WSJ: On Its Giant Plane, Airbus Tests Exits

March 22, 2005
PAGE ONE

Cabin Pressure
On Its Giant Plane, Airbus Tests Exits -- And Humans, Too
Evacuation Drill for A380 Jet Requires 853 Passengers To Escape in 90
Seconds
Perils of a Second-Deck Slide

By DANIEL MICHAELS in Toulouse, France, and J. LYNN LUNSFORD in Phoenix
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 22, 2005; Page A1

The new Airbus A380 jetliner is so enormous that it will take almost one
hour for its maximum load of 853 passengers to board. In an emergency, those
same people must be able to escape within 90 seconds.

This summer, Airbus will see if it can meet that target. Inside a cavernous
plant in Hamburg, Germany, volunteers playing the role of passengers and 20
crew members will board the two-deck airliner, sit down and buckle up.
Organizers will toss blankets and baggage about to simulate the mess onboard
after a survivable accident. Some participants representing parents with
babies will receive lifelike dolls to cradle. Airbus technicians will
retreat to observation points hidden inside dummy toilets and galleys, as
regulators from Europe and the U.S. get in place to witness controlled
chaos.

Airbus will then turn out the lights. Only half of the plane's 16 doors will
open, replicating problems that complicate aviation emergencies. Slides will
shoot out and inflate to the size of flatbed trailers. Flight attendants
will yell in their best drill-sergeant voice: "Get out! Get out! Get out!"

Like everything else about the largest passenger plane ever built, the A380
evacuation test will happen on a grand scale. The engineers are pretty sure
the mechanical equipment will work, but predicting how the humans will
behave, particularly on such a large airplane, is what makes the planning so
difficult. Because the plane's upper deck is two stories high, regulators
are particularly interested to see what happens when the volunteers emerge
at the edge of the high doorway and realize they must jump onto the steep
and slick nylon slide. Will they balk and slow others' escape? Will they
pile up in a human traffic jam at the bottom?
[In Case of Emergency]

The A380, slated to make its first test flight by mid-April, must pass the
cabin evacuation test before it can enter commercial service next year. If
it fails, aviation authorities might force Airbus to limit its maximum
passenger load. That could affect the A380's sales prospects for heavily
traveled routes in Asia and the Middle East.

Most airlines buying the plane have announced plans to install around 550
seats, including first-class and business-class sections. But some carriers
may want to create high-capacity versions, as some have done with Boeing
Co.'s 747 jumbo jet. The 747 can carry as many as 524 passengers in a
two-class configuration but usually carries around 416. The A380s with fewer
seats won't have to undergo an evacuation test so long as Airbus can pass
the test with the maximum 853 passengers.

In recent decades, aircraft manufacturers have worked closely with
regulators to improve the odds of a successful evacuation. Many of those
changes came in response to lessons from actual accidents. Despite the
improvements, evacuation planning still vexes manufacturers because it's
impossible to fully control or predict passenger behavior. In real
evacuations from smoke-filled cabins, for example, some people still try to
get their bags from the overhead bins.

Equally vexing is the design of the evacuation test itself: It must be a
realistic simulation of an accident, but after a test in 1991 that left a
volunteer with a broken neck, everyone is careful to avoid excessive risk
for the participants. Setting up the A380 test has required years of debate
among regulators and months of planning.

Airbus is owned by European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co., a Franco-German
company, and Britain's BAE Systems PLC. The two, together with industrial
partners and European governments, are investing more than $12 billion in
the A380. Airbus has 137 orders for the passenger version of the plane.

U.S. and other authorities require that for every commercial jetliner with
more than 44 seats, all passengers in an evacuation test must be able to get
off in 90 seconds using half the available exits. Authorities figure that's
about how long most passengers would have to escape a fiery airplane wreck
before succumbing to flames or smoke.

Evacuation testing became a serious issue after two accidents in the 1980s.
In 1983, half of the 46 people on board an Air Canada plane died after an
emergency landing in Cincinnati. Two years later, 55 of the 137 people on a
British Airtours plane at Manchester Airport in England died in a fire after
an aborted takeoff even though more than half of the plane's exits were
available for more than two minutes. Regulators realized that their tests
hadn't simulated real chaos.

One of the people who pushed for greater reality was Helen Muir, a professor
of aerospace psychology at England's Cranfield University. Standing in her
office she flipped on a videotape of a traditional evacuation test. The
crowd looked rushed but orderly. Then she popped in footage of a test in
which several people frantically try to squeeze into an escape hatch at
once. The difference: Participants in the second test were offered a £5 note
for being among the first to leave the airplane.

"Horrific, isn't it? And this is just for five pounds," says Prof. Muir.
"Put a little smoke in the cabin and you think you're going to die."
[Quick Escape]

From experiments such as these, manufacturers modified aircraft. On
single-aisle jetliners, the rows next to the exits over the wing have more
space between them so passengers have extra room to escape. Jet makers are
now required to install emergency floor lighting. To reduce the chance of
toxic smoke, airplane makers have upgraded the plastics and synthetic fibers
in walls and seats.

Evacuation tests can be dangerous. According to Federal Aviation
Administration data, nearly 15% of volunteers get injuries such as sprained
ankles. Yet regulators have balked when plane makers advocated using
computer simulations. "All of the computer modeling in the world is not
going to give you what you'll get in a test," says the FAA's top official,
Marion Blakey.

In a 1991 test of a McDonnell Douglas MD-11 inside a darkened hangar at Long
Beach, Calif., one attempt took 132 seconds and resulted in 28 injuries.
McDonnell Douglas did the test over and got people to move faster. But in
the mayhem, a 60-year-old woman caught her foot on a slide. She flipped,
crashed headlong against a pile of people at the bottom, and broke her neck.
She was left paralyzed for life. McDonnell Douglas failed the test and the
FAA denied its request to put up to 421 people on the MD-11. (It eventually
approved up to 410.)

The centerpieces of any evacuation are the giant inflatable slides. Each
slide must shoot from its tightly packed container and be ready for use
within six seconds of a door opening, even after freezing at minus 65
degrees Fahrenheit. The slides must stay usable amid high winds and flames.
They must not collapse if passengers pile up at the bottom. Some also must
double as life rafts.

The slides for the A380's upper deck have an added feature. Normally they
stretch about 40 feet. But that might be insufficient if the plane comes to
rest at a strange angle or tips up on its tail. In such cases onboard
sensors will automatically trigger 13 additional feet of slide to inflate on
some of them.

Airbus awarded its A380 slide contract in July 2001 to Goodrich Corp. of
Charlotte, N.C. Goodrich built a hall at its Phoenix plant to test the A380
slides including chambers for extreme hot and cold and a swimming pool
outside to test the slides as rafts. Six Hollywood wind machines simulate
storms. Test rigs replicate sections of an A380 exterior, including one with
a platform 26 feet up, equal to the height of an upper-deck door.

Goodrich has conducted simulated evacuations on each type of slide for more
than a year as part of its own testing. The company brings in employees for
some runs. But regulators demand novices for important tests, since most
people never go down an airplane slide in their life. By the time regulators
certify the slides, they will have been deployed a combined 2,500 times,
says Christine Probett, president of Goodrich's aircraft-interior-products
division.

Test jumpers wear helmets and tape their ankles like football players to
prevent injuries. Goodrich is allowed to intervene only to help subjects
clear away from the bottom of slides so others don't crash into them.
Regulators say passengers spontaneously do this in real evacuations.

Goodrich's tests have inspired several tweaks. Designers built inflatable
side rails to prevent passengers from falling off and adjusted the length of
some slides to make them less steep. They also found that adding a small
porch-like area just outside the jet doorway on some upper-deck slides lets
passengers gather their courage to jump and prevents queues inside the
plane.

Last weekend, Goodrich was testing another feature that is now mandatory on
new planes: built-in light strips that illuminate the chute so passengers
don't feel as if they're jumping into a bottomless pit. In the latest tests,
it turned off all the lights in its test hall to simulate "dark of night"
conditions.

Still, A380 planners realize the upper-deck slides may prove imposing,
especially to frail or novice fliers. An elderly woman, for example, would
be assisted by cabin crew if she balked at the door, "but at some point she
would just be pushed," said Manfred Bischoff, co-chairman of Airbus parent
EADS.

As slide tests proceeded last year, a trans-Atlantic debate simmered about
how to conduct the full-scale A380 mock evacuation. The plane's two decks
are connected by two staircases. The upper deck can carry up to 315 economy
class passengers and the lower deck can hold up to 538.

Airbus A380 Safety Director Francis Guimera says that in assessing the two
cabins, Airbus looks at the plane "like two separate aircraft." It works on
the assumption that in an accident, the stairs wouldn't be usable and all
315 upper-deck passengers would have to leave from that deck.

Mr. Guimera and his colleagues thought a classic one-shot evacuation test
might not be the best method for the A380. Airbus worried that if lots of
test participants on the upper deck ran down the internal stairs before
escaping, the lower deck might get too congested, while top-deck exits
wouldn't show their potential. Airbus proposed instead conducting separate
tests for the upper and lower decks.

European officials agreed but U.S. regulators balked. Considering the A380's
size, says Ms. Blakey, the FAA administrator, a full-scale test carries a
"certain show-me quality" that will add to public confidence in the plane.
In December, Airbus relented and agreed to a single test of the whole plane.
It is still working with regulators to figure out what to do if many people
use the stairs. In that case Airbus might have to repeat the test or shut
the stairs and do a test of the upper deck alone.

Airbus engineers in Hamburg began conducting preliminary trials late last
year. More recently they have distributed fliers in health clubs across town
seeking volunteers for the big test. Mr. Guimera says Airbus is targeting
people in good physical shape to avoid injuries. At least 40% of the
passengers must be women and 35% must be over age 50 to simulate a typical
planeload. Each participant will receive about $65.

As a precaution, Airbus may place cushions beneath some upper-deck slides
before starting the test in case a slide collapses and people fall over the
side. And to avoid accidents it will be allowed to place dim lights at the
bottom of slides.

On the big day, which is yet to be set, volunteers and crew will board the
plane as almost 250 regulators, Airbus technicians and medical staff get
into position to observe and assist. On a signal, flight attendants --
recruited from a real airline -- will throw open doors and herd passengers
to the nearest available slide. For 90 seconds, Airbus executives will hold
their collective breath.

---- Andy Pasztor contributed to this article.


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