G-VROM slide deployment at MAN this morning

According to A.Net is would appear one of the upper deck evacuation slides on G-VROM was deployed in error at MAN this morning...
https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtop ... &t=1403357

The aircraft departed about 90mins late as the VS75 to Orlando, so there was clearly a replacement evacuation slide in one of the maintanance stores at MAN.

[mitchja]

Whoops!!! Normally its a catering truck that opens a door from the outside and sets off an armed slide. No reason to open the upper deck doors though?

I believe a 744 can actually fly without 2 fully working upper deck doors / slides as the internal stairs can be used instead should the need arise to evacuate.

I actually also vaguely remember being on a VS 744 flight a good while ago and hearing an announcement for a similar issue being made during the safety demo as well.

I thought - but am happy to be proved wrong - that if a 744 door was opened from the outside then the slide will not deploy even if the door is armed - only an opening from inside activates the slide.

It's on smaller aircraft where the slide has to be physically un-armed (often by removing the girt-bar) and these aircraft normally have a day-glo orange tag to snap in place accross the door window to indicate an armed door to ground crew.

I would also have thought that a 744 cannot fly with both upper deck doors defective as there is no means of escape for the upper deck if, say, there is a fire on the internal stairs / they become blocked in some other way. If both upper deck doors were defective I'd expect the upper deck just to be out of action for the flight passenger-wise.

Based on a tweet that was a customer on VS75 moaning their bubble seats had been moved downstairs I think it just ran without the Upper Deck being used for Pax.

[Darren Wheeler]

If one of the upper deck slides is inop, the deck can be used but is limited to just 24 passengers. Any above that will either have to move downstairs or be offloaded. If both are inop then the deck is fully closed. Flight deck have their own escape method.