Spirit A320 RTO due to engine fire. Views from the cabin
 

Courtesy of Avherald

https://avherald.com/h?article=4ee2677c&opt=0

Fan blade separation will give the FAA/EASA something to think about in a hurry.

Any comments on the Evacuation call? Hardly clear, or emphatic. Whatever happened to "This is the captain. This is an emergency. Evacuate evacuate! Left / right side only."

You can have a chat with the pax about what caused it once you're all on the tarmac.

Better not to say left/right as causes confusion, particularly for aft-facing cabin crew. Recent Airbus amendment removed left/right from evacuation order for this reason.

What is it with folk taking hand luggage & filming the entire episode! Cabin crew need to be much more assertive.

Everything must be filmed or it didn’t happen, recording the event is more important than surviving it for this generation !

What's the certification time for an evac? 90 seconds?

stilton

Daft it may seem but it does give useful information and can be learned from.

Certification
 

The certification requirements provide a standard for the design of aircraft; a comparative measurement based on a minimum time; aircraft configuration, seats, flight attendants, number of (operating) doors, a range of passengers, and conducted at night.

The use of these requirements for operational approval can overlook the essential need for crews’ understanding of procedures and priorities - ability to adapt to each unique, surprising situations, which will not be the same as used for certification. i.e. passengers will not behave as demonstrated in certification; in the real world crews have to intervene, encourage, etc.
Operational assessments (nor accident investigations) should not be judged by timing, which is often detrimental to necessary understanding required for safe operation; safety first, can procedures be better applied, what more can be learnt.

“There's nowt so queer as folk”; regulators, operational assessors, investigators, downwards; poor old cabin crew at the bottom layer facing reality, have to manage an ‘unmanageable’ situation involving real passengers.
Work as done is never as imagined; regulations have limited, constrained imagination.

The outcome of this event was safe; well done the crew. What can others in industry learn from this event, how, and then apply this without regulatory intervention.

Hartington

IIRC Certification requires a demonstration that everyone on board can be evacuated in 90 seconds using half of the aircraft emercency exits.
The fact that it takes longer in reality is due to human factors as safetypee says.
I was witness to a certification evacuation test that required 3 attempts to get it right and that was with fit young people.

gcal

Risking your life taking even a few extra seconds to film rather than evacuate from a burning aircraft as quickly as possible is daft indeed

safetypee

After an evacuation either for certification or in an actual emergency, are any crew or passenger interviews conducted?

Landscape video (and the end) at last! :ok:

What in hell were they hanging around for ? Read the accident report for the Airtours at Manchester and then watch me go.

John, re passenger interviews; I don't know.

Accident investigation can request a wide range of information. I have seen one report which related seat position and outcome based on crew and passenger interview, but this involved crash impact survivability and subsequent human behaviour, unrelated to a commanded evacuation.

The certification events (FAR/CS 25) which I witnessed (in the dark), filmed the event for documented evidence, passengers wore ‘illuminated’ identity vests so as to match seat location, exit used, and time to escape. Interviews, if any, were associated with the safety aspects of the test set up.

A good source of information on seat vs escape vs time, interviews, etc, is in the research by late Helen Muir of Cranfield university. (See link 2 @ #15)

Three operational approval tests (FAR 121) were witnessed; these were not conducted iaw with certification requirements, and some in particular were ‘jump through the hoop’ exercises for the regulators benefit, with little practical relevance, apart from using a meaningless timed tick box. The ‘passengers’ were all company employees who were not about to rock the boat - anyway there was pay, and free food and drink.

Incentive to escape is influenced by perceived threat and crew assertiveness.It will be interesting to understand what the flight deck commands and cabin crew actions were in this incident (#3). If they follow the gist of the reported tower communication “roll the trucks”, then.

For the traveling public
https://www.aerosociety.com/news/rae...cuation-video/

Also other links, particularly
https://www.aerosociety.com/media/14...-june-2020.pdf
case studies, research, etc

Many operators use the phrase "all available/useable doors" for this reason

They literally said that exact phrase, given the amount of carrying on in the cabin it was pretty clear, probably as much as you're going to hear it in that circumstance

The video is valuable documentation of real world pax behavior however disappointing it may be to us and the regulators - who may be disconcerted by this real world behavior.

The certification standard is everybody evacuated in 90 seconds using half the exits.

In the video, I don't see any movement towards the exits for a full two minutes. Observe that this affords many pax the opportunity and temptation to pull stuff out of the overhead bins.

Observe also that "Remain Seated" admonitions were largely ignored. Survival instinct prevails.

Kudos to the fire crew who got the fire under control and helped catch pax at the bottom of at least one slide.

​​​Cabin security needs to be a top item in a post RTO checklist. In this case we were lucky. The next time a fire breaches the cabin in under two minutes, we won't be so lucky.

Dave Gittins

Exactly. We do not need a repeat of British Airtours disaster in Manchester - and this one looks strikingly similar (slow evacuation, hesitation). Luckily, no strong wind to fan the fire towards fuselage and fire itself died out/extinguished in time. If not......

givemewings

I think you need to watch the video again. The first communication from the flight deck is at 01:30, with (presumably) the Captain saying "Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate. The right hand engine has caught on fire...we hit a bird on take off. Please, er, avoid the right hand engine."