As travelers we have heard the phrase hundreds of times, Disarm Doors and cross check?

To most people it just induces a massive sigh of relief that the flight is over, the aircraft has parked and it is just about time to disembark.  But what does it actually mean?

Doors on the planes that we fly on are equipped with emergency slides. When the doors are armed, the emergency slide immediately deploys as the door is opened. When the door is disarmed, there is still the possibility to deploy the emergency slide but this needs to be done manually.

Once the plane has parked, it is obviously in nobody’s interest to have the emergency slides deploy for no reason. This will  no doubt putt the plane out of service and create all sorts of other havoc with the slides flying into jetways or buildings.

It is therefore essential that all the doors on the plane are disarmed.

This will therefore lead to the next part of the instruction which says “cross-check”. Cross check is not a term that is specific to aircraft. It simply means that one person should check the work of somebody else.

Being that it is so imperative to ensure that the doors have been disarmed, the pilot or head flight attendant will instruct all attendants to check the work of others to ensure that the disarming has actually been done.

There is a lot of other jargon that comes along in the flight industry. Flyers no longer have to be mystified by the words, arm all doors and cross-check.

The post What does disarm doors and cross check mean? appeared first on ElJet's Private Aviation Blog.