RESEARCH ON ESTABLISHING PERFORMANCE BASED REGULATION FOR THE EMERGENCY EVACUATION SYSTEM OF COMMERCIAL TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT

Emergency evacuation is of considerable significance for reducing the casualty rate after an accident. The individual airworthiness authorities have made regulations on the design requirements of the emergency evacuation system. The current rules are mostly prescriptive content based on industrial technical standards, which guarantees a high level of safety. However, the efficiency and flexibility of prescriptive regulation may be limited due to industrial development. Therefore, a new method to manage safety is needed to better adapt to industrial development and ensure a higher level of safety and efficiency. Firstly, this paper analyzed the main limitations of current prescriptive regulations. It is found that prescriptive regulations are lack of adaptability to emergence issues, innovative technologies, novel design features, and different operation needs. Performance based regulations focusing on safety goals instead of technical requirement is able to provide flexibility to the developing aviation industry in its complexity and new technologies of the emergency evacuation system. Therefore, a scheme to establish performance based regulations is proposed based on the idea of safety risk management. The core of the scheme is to determine appropriate safety performance indicators through analysis of simulation, experiment, and historical data to represent the level of safety of the system. This scheme for establishing safety performance based regulation for emergency evacuation system is aiming to improve safety and certification efficiency through improved airworthiness regulation.