Originally Posted by
Wayside
For normal operations, overwing exits will always be armed as they aren't opened unless its an emergency. Maintenance will deactivate the exits before opening them if they are opened for non-emergency reasons.
Which was what I thought may have happened, but then upon rereading the story this: "and then went to the back of the plane" - this makes me think he was using one of the rear galley doors. The story further separates the actions of opening the door and deploying the slide: "as other passengers were boarding,
opened the emergency exit door, deployed the emergency slide and then went down it" - and the story does so with a comma. It's arguably semantics, but my reading is that he went to the back, opened the
disarmed door, and pulled the slide release mechanism to deploy the slide and leave (in lieu of him just jumping out).