PASSENGER COMPARTMENT ESCAPE FACILITIES

PASSENGER COMPARTMENT ESCAPE FACILITIES

The passenger compartment is provided passenger/crew doors and emergency exit doors.

Wide body aircraft has forward, mid and aft passenger/crew doors on both sides and two emergency over wing doors for emergency exit only. Normal doors are also used as emergency exit. Each door is fitted with an automatically deployed and inflated escape slide to facilitate the emergency evacuation of all passengers and crew in the shortest possible time. Modern aircraft has all slides of the inflatable type, using cylinder-stored compressed gas.

The escape slides are mounted on the door structure, armed/disarmed by the door emergency escape slide release mechanism, and activated by the door opening process. In a typical modern aircraft, the FWD doors, MID and AFT passenger/crew doors are each fitted with a dual-lane escape slide or an optional slide/raft allowing for two abreast evacuation and the emergency exit doors are each fitted with a single lane escape slide. The door-mounted girt bar retaining mechanism controls actuation and deployment of the escape slides. All doors are equipped with an emergency escape slide warning system. When the emergency control handle is placed in the ARMED position and the interior control handle is lifted to open a door, an electrical warning system on the door is activated providing audio and visual warning signals. See Figure 3.7.

The emergency doors have their own emergency slide release mechanism. The escape slide release mechanism functions to activate emergency opening of the door and initiate the escape slide deployment process. The mechanism is manually operated by the two-position Emergency Control Handle (ECH). The ECH is connected to the door locking mechanism so that the handle can only be repositioned when the door is closed and locked. A safety pin secures the ECH in the DISARMED position only. The ECH is connected by rods to the stop lever and the girt bar control mechanism.