What's the best cabin layout for aircraft evacuation?

The Federal Aviation Administration requires aircraft evacuation within 90 seconds, but a new paper in AIP Advances found simulated scenarios show evacuation times significantly exceed that threshold, particularly when elderly passengers requiring assistance are factored in. The study builds on 2011 research by Jason Steffen, now a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who developed an optimized boarding method using the traveling salesman problem algorithm. Steffen's "wave" boarding approach, which prioritizes parallel seating over traditional back-to-front strategies, proved nearly twice as fast in field tests and 20–30 percent faster than random boarding. The key finding: maximizing simultaneous seating reduces bottlenecks in cabin aisles. The research suggests current FAA evacuation standards may need recalibration to account for real-world passenger demographics and cabin layout constraints.