The ditch of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River exposed several serious usability/human factors problems with the Airbus A320 aircraft. According to Michael Wilson and Russ Buettner’s account in the New York Times, a man named Josh wasn’t the first passenger to reach the cabin door and attempt to open it. “‘Someone tried to pull the door in,’ another passenger recalled, ‘and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to throw it out.’ He twisted it and threw it out.’” The aircraft’s cabin door lacked an appropriate affordance; a clue to whether the door opened in or out and how to operate it.
That would be bad enough, but of course it wasn’t. Wilson and Buettner report that three men formed a human chain out the aircraft cabin door to right a life raft attached to the plane that deployed upside down. Oops. “Mr. Wentzell turned and found another passenger, Carl Bazarian, an investment banker from Florida who, at 62, was twice his age. Mr. Wentzell grabbed the wrist of Mr. Bazarian, who grabbed a third man who held onto the plane. Mr. Wentzell then leaned out to flip the raft.”
Not only did the life raft deploy upside down, but there were not enough life rafts for all the passengers. “On another wing, Craig Black, a 46-year-old auditor, stood at the tip and thought of the Titanic, as in, he said, ‘There wouldn’t have been enough rafts for everyone.’”
Oh, but that’s not all. If the rear exit doors of the airplane weren’t locked, the plane would have sunk much faster and there would almost certainly have been casualties. “If that door opened,” the Times reporters quote Wentzell as saying, “everything would go under.”
Wilson and Buettner report yet another human factors failure: “Don Norton, 35, one of three passengers who work at LendingTree.com, a Charlotte-based financial services company, had opened one of the emergency exits. Then he had to figure out what to do with the hatch, finally tossing it into the river.”
Let’s see, that’s at least three potentially fatal human factor design flaws with the Airbus A320. In one incident.
But that’s not the real story. The real story is that all 155 souls on that airplane survived. The aircraft, after all, fell from a height of 2,800 feet—more than a half mile—into the Hudson River. New York Governor David Paterson refers to it as the “miracle on the Hudson,” but the media seems to be especially slow to recognize that fact. Why is that?
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