Airbus shared lessons from its full-scale emergency evacuation demonstration on the A380-800 — many applicable to cabin crews of any airliner — during the International Aircraft Cabin Safety Symposium in Montreal in February 2008. Videos of the evacuation, as recorded by overhead interior cameras, revealed more clues to how the two pursers and 16 flight attendants in March 2006 evacuated 873 people in 78 seconds via three upper-deck slides and five lower-deck slides in Hamburg, Germany (ASW, 1/07, p. 46). This cabin crew was drawn from a pool of 42 Lufthansa line crewmembers selected under regulatory criteria to represent an average cabin crew in age, training, experience and other attributes.
“The behavior and assertiveness of the cabin crew had a great impact on the speed with…
