Life Preservers: Concepts, Progress, and Challenges

Objective: This paper aims to provide an overview of concepts, progress, and challenges of life preservers, which may promote the importance of life preservers, and present several urgent issues on life preservers.
Background: Although life preservers are required on an airplane in some overwater operations by the regulations of many countries, some airlines and many passengers have ignored life preservers.
Method: Different requirements for life preservers are presented and compared. Then the progress on life preservers is analyzed. Based on these analyses, two problems of existing life preservers are summarized, and corresponding challenges are also proposed.
Results: The difficulty of donning life preservers has been repeatedly proved through some major attempts to solve the problem. Furthermore, existing life preservers may make the passengers at risk of flight over cold water due to lack of thermal protection.
Conclusion: Life preservers play a vital role in ensuring passenger safety in awater-related accident, but several urgent issues must be addressed on further improvement of life preservers.