Trenchard Vest has introduced a new three seal concept, making airline life vests harder to tamper with while speeding up check times for cabin crew.

Trenchard Vest Technical Sales Manager, Mike Mullenger, explained how the development of the product has moved on following tighter safety regulations introduced in the wake of /11. He said:

“Before 9/11 there was no real need to secure the life vest pouches, but after that event, obviously security levels increased and the United States Transport Security Administration put out a mandate to say all life vest pouches under economy seats should be sealed.”

 “The airlines themselves came back to us to and said, ‘Could we find a way of sealing this?’, so we designed the pouch to take tamper evident seals to secure it and stop any prohibited items being inserted.”

RFID tags reduce search times

Mullenger said the new design was simpler to seal and made the front closure less vulnerable to tampering by using three different seal types to secure the pouch. It also made the task of cabin inspections quicker and more accurate through use of a hand-held scanner

He added: “One hundred per cent of the pouches on every initial flight into the United States have to be searched and a percentage of pouches thereafter, so introducing the seal brings down that search time for the airline because you just have to visually inspect the seal, as opposed to opening the pouch, taking the life vest out and repacking it.”

“Airlines are all interested in making their operations leaner, so this is just one aspect of that. It reduces the turn around time. It makes the reporting more efficient as well, because you can take out a lot of human error if you introduce RFID. Everything is electronic and that much faster. You simply walk through the aisle of the aircraft with a handheld scanner looking for the responses from the RFID tags and it brings the search times right down.”

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