I have fallen down a new research rabbit hole today, and it is aircraft evacuations, specifically evacuation behavior. More specifically, I'm curious about how many actual real person studies and simulations have been done regarding airplane evacuations over the last decadeish so as to account for things like how small airplane seats have gotten, changes in passenger behavior, changes in luggage standards, and changes in passenger size. (There's a lot of computer simulation studies but...ah...I don't really care about those. Sorry not sorry, your computer simulations cannot account for the full breadth of panicked human behavior.)
Right now I'm just skimming abstracts, but I have found a few interesting papers/reports so far.
There's two main historical accidents I'm thinking of here, though I can't remember the flight numbers, but both were decades ago.
One plane crashed due to being far overweight, and the REASON it was overweight was because the average assumed weights of passengers and their luggage had not been updated in decades. So they had, we'll say, 100 passengers all assumed to weigh 150lbs on average with 20lbs of luggage and that was within their weight limits for the plane. But, whoops, turns out the REAL average weights were now 175lbs per person with 50lbs of luggage (or whatever the actual numbers were), and suddenly they were massively overweight for what the aircraft could handle even though their calculations said they weren't. After this was discovered, the average weights were updated. Not sure how often they've been updated since, though, or if they account for the abuse of carry-on/personal item policies.
The second one was, I believe, pretty survivable in terms of what happened to the plane itself, but a TON of people still died when the plane caught fire on the ground. It was eventually discovered that this was because of the design of the bulkhead openings not being wide enough for easy egress, which resulted in people getting jammed up as they rushed for the exits. A really famous study was done afterwards that tested different bulkhead widths and resulted in the requirements being increased to allow for smoother evacuations.
There was also another study at one point that tested different command types from flight attendants which found that short, clear, forceful communication during an evacuation was most effective.
Now! Both of those, and the flight attendant one, were 3+ decades ago, and we all know a lot has changed in the last three decades in terms of air travel and culture as a whole. There's been a lot of emergency evacuations of planes in the last handful of years where there has been issues with people taking their luggage, evacuations just going slowly overall, people getting mad at flight attendants for being forceful, etc.
The first thing I was really curious about was how the shrinking of airplane seats may effect evacuation times. Because if adding a few extra inches to the width of a bulkhead can save hundreds of lives, it feels like a few more or less inches of legroom might also have an effect that needs to be considered. I looked primarily for studies published since 2020, just to keep things somewhat recent, and I did find a few things, but they're somewhat contradictory.
(Again, I'm just skimming these for right now, will go back and fully read things when I have time. If I later find that something is wrong, I'll update the post.)
This 68 page report released by the FAA in 2021 looked at the effects of body type and seat design on passenger evacuation, and is super thorough. They took a ton of different body measurements, tried different seat sizes, and ran multiple tests with over 700 people. They also used financial incentives to simulate panic behavior as much as possible. (If you got off the plane quicker, you got an extra $25 on top of the base pay for being involved in the study.)
However, they did not involve luggage at all. They excluded some people "too large to participate" (not sure what the cutoff there was, or what metrics constituted "too large," but it looks like the heaviest participant was around 419lbs and the tallest was around 6'4"). Only just over 13% of participants were over 50, with only 1 over 60. They only had around 60 people per test. Didn't seem to have anyone with any sort of major disability either, though it's unclear if there was any level of disability involved for any participants. They also only tested perfect conditions with the plane level, the lights on, no debris, etc.
All of that's not to say the study has no value, it does. But it comes with a lot of caveats. There's obviously only so much you can do to simulate panic behavior outside an actual emergency, but...like...at least turn the lights off and project some flames on the wall or something. Now, the study DOES say it was done intentionally to isolate just the variables of body metrics and seat size, but without a comparison to some sort of panic version, it isn't really what I'm looking for here.
The study did conclude that body metrics and seat size do not have an effect on evacuations, though. So there is that. However, I don't think they tested different body size configurations either? Like, doing a test with all the smaller people, then one with all the bigger people, then one with a mix. Which feels like it would be important for drawing conclusions?
This study, however, concluded that increased body size DOES slow down evacuations. And this one concluded that increased passenger density (i.e. the more seats you put in the plane, the higher the passenger density, rather than looking at seat size specifically) and increased incidence of disabled passengers (disability is not defined) slows down evacuations. However, both were only computer simulations.
As for taking luggage with, I found a Masters thesis on it, which used a mix of computer simulation and survey results. And there's this literature review from the FAA about other luggage/evacuation studies done with computer models, but overall it seems like this area is a pretty big gap in the literature when it comes to actual real-world studies.
This was only a quick dive into the literature, so there's probably more out there that I'm missing, but overall it feels like there's some big gaps here in how we're looking at these things. Some random studies I'd like to see, and I'd love recommendations if anyone knows of ones that do exist:
A real world evacuation comparison between two planes of the same size, but one with a seat configuration from, say, the 60s, and one with a seat configuration from this decade. Tested with a fully loaded plane, with and without simulated panic conditions, with and without luggage, and with different body type setups.
Literally any real-world studies with luggage as a factor. I think you could perhaps simulate personal attachment by doing something like saying each luggage piece has a prize ticket inside, but it's a 50/50 chance on whether you win that prize by leaving it on the plane or taking it off, so participants have to choose. Or something, IDK, just speaking off the cuff here.
Studies interviewing survivors in the immediate aftermath of accidents that specifically ask them about their behavior and the behavior of others during the evacuation. Lots of caution needed here, obviously, so you don't traumatize people worse, but still.
I'm also baffled by the fact that we STILL don't have security cameras on planes? Like, don't get me wrong, I hate being constantly observed too, but if there's one place I would expect to see and accept having security cameras, it'd be on a plane. With all the other shit TSA shoves at us, the lack of security cameras is just. Weird.
If we DID have security cameras on planes, that footage could be so, so valuable in studying these things. But the only footage we get is shaky cellphone footage, which is a whole separate issue.
So yeah. That's my rabbit hole of the day.
