How to Evacuate 873 People from an Airbus A380

Ladies and gentlemen, we trust you are enjoying your flight. We hope you have your seatback reclined, your tray table unstowed, your personal electronic devices turned on, and a complimentary beverage of your choice that's just been delivered by a cheerful member of your cabin crew.

Now imagine this: There are more than 800 other passengers on this brand-new Airbus A380, and something has gone wrong. Really wrong. So wrong, in fact, that we have to make an emergency landing. But that's not the stressful part. The stressful part will occur after we land. Assuming the plane is still intact, and not, say, engulfed in searing fossil-fueled flames, we'll need you all to evacuate the cabin as quickly as possible via the slides that will inflate automatically from the emergency exits located on either side of the aircraft.

How long would it take for everyone to get off the A-380?

In a best-case scenario, with no smoke, no fire, limited structural damage to the aircraft, and no one who sustained any injuries during the landing, it would take a little under 80 seconds to evacuate 853 passengers and 20 crew members from an A380.

That's what Airbus learned after conducting a live A380 evacuation drill with a planeload of Lufthansa employees inside a darkened German aircraft hangar during March 2006. Yet even under those most ideal of circumstances, there were casualties: one broken leg and 32 friction burns. As the Wall Street Journal reported, it could have been far worse:

In a 1991 test of a McDonnell Douglas MD-11 inside a darkened hangar at Long Beach, Calif., one attempt took 132 seconds and resulted in 28 injuries. McDonnell Douglas did the test over and got people to move faster. But in the mayhem, a 60-year-old woman caught her foot on a slide. She flipped, crashed headlong against a pile of people at the bottom, and broke her neck. She was left paralyzed for life. McDonnell Douglas failed the test and the FAA denied its request to put up to 421 people on the MD-11. (It eventually approved up to 410.)

Still, what was it like inside that A380 during the evacuation? Or, to put it another way, what's it like to be one of 873 souls scrambling to escape from a double-deck aluminum tube as fast as humanly possible? A video of the 2006 A380 evacuation drill was recently posted to YouTube, and you can watch it right here: