A study by the University of Calgary in Canada has found that the increasing number of elderly passengers in planes poses new challenges in emergency situations. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires aircraft to evacuate within 90 seconds in an emergency, but this has increased as the average age of the population increases. The researchers simulated 27 evacuation scenarios on an Airbus A320, one of the most common narrow-body aircraft in the world. They compared three cabin layouts with three different ratios of passengers over age 60 and three different distributions of those passengers. The fastest evacuation time was 141 seconds for all passengers to reach the ground, much longer than current FAA mandates. The study's findings were published in AIP Advances, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Institute of Physics. The authors noted that elderly passengers' mobility, cognitive limitations, impaired vision or hearing, limited manual dexterity, and a higher susceptibility to panic or physical injury during high-stress situations.