Aircraft Evacuation Slide

An aircraft evacuation slide is an inflatable slide built into a commercial aircraft's doors so that passengers and crew can leave the aircraft quickly in an emergency, and regulators require one at any exit whose sill sits more than six feet, about 1.8 meters, above the ground. The slide is packed away inside the door structure in a compartment called the slide bustle, and on many modern aircraft it deploys automatically, inflating within seconds using an inert, non explosive gas system, whenever a door is opened while armed for departure or arrival. The first aircraft evacuation slide was developed and produced by Air Cruisers, a company founded by James F. Boyle, with a patent submitted in 1954 and granted in 1956; a later refinement combining the slide with an inflatable raft is credited to Jack Grant, an operations safety superintendent at Qantas, in 1965. Aviation regulators such as the Federal Aviation Administration and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency require that an entire aircraft be capable of evacuating within ninety seconds using only half of its available exits, a standard evacuation slides exist to help meet.