Surprising responses by an airline captain and flight attendants in the 17 minutes after their aircraft veered off the landing runway at a New York airport delayed the evacuation of 132 people from the McDonnell Douglas MD-88. The crewmembers’ actions bring to mind human factors in evacuations that have been addressed repeatedly in the past 20 years.1
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB’s) final report on the March 2015 runway excursion by the Delta Air Lines aircraft at LaGuardia Airport acknowledges the entire crew’s performance in the accident’s favorable outcome, with casualties limited to 29 passengers who suffered minor injuries (see “Lost in Reverse”).2
However, the report’s findings — as well as the findings in other relatively recent U.S. airline accidents3 — cover human performance failures that could have affected the outc…
