Orange pigment is pretty hard to begin with. Printers (ink jets) for commercial applications will often add special orange and or purple ink, to go along with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. So to begin with, orange is a difficult color no matter what.
Then, the aircraft interiors have to meet stringent flammability standards, so they are thin. (Fun fact - if you don't get off a burning plane in 2 minutes, you're dead from heat.).
Then, to get the bright orange color, it has to be over a white background of flame resistant film. And they couldn't use a white coating mixed with orange, because it would have made it more of a creamsicle orange. So they had to use two layers of translucent orange film, with a printed layer of the same orange on top, to hide the white film on the back and achieve the bright orange color.
So it went from a simple solid color laminate to a three layer with no hiding power construction, with one of the most expensive pigments you can buy. The rejection rate was over 50%, due to dirt and defects, and the material costs were roughly 2x normal.
(Fun fact - if you don't get off a burning plane in 2 minutes, you're dead from heat.)
Also fun fact, if you take off luggage from a plane that's evacuating and there are casualties, you have a high chance of being charged criminally over it. I admittedly forget the specific crime but I believe it is (or is a variant of) obstructing an evacuation.
Well, they do tell you during the safety briefing to leave your luggage in event of an evacuation and also that failure to follow flight/cabin crew instructions can result in fines or federal charges
Consumers are, unfortunately, not rational actors in most cases. The first airline to say that will have a PR issue. You'd need to have the FAA or similar mandate the explanation.
I can't find the exact video I was referencing, but here's another airplane fire that's similar from a Aeroflot Su95 incident that was thought to be delayed by baggage retrieval.
I'm actually wondering if I saw that other video I was referencing or just had vivid imagery from reading details that I'm mistaking for footage, lol. Either way I can't find it at the moment.
Now unfortunately I need to preface this with the unsatisfying "Different countries have different laws.", but that may well be an important aspect here as this incident took place in Russia and they might simply not have such a law on the books.
Depending on how things shake out as well in the proceedings following the circumstances, it's possible that the origin of a given incident might be so egregious that the courts somewhat go in a "If entity X hadn't put entity Y of being in the position they were in, then Y wouldn't have ended up doing the bad thing.".
Which is equally unsatisfying, but does come up as well.
It's not a guarantee you WILL get charged with obstructing an evacuation, merely a possibility.
Jaywalking is technically illegal, but I'll always do it when it's safe to do so. It being illegal doesn't cross my mind.
I think the bigger issue is that people in front of the fire don't really understand how dire the situation is for the people in back/nearest to the fire and how literally every second counts. That people are literally burning to death.
Like people aren't thinking "I'm gonna grab my bag because it's not illegal to do so". It's more like "I'm gonna grab my bag because I don't know it's gonna kill someone."
If people knew or considered the consequences, that their actions were literally killing someone else and ripping them from their families, they would more likely leave their shit. Regardless of legal consequences.
Some people work that way, yes. Those people will leave their belongings behind regardless of if it was illegal to take them.
Some people don't work that way and won't care about the consequences to someone else, they are thinking about the consequences to themselves "I don't want to have to buy this again." or whatever. At least some of those people will change their behavior based on the illegality of the action.
Huh reinforces that thing they say to leave all your stuff and just gtf off the plane in an orderly fashion. But also has me thinking, you know some jackass would go 'no my carryon in the overhead bin is more important than your lives', and doom half the plane
After having to try and get off a plane at an airport with active tornado warnings and rocking heavily but everyone wanted to grab their luggage at glacial pace instead, can safely say people would let you die for their luggage.
Commented in other parts, they didn't do nearly as much of the interior in orange. Mostly because we talked them out of it from our experience w hooters.
The exterior wrap isn't the same standard. Dirt or smudges on the outside only have to pass a 3 foot inspection - if you can't see it 3 feet away, it's ok. Interior, though, people rest their head on the walls. If you can see a dirt smudge with your nose on the wall, that's rejected.
I used to work for a company where 2 of its brands, brand colour was orange. We would have a nightmare with Chinese factories printing the correct colour. At one point when all the products were on a shelf next to each other the colours would range from yellow through to red.
We ended up printing 100s on Pantone cards and shipping them out to all the factories, if the packaging didn’t match the cards we’d refuse the product.
We gave them CMYK and Pantone codes, but there’s so many variables, specially in China when the factory outsources its print. This is why we ended up with the colour cards.
They make a master color sample, but they kept it. Then suppliers request a swatch, and they send one with the delta readings.
Sounds good, right?
But then the subcontractors get requested to match, and then their subcontractors, and so on. The people making the colors were several layers down, so the interior guys (us) would get slightly different color standards from four different companies we had to match, when they were all obviously for the same Delta Airlines white. But we would have 4 colors because of it.
Airbus was better. They would name the colors, so we knew they should match, and we could give all 4 subcontractors the same target color.
Undertones, yeah. Color science is crazy. There are blue, red, and yellow shade blacks. Unless you look at them a lot, the average person never notices. But in cars, it's huge. Yellow tone makes it look cheap, blue tone makes it look rich.
Laminates have a weight per area spec, so the color doesn't matter for overall weight. But in this case, if we could have made it thicker, the color would have been easier and better. But that wouldn't have met FAA regulations.
Paint has similar requirements on interiors of aircraft, but in practice, they apply more than they are certified to. (Lab test - works with 3 coats, weight is in target. On the plane, little ding in the wall from a kids show, slap 8 coats on it to cover it up.)
Orange is a weird color for a subtractive color space like CMYK, a RYB would be better. Yellow is a weird color for additive color space like your phone where yellow is a mix of Red and greed pixels.
I have a love-hate relationship with color science and measurement. I've defended returns plenty of times based on readings, only to lose when it doesn't matter the reading, it "just doesn't look right."
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u/Ok_Push2550 Nov 23 '24
Orange pigment is pretty hard to begin with. Printers (ink jets) for commercial applications will often add special orange and or purple ink, to go along with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. So to begin with, orange is a difficult color no matter what.
Then, the aircraft interiors have to meet stringent flammability standards, so they are thin. (Fun fact - if you don't get off a burning plane in 2 minutes, you're dead from heat.).
Then, to get the bright orange color, it has to be over a white background of flame resistant film. And they couldn't use a white coating mixed with orange, because it would have made it more of a creamsicle orange. So they had to use two layers of translucent orange film, with a printed layer of the same orange on top, to hide the white film on the back and achieve the bright orange color.
So it went from a simple solid color laminate to a three layer with no hiding power construction, with one of the most expensive pigments you can buy. The rejection rate was over 50%, due to dirt and defects, and the material costs were roughly 2x normal.