§ 29.783 - Doors.

§ 29.783 Doors.

(a) Each closed cabin must have at least one adequate and easily accessible external door.

(b) Each external door must be located, and appropriate operating procedures must be established, to ensure that persons using the door will not be endangered by the rotors, propellers, engine intakes, and exhausts when the operating procedures are used.

(c) There must be means for locking crew and external passenger doors and for preventing their opening in flight inadvertently or as a result of mechanical failure. It must be possible to open external doors from inside and outside the cabin with the rotorcraft on the ground even though persons may be crowded against the door on the inside of the rotorcraft. The means of opening must be simple and obvious and so arranged and marked that it can be readily located and operated.

(d) There must be reasonable provisions to prevent the jamming of any external doors in a minor crash as a result of fuselage deformation under the following ultimate inertial forces except for cargo or service doors not suitable for use as an exit in an emergency:

(1) Upward - 1.5g.

(2) Forward - 4.0g.

(3) Sideward - 2.0g.

(4) Downward - 4.0g.

(e) There must be means for direct visual inspection of the locking mechanism by crewmembers to determine whether the external doors (including passenger, crew, service, and cargo doors) are fully locked. There must be visual means to signal to appropriate crewmembers when normally used external doors are closed and fully locked.

(f) For outward opening external doors usable for entrance or egress, there must be an auxiliary safety latching device to prevent the door from opening when the primary latching mechanism fails. If the door does not meet the requirements of paragraph (c) of this section with this device in place, suitable operating procedures must be established to prevent the use of the device during takeoff and landing.

(g) If an integral stair is installed in a passenger entry door that is qualified as a passenger emergency exit, the stair must be designed so that under the following conditions the effectiveness of passenger emergency egress will not be impaired:

(1) The door, integral stair, and operating mechanism have been subjected to the inertial forces specified in paragraph (d) of this section, acting separately relative to the surrounding structure.

(2) The rotorcraft is in the normal ground attitude and in each of the attitudes corresponding to collapse of one or more legs, or primary members, as applicable, of the landing gear.

(h) Nonjettisonable doors used as ditching emergency exits must have means to enable them to be secured in the open position and remain secure for emergency egress in sea state conditions prescribed for ditching.

[Doc. No. 5084, 29 FR 16150, Dec. 3, 1964, as amended by Amdt. 29-20, 45 FR 60178, Sept. 11, 1980; Amdt. 29-29, 54 FR 47320, Nov. 13, 1989; Amdt. 27-26, 55 FR 8003, Mar. 6, 1990; Amdt. 29-31, 55 FR 38966, Sept. 21, 1990]