That must make night-time evacuations really hard.
Something I’ve been experiencing recently is, after landing, “please lower your window shades to help keep the airplane cool.” This is obviously in the warm-weather airports I often fly through–LAX, Burbank, Phoenix, Las Vegas. However it does seem like a recent thing to me, last 3-5 years. I assume it is a cost-saving measure for the airlines.
Night time is harder.
Evacuations pretty much only happen in on-airport landings. While airport runways aren’t brightly lit from overhead like a suburban street or parking lot, there’s still a lot of lights around. One of the reasons the cabin lights are turned down during night taxi-outs is to improve everyone’s eyes’ dark adaptation. There’s a bunch of difference between the interior at night with all window shades open and all window shades closed.
Besides all that, if it’s a really bad day at work there’ll be this nice cheery fire nearby giving all the light anyone could ask for.
IMO what’s mostly changed is folks’ expectations about how well air-conditioned airplanes should be. Older airplanes particularly have much weaker ground air conditioning than newer ones. So shades down make a massive difference in them.
None of them, even the newest, can really keep up with sitting in the sun in Phoenix or Vegas on a 100F+ degree day. So we try to get it as cold as possible before we start boarding again, knowing that between the Sun, the outside air temp, and each of the passengers putting out 60 to 100 continuous watts of heat it’s going to be too warm by liftoff an hourish after the first pax comes on board.
To be sure, management is after us to use low-cost ground-based air conditioning and electricity as much as possible and the airplane-fuel driven onboard air conditioning and electricity as little as possible. Generally with old airplanes the ground-based air conditioning is about equal to the aircraft’s capability and on later model airplanes the airplane’s is superior. And yes, the ground gear installed at PHX, LAS, MIA, etc. is more powerful than in SEA or MSP. <rant>When it’s working right.</rant>
The biggest limitation here is that when we park we switch to our on-board stuff then shut down the engines. After the jetbridge is in position the ground crew can hook up the ground electricity and air. But that takes one worker about a minute and about 5 minutes respectively, *if *they jump right on it when the jetbridge parks.
But they’re timed on how fast they get the first baggage cart delivered to the carousel. And the last one. So of course it’s easier for them to skip hooking up the umbilicals & just start unloading bags.
So now it’s 10 minutes after parking, we’re ready to leave and have another airplane to go get ready for the next flight. And still no umbilicals. So we leave the airplane running on internal power & air and another $50-$100 goes down the drain.
At various times in the past we’ve also had initiatives to have the crew go through the cabin after de-boarding and turn off the dozen or two reading lights that were inevitably left on. Of course that saves bulb life & hence those costs, but more importantly on the older airplanes it takes umpteen useless watts of heat out of the equation. Later model airplanes have a master on/off switch at the FA panel that will reset them all to “off, but available when the pax pushes the button.”
You misread the OP. It was Quick airplane question! Not Quick Airplane! question
I haven’t heard this recently, but not long after 9/11 the request was made so that the airport staff could be sure that nothing suspicious was going on in the plane.
You’re right, that’s a different title, altogether
And here I was expecting the thread to be about supersonic jets. You know, quick airplanes.
<sigh.>
<OK, fine. But just this once>
That’s a different title.