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Blended Wing Body (BWB) aircraft with around 1000 passengers\ud and crew are being proposed by aircraft manufacturers. This type of aircraft configuration is radically different from conventional tube type passenger aircraft and so it is essential to explore issues related to both fire and evacuation for these configurations. Due to both the large size and the unusual nature of the cabin layouts, computer simulation provides the ideal method to explore these issues. In this paper we describe the application of both fire and evacuation simulation to BWB cabin configurations. The validity of the computer evacaution simulations is\ud also explored through full-scale evacuation experiments.

This paper describes research that was carried-out under the EU FP7 research project SAFEGUARD and presents passenger response time data generated from five full-scale semi-unannounced assembly trials at sea. The data-sets were generated from three different types of passenger ships, a RO-PAX ferry without cabins (RP1), a cruise ship (CS) and a RO-PAX ferry with cabins (RP2). In total, response times from 2366 people were collected making it the largest response time data-set ever collected – on land or sea. The analysis methodology used to extract the response time data and the resultant response time distributions (RTD) is presented. A number of key findings from the data analysis are presented along with three recommendations to modify the IMO guidelines governing ship evacuation analysis, namely; (a) it is inappropriate to use the same RTD for cruise ships and RO-PAX vessels; (b) a new Day Case RTD is suggested for RO-PAX vessels and (c) new Day and Night RTDs are suggested for cruise ships.