Pax Evacuation Commands
After reading the thread on the BA 038 accident in LHR I am prompted to ask what form of words you use in the event of ordering a passenger evacuation. I did mention it in the thread but it got lost in the hullabaloo and prompted almost no reaction. So now that the drama has subsided somewhat, I would like to know what you use.
My present company use,
'This is an emergency, Unfasten your seat belts and evacuate using all available exits.'
This is almost the worst example of evacuation command possible. It uses words that will be unfamiliar to many passengers. Unfasten is not an easily learned English word, as are, evacuate and available.
Evacuation studies carried out since the very survivable Manchester BA B737-200 fire in 1985 have some interesting results. Cranfield University, using a Trident fuselage and more recently a B737 Cabin Simulator along with a two deck wide-body simulator have shown that passengers, me amongst them on the Trident, behave in many and varied ways to such a situation. At one extreme, a number will be moving towards the exits even before the aircraft has come to rest, others will sit and do nothing no matter how hard you shout at them.
The command from the cockpit found to be the most use in our multi-lingual era is
'Open your seat belts and get out.'
Any other form of words were all found to be confusing and less well understood. If your company uses anything other than this form of words, I would be interested to hear them.