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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Friday, August 29, 2008

Under pressure (or not)

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As you may have read, a UK-based airline had a decompression incident this week – a Ryanair flight had to make an expeditious descent and unscheduled landing in France. Apart from the fact that it’s a surprisingly rare occurrence, given the number of pumped-up aluminium tubes that motor around at 35,000 ft every day, in aviation incident terms this appears to have been a bit of a non-event. The crew followed standard procedures to get down to an altitude more compatible with surface-pressure aspiration, the oxygen masks duly deployed, no-one passed out, no-one was hurt, all apparently handled by the book. Everyone happy, congratulations to the crew? Not a chance.
The newspapers – even the “qualities” – in the UK widely reported passengers’ complaints that, “not all of the oxygen masks worked.” While not wishing to anticipate any official investigation, I think we can see where this one came from. If the passengers had bothered to listen to the safety briefing (we all do, don’t we?) they would have heard the bit about “……breathe normally: the bag will not inflate.” It seems a safe bet that passengers who didn’t listen were left looking at the uninflated bag attached to their mask and thought, “it’s not working”. The fact that, at 30,000 ft, they were able to think at all rather argues the opposite.
Having flown with both diluter-demand and metered-cannula supplementary oxygen systems I’d be happy to tell them; the amount of supplementary oxygen you need in those circumstances is small; you’re not going to feel a gale of O2 on your face.
So here is the market opportunity you could try to sell to the airlines; when the supplementary oxygen system is triggered, a pre-recorded message immediately repeats the safety briefing (the crew can’t do it, they’ve got masks on) to tell passengers what to expect.
You might point out that that doesn’t need any new hardware for the cabin systems. And you’d be right; but here is what it does need, something that most PA systems, including and especially those on aircraft, appear to completely lack. That is, an effective AGC system to set the delivered sound level to a sensible and effective level. It seems a simple request, yet in so many circumstances, public announcements are reduced to inaudible muttering or, alternatively, boosted to an ear-splitting roar. It’s evident that this simple request must be very difficult to deliver: why?

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