We were discussing this last week, several of the crew on my flight (flying 5 years or more) had all successfully used fire extinguishers to put out fires onboard. Anyone who wants to remove those from the aircraft is nuts!
I reckon the worst thing you can deal with onboard is a fire, once it gets ahold you are pretty much screwed. I remember reading a line somewhere (think it was Boeing) that said from ignition to landing, if anything over 12minutes and the fire is uncontrollable, you might as well call it a day and write your goodbye notes..
Wrt rafts, some of you are getting confused between 'flotation only slides' and 'Slede/raft'. The former are not intended to be used in ditching but MAY be used as a last resort, in the manner described, for pax in the water to hold onto. The latter are designed to keep you dry and out of the water and are equipped with survival gear. Sliderafts must be able to carry the entire capacity of the aircraft plus overload. (A common capacity on large aircraft is 60, and 80 at overload, in case one of your other slides is damaeg etc)
The round dingies are probably mroe seaworthy, but IMHO having done a ditching drill and deploying them out the o/w exits on a B737, you'd be on the bottom before you got them all away. For the purposes of getting a few hundred panicking passengers out of an aircraft, the slideraft is probably going to work better. The dingies are only as good as the crowd control used when setting them up for loading.
Of course the chances of surviving anything open water are low- but I can think of several cases where aircraft overran into water and the sliderafts were used.
The Hudson river case, someone asked about, the rear slides did not deploy because the procedure says you don't use them in ditching since the door sills are underwater. Ditto for the overwings, they are slides only not rafts IIRC...
Last edited by givemewings; 25th Aug 2012 at 18:08.