Development and Evaluation of an Onboard Aircraft Cabin Water Spray System for Postcrash Fire Protection

This paper outlines a program that could ultimately lead to design standards for an onboard aircraft cabin water spray system to suppress postcrash fires. A brief summary of the program and the status of current activities is presented. The latter includes full-scale effectiveness tests, a study of possible problems arising from the inadvertent (or intentional) discharge of the system, and computation of the potential benefits (lives saved) from the mandatory requirement of such a system. The bulk of the paper describes the results of full-scale tests under several postcrash fire scenarios to measure the increased survival rate when using a water spray system. It is shown that a water spray system may provide passengers 2 to 3 minutes of additional time to escape under certain postcrash fire scenarios.