Hello there safety experts,
I have started writing a wee article on the Manchester airport disaster in 1985, and it's turning into something way more epic, argh. I've written the narrative of the event itself and am now writing up about the investigation and aftermath.
I have found several claims in short articles about Flight 28M that emergency lighting on the floor pointing to the exits was mandated after this disaster. However, I cannot substantiate this. I can see in the AAIB report that several recommendations were made, none of them related to lighting. In fact the report at one point says they don't think it would have been that useful due to a film over the survivors' eyes impairing their vision. The report is way more into smokehoods.
A thread on here from 2004 says this was introduced after Kegworth - but I can't see anything in the recommendations in the Kegworth report, either.
I can see in the report on the 1983 Air Canada DC-9 fire, that was published in January 1986, that floor lighting was something they announced they were going to recommend as a result. It's not clear when this recommendation was actually made, though and googling is proving difficult.
I'm sure Mayday/ACI has made the claim that the disaster resulted in the lighting on their shows about both Manchester and Air Canada... but that might not be correct.
I'm going cross-eyed trawling through reports, so forgive me if this seems like the easy way out, but I've already been at for hours, and it's only going to be one brief paragraph... I was wondering if anyone knows for definite when the emergency floor lighting was made mandatory? Or could point me to somewhere that would be more likely to have bang on information?
I would also appreciate any opinions on how useful it has proven to be, especially given the concern in the Manchester report that people wouldn't have seen it anyway... in more recent evacuations like Air France and BA in Las Vegas t'other day, was the lighting a factor, do you reckon?
Given that in both of those a lot of the passengers made it out with their baggage (I shall say nothing about my opinion of that
) I'm assuming visibility was not so much of an issue?
When I get home I shall check my actual books to see if they mention anything further, but any help you can give me would be very gratefully accepted!