Originally Posted by LHR/MEL/Europe FF
As the programme is not airing down here as far as I'm aware, could someone please briefly exaplian what the issue was with the faulty slide?
I know for B737-200s the slide is engaged manually by clipping the girt-bar into a slot at the door sill. I'm not sure that there is any other indicator aside from the manual inspection. Was the aircraft in question a 737-800 and if so, is there a secondary indicator to show that the door is armed?
As far as I could understand from the conversation, it was an indicator showing the pressure inside the compressed gas/air bottle that discharges to inflate the slide when it's triggered. The indicator was showing that the pressure was low, hence a concern that if the slide had been needed it might not have inflated correctly and might not have been usable.
The weakness about this complaint was that neither of the cabin crew concerned knew what the number one had done with the report. It would have been a much more cogent complaint if the reporter had gone to the captain personally and told him that the slide bottle looked like it was under pressure, and the captain had then done nothing.
Originally Posted by irmster
Did 2 Ryanair returns last year - Jerez and Salzburg. Both flights were on-time, without incident and cheap. I'd rather base my decisions on experience rather than a heavily edited tv prog.
Your experience tells you nothing about what goes on underneath the facade presented to the passengers. It's those things that could make the difference between acceptable levels of safety and unacceptable levels of risk. The important things are almost never seen by the passengers during normal operations. But if you want to shut your eyes to the existence of potential problems when their existence is revealed, you're entirely free to do so.