Well, company specific to a point, but in general...
The aeroplane will come to a stop, or be at a stop. The stop may be normal, urgent or perhaps violent depending on circumstances. There may be no prior indications whatsoever.
There will be a considerable pause while the flight deck get their actions started, this will seem interminable if the event was an obvious problem or if there is external fire. In reality it will last a couple of tens of seconds.
The engines will shut down (you cannot evacuate pax into running engines)
A PA will be made to the effect of "EVACUATE EVACUATE! UNFASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS AND GET OUT"
Then there will be a few moments - long long moments while the cabin crew deal with the "Oh ****! Oh Christ! Oh dear!" moments, get up, check outside their doors, open them ans begin to scream, and won.t stop screaming "COME THIS WAY! COME THIS WAY! JUMP! JUMP! COME THIS WAY! LEAVE YOUR BAGS! JUMP! COME THIS WAY" etc etc until exhausted or all the pax are off.
It will be very noisy with their shouting which led to scurrilous reports in the meeja recently of crew panicking during an evac. They were doing their job,
overwhelming all the senses of the pax with urgency to get off the aircraft.
Then they're supposed to Marshall hundreds of bewildered and disorientated pax (ie far far more bewildered ans disorientated than usual) and get them out of the way of the hordes of adrenaline fuelled emergency vehicles thundering into the area at breakneck speed...
They earn every penny of their meagre wages, believe me, and they don't get paid one penny for the day that have to do an evac IMHO.
A well managed evac will seem to take forever to get started, The pauses will seem like a lifetime if there is obvious urgency to leave but scores, even hundreds of such events have conclusively shown that hurried evacs cost lives, it is far far better to be methodical and take time to get the sequence of events right than rush it and bugger it up, and kill more people than might otherwise have been the case. Its a very serious business indeed and MUST be got right, there's no second chance.
Last edited by Agaricus bisporus; 4th Jun 2012 at 21:39.