Changes airlines have made in recent decades to fit more seats onto planes haven't impacted aircraft evacuation times, according to long-awaited results of evacuation tests conducted by the FAA.
The tests were conducted from November 2019 through January 2020. The testing team found that the cabin configurations currently flown by U.S. carriers do not impede evacuation progress for 99% of the American population.
The report is dated January 2021, but the FAA only posted it to its website on April 1. The agency didn't explain the 15-month delay.
In a separate March 31 report, the FAA noted that the tests relied solely on able-bodied adults under age 60. No senior citizens, children or disabled individuals participated.
"As a result, they provide useful, but not necessarily definitive information, regarding the effects of seat dimensions on safe evacuations for all populations," former FAA administrator Steve Dickson wrote to lawmakers in letters dated March 31, which was his final day on the job.
Dickson said that information from the study will inform a regulatory review that the FAA plans to conduct in order to set minimum standards for seat width and the space between rows on commercial aircraft. The standards, which Congress mandated be set as part of a 2018 FAA funding bill, are to be based upon what is "necessary for the safety and health of passengers."
Federal law requires that aircraft evacuations take less than 90 seconds.
The March 31 FAA report gave no timetable for beginning the rulemaking process. The 2018 FAA Reauthorization Act had called for new standards to be set by October 2019. Advocates had pushed for the standards out of concern that the increasing density of airline coach cabins over the past couple decades, coupled with the increasing size of Americans, could have negative impacts on both evacuation times and on the health of passengers.
In a prepared statement, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who penned the legislation, called the findings of the FAA's evacuation study team a "foregone conclusion the airline industry dictated."
The flying public cannot rely on the results of this study nor should seat sizes be based solely on the study's results," Cohen said. "I look forward to participating in the FAA's forthcoming public comment period and hope the input is taken seriously before the FAA makes its final determination on minimum seat dimensions that are necessary to ensure passenger safety."
The trade group Airlines for America (A4A) said that safety is the top priority of U.S. airlines.
"The FAA is the global gold standard for aviation safety and we appreciate their comprehensive review of existing aircraft standards, which affirmed the highest level of safety onboard our nation's commercial airlines," A4A said in a prepared statement.
In the official report on the evacuation tests, authors from the FAA's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute said that once the space between aircraft rows drops below 28 inches it begins to have a detrimental effect on evacuations for a higher percentage of Americans. Currently, 28 inches between rows is the tightest configuration found on commercial U.S. airlines.
The authors also noted that the general U.S. population is getting larger and heavier. They suggested that the interplay between aircraft interior configurations and the size of flyers be evaluated on an ongoing basis.