The safest cabin layout for efficient aircraft evacuation
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 31-Mar-2026 11:15 ET (31-Mar-2026 15:15 GMT/UTC)
In AIP Advances, researchers simulate different evacuation scenarios in case of a dual-engine fire in an Airbus A320. They compare three different cabin layouts with three different ratios of passengers over the age of 60 and three different distributions of those passengers, finding that the proportion and location of elderly passengers have the largest effect on evacuation time. The fastest option — with 30 elderly passengers evenly distributed throughout the cabin — still required 141 seconds for all passengers to reach the ground.
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