Originally Posted by
supine
Those two statements are contradictory.
"taking 10-18 minutes to make a decision" is not true.
From the timestamped video we know that it was only 5-6 minutes after the plane came to a stop.
The person filming was seated behind the wing and was out of the aircraft around 7 minutes after the plane came to a stop.
Anyone behind the camera person that followed would have been out about 8 minutes after the plane came to a stop.
The 18 minutes is the very least person to leave, the captain who has done one final sweep to ensure everyone is out.
The time stamp starts shortly after the impact, so the exit is about 7 minutes after the impact. It is a bit tricky to see in the video when exactly the plane comes to a halt. The video says about 38 seconds in, initially I thought it was around the two minute mark, as I wrote above, but I after watching the video a few times again I would say the plane is completely stopped somewhere around 1 minute mark.
The video is filmed at a point slightly behind door L3, and they escape at door L1 at the 07:08 time stamp, starting to move forward at 6:28. If we take the video indication of 38 seconds as the time the plane stopped, door L1 was opened with time for the evacuation to reach L3 5:50 after the plane stopped and exited at 6:30 after the plane stopped, having had to run past two unusable exits.. So the decision making is in the 3-4 minute range. Which between confirming the engines are shut down and assessing the location of flames and wind blowing the flames is probably not too unreasonable.
As was asked by someone else, what is the point of the 90 second test and rule. That is test that you can evacuate in 90 seconds from the evacuation is started, not including the time you take to assess where it is safe to use the exits. Normally the 90 second test is with half the exits in use, here it was less than half, so it could be excused as to why it takes more time than 90 seconds.