Aircraft Escape Slides Faulted in NTSB Study

In more than a third of commercial aircraft evacuations, at least one inflatable escape slide failed to work properly or at all, according to a draft of a National Transportation Safety Board study released Tuesday.

“A slide problem in 37% of the evacuations in which slides were deployed is unacceptable for a safety system,” said NTSB Chairman Jim Hall. “It’s time for the FAA, the manufacturers, the airlines, the aircraft crews and the airports to take action to ensure that no one else dies because of poor aircraft design, inadequate evacuation procedures, inadequate crew training or inadequate emergency response.”

The study examined 46 emergency evacuations of commercial airplanes that occurred from September 1997 to June 1999, involving more than 2,600 passengers and 18 different types of aircraft. In the cases studied, about nine of every 10 passengers escaped without injury.

Most of the serious injuries and all the fatalities mentioned in the evacuation study occurred in the crash of American Airlines Flight 1420, which careened off the runway after landing in Little Rock, Ark., in a late-night thunderstorm on June 1, 1999. While 134 passengers escaped, most with injuries, 11 people were killed, including the pilot.

Of the evacuations studied, 19 involved the use of inflatable escape slides that extend out from a plane’s emergency exits. In five cases, at least one of a plane’s slides didn’t deploy automatically and flight crews had to manually inflate it. Slides failed completely during two other evacuations.

One of those failures occurred on July 9, 1998, after the engine of an American Airlines A300 caught fire soon after it took off from San Juan, Puerto Rico. After the plane returned to the airport, the crew tried to evacuate passengers through the right side because the left was blocked by fire and emergency vehicles. One exit and escape slide worked properly but the other three had problems: One slide inflated but then flipped over in the wind and had to be straightened by someone on the ground, another deployed but only after a flight attendant made two attempts to open a jammed door, and one door wouldn’t open completely and its slide didn’t work at all.

The NTSB repeated Tuesday a December recommendation that the Federal Aviation Administration require for a year that air carriers test the evacuation systems on 10% of each type of plane in their fleets.

Improper use of slides by passengers can also slow an escape from a plane. While passengers should be jumping onto slides, people first sitting down at the exits create delays, the NTSB said.