An investigation of the factors influencing passengers' ability to operate exits on civil aircraft

摘要

Type III exits are a useful means of escape and they exist on a large proportion of theairline fleet. Evidence from aircraft accidents and previous research indicates thatmany passengers experience great difficulty in operating and evacuating through anoverwing exit. There are two different approaches to improving passenger operatingperformance; these being improvement and simplification of the task itself orprovision of clear instruction or practice for the passenger seated next to the exit.The first experiment investigated the impact of improvement to the Type III exitmechanism and practice on participant operation speed and accuracy. The results of afour-way Analysis of Variance indicated that both speed and accuracy of operationimproved as a result of the exit redesign. A Repeated Measures Analysis of Variancealso showed that the provision of practice led to a significant reduction in operationtimes. However, practising the operation of the current design of the Type III exitfailed to improve participant speed of operation to the level achieved by participantswhen operating the modified exit for the first time.The results from the second study which investigated the impact of variations insafety briefings on participants' speed and accuracy of operation of the traditionalType III exit clearly indicated the benefits of providing some form of instruction.Allowing participants to watch a `fellow passenger' on a video performing the task ledto quicker and more accurate exit operation. Variations in pre-flight briefing carddesign were also shown to improve operation accuracy.The implications of these results for the future development of self help exits,provision of training and design of briefing material are discussed.