested for satisfactory deployment in some very demanding circumstances. It seems to me this is a separate subject and can be dealt with as such.
Assuming this external work can be done to everyone’s satisfaction why do you have to stuff a full load of real (but probably totally unrepresentative people) down the system? Would that prove anything that that could not be better and more safely shown in the R&D lab?
64-dollar question:
Do we really feel any past certification evacuation demonstration has been fully representative of a real emergency evacuation in the same type?
Personally, I don’t think so.
For my money if we really want to improve evacuation safety we should be insisting on more realistic certification demonstrations of what happens inside the aeroplanes (present and future) and leave the external escape system development and testing to R&D labs using trained test subjects and or dummies or whatever. Just like car crash testing.