Should Planes Have Locking Overhead Bins To Protect Passengers From Themselves?

The U.K.'s Royal Aeronautical Society is proposing that regulators study whether locking overhead bins might keep passengers from delaying evacuations by reaching for their bags.

Toronto, CANADA: An emergency evacuation slide (under ladder) hangs from the wreckage of the Air France Airbus A340 at Toronto's Pearson International Airport 03 August 2005, one day after it skid off the runway and burst into flames. Investigators have found black box flight recorders from the wreckage of the jet and they are in 'good' condition, officials said. The recorders could give investigators vital clues into what caused the plane to skid off the runway with 297 passengers and 12 crew onboard who miraculously escaped largely unscathed from the blazing jet.

Despite airlines' efforts to educate the flying public on evacuation procedures, making emergency videos more engaging and entertaining and posting them online, people still behave in unpredictable ways during aircraft accidents. Some of the things they do increase the risk of injury and may cost lives.

In a newly published paper, experts from the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) highlight various irregularities in recent evacuations that raise concerns and propose that regulators study solutions.

Aviation is the safest form of transport and, the RAeS report states, 90% of aircraft accidents involving commercial aircraft are survivable. But how passengers react during accidents can play a big role in the number of injuries and deaths.

“Accidents and incidents involving evacuation occur on a regular basis, many of which require rapid disembarkations not using evacuation slides, whilst a lesser number of evacuations occur when a significant threat of imminent danger exists to aeroplane occupants,” the report's authors write. “Both scenarios include a risk of injury to passengers and crew, since getting to the ground from an emergency exit can involve jumping into an evacuation slide from a considerable height. This is especially the case for twin-aisle aeroplanes, and even more so for an evacuation from an upper-deck on multi-deck aeroplanes. Additionally, there is a risk of injury to occupants who have to evacuate via exits that are not required to be equipped with evacuation slides.”

Evacuating with luggage is perhaps one of the most dangerous and irrational of passenger behaviors. It not only compounds the risks inherent to evacuation, but it also delays egress from a plane which could be about to burn up or explode and tests the design limits of the slides.

Aircraft slides are softer than you think

Evacuation slides were never designed to support both people and luggage.

This emergency equipment is made of coated neoprene fabric, hardened only by air under pressure. Slides are fixed to exit doors by metal bars which detach for removal during maintenance. In the cases of slide-rafts, they are designed to separate quickly from the aircraft in overwater emergencies where the airplane may be sinking or where fire may spread rapidly through jet fuel floating on the surface of the water.

Even heels can tear slide fabric, which is why women are required to remove these shoes during evacuations. What is more, the process of sliding on this coated neoprene produces electrostatic energy. Though slides are grounded to prevent passengers getting a shock when they touch the ground, it’s not known how this energy might effect rolling bags that contain electronics or lithium-ion batteries.

Passengers ignore obvious danger

In the RAeS paper, the authors highlight some recent incidents in which critical evacuations were delayed because of passengers stopping to collect their bags before exiting the plane. In the case of British Airways Flight 38 crash at Heathrow in 2008, one passenger actually re-entered the aircraft by climbing back up the slide just to retrieve their bags.

The reports' authors identified six other aircraft accidents during which passengers brought their luggage along — even though most of these incidents presented critical and catastrophic conditions. That includes intense fire and fuselage breach. During an Air France, A340-300 crash in Toronto, Canada on 2 August 2005, though the fuselage broke into pieces, the evacuation was impeded by nearly half of the passengers stopping to collect their bags. In the case of a Virgin Atlantic A330-300 crash at London, Gatwick on 16 April 2012, despite a warning of smoke in the aft cargo compartment which led to the evacuation and the risk of fire imminent, passengers stopped to collect their bags from overhead bins.

Other incidents the RAeS report's authors reference where passengers prioritized their luggage over their lives include:

Asiana Airlines, B777-200 crash in San Francisco on 6 July 2013 — devastating total hull loss and intense fire.
Air Canada A320-200 crash in Halifax on 29 March 2015 — landing short of the runway.
British Airways B777-200 crash in Las Vegas on 8 September 2015 — time critical engine fire.
Emirates B777-300 crash in Dubai on 3 August 2016 — intense fire resulting in the destruction of the fuselage.
Laptops are worth more than lives

It is a dangerous dynamic that baffles and frustrates many of those involved in ensuring aviation safety. Despite widespread coverage of these events, which includes heavy criticism on social media of those bringing bags with them, passengers still do it.

When contacted for this story, Nick Butcher, one of the lead authors of the report, believes that fear of lost property overpowers fear over loss of life.

“One of the things behind this is that the things people have in their baggage with them can be very valuable — laptops and other electronics or cameras. Twenty years ago, that wasn’t the case,” he said.

Of course, the trouble with this is that the person who puts bags before safety is not making that decision for themselves alone. They are also delaying others who need to evacuate the aircraft quickly — prioritizing their personal items over the lives of others.

Luggage lockout

Locking overhead bins may solve this problem. Butcher says this feature is already being considered for the Irkut MC21 aircraft. A central switch feature in the flight deck would allow the pilots to lock-out overhead bins as part of the emergency checklist. But there are questions about the effectiveness of this approach.

Concerns go beyond the functional reliability of these systems — whenever you introduce complexity into an aircraft component you risk introducing new maintenance and operational failures. But if the drive to preserve property is so ingrained in people, there is also the risk that passengers will take even longer to evacuate, wrestling to open the locked overhead bin doors.

Butcher acknowledges this and explains that the authors are only recommending regulators study the possibility of installing locked bins, as part of a broader study of evacuation dynamics. They are not calling for locked overhead bins as a solution nor arguing that locked bins would be a panacea. “Aviation authorities should consider the feasibility,” Butcher said.

The next step in the process is for the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to study the nearly 80-page report which will be presented to the regulator this Thursday. Whatever they determine, a more in-depth study of human factors, looking for solutions to this errant and life-threatening passenger behavior during aircraft emergencies is past due.

“We have to find ways to stop this from happening,” Butcher said.

Source: forbes.com

Collect by Huong Nguyen