When a flight attendant gets hired with an airline (or corporate
flight attendant job) they must undergo a tough training courses to
learn the ins and outs of Emergency Proced
ures. From what I understand,
most carriers have a 6-week training courses that teach the new-hire
about evacuations, medical situations, food preparations, and even learn
how the company wants their employee's to treat their customers.
When
training for a carrier, the new-hire will learn how to evacuate an
aircraft, learn where emergency equipment is, and understand how the
different types of aircraft work. After the initial training is
completed, then the flight attendants must do the Federal Aviation
Administration annual training to keep current on Emergency Procedures.
I've
heard that some flight attendants have gone through their entire career
without a single incident, while others seem to get the luck of the
draw and have every possible situation occur. Some situations could be
(but not limited too) heart attacks, choking, fainting, turbulence,
decompression, hypoxia, burns, fires, smoke, claustrophobia, fear of
flying, child birth, vomiting passengers...just to name a few things.
Either
way, every year a flight attendant has to be requalified on the
aircraft they work. Some airlines only have one aircraft, while others
have several different aircraft types. Having only one aircraft type
would be easy, but if you're lucky, you will get qualified on several
different aircraft configurations and will get utilized for different
trips.
Some flight attendants may never use their skills, but there are some w
ho
seem to be tested on their training almost on a daily basis. Throughout
the long training, the new-hire flight attendants must learn a manual
that is comprised of both Federal Aviation Regulations, and Company
Policy.
When I was first hired, we had to carry around two of these
manuals, one for the FAR/Company policies, the other was strictly to
know about the cooking and preparation times of meals. Now, we have
consolidated everything into one large manual. Still, this Flight
Attendant "Bible" can weigh close to 3lbs. (hopefully someday we'll be
able to access the data on an iPad!
Back to the recu
rrent
training, after flight attendants are qualified on the equipment their
airline has, they must re-qualify every year to maintain their
qualifications. One of the things that consistantly changes are the
requirements for CPR. This was always one of the nail biters for all
flight attendants because this was a pass or fail test. If you didn't
know what to do by heart, then you failed and had to go through more
training. What the FAA and companies realized, flight attendants work
together in real life situations, so now if you don't remember what to
do as a First Responder, you have other flight attendants (and
passengers) to help out.
Over the years, the American Red Cross
changed their procedures after many studies, and have found that what
the general public were doing, wasted valuable time to get the blood
flow to vital organs. So instead of checking to ensure the head was
tilted properly, and to see if the chest would rise with a couple of
full breaths, now they want you to jump right in (if the person is
unconscious and not breathing) to pump the chest. This simulates and
pushes air to the lungs and brain to hopefully keep the individual from
losing oxygen.
Besides learning CPR,
flight attendants have to learn how to open the emergency doors,
emergency window exits, and 'bark' commands to get the passengers out
quickly in the event of an evacuation. Many frequent passengers will
request to sit in the emergency window exit, however I know many of them
would balk at actually opening the exit when the time comes. Many of
them don't realize how heavy the window exit actually is, or know what
to do with the door once they open it up. Some of the smaller aircraft
require you to throw the window out onto the wing, while others require
you to lift the nearly 50lbs and place it onto the seats.
Once
the doors and windows are open, then you have to make sure the slides
(if there is one) inflate to make sure the passengers can evacuate
safely onto the ground. Sometimes the door may not open, so it's jammed
and the flight attendant then has to look for their secondary exit and
open that one, or redirect the passengers to any other exit.
Flight Attendants in the United States have strict government
regulations that they must follow. If they don't, they could be
personally fined a considerable amount. Some of these are to ensure that
passengers seat belts are buckled, over head bins are closed, nothing
placed against the bulkhead wall for taxi, take-off, landing, and the
one that is the worse....Electronic devices are turned off during
'critical' phases of the flight. (this is often when flight attendants
become those horrible vampires and snarl at the offending passenger)
I
could go into the long drawn out saga about electronics...but I wont.
Flight attendants have to follow the FCC/FAA rules, and they must follow
the rules they themselves must follow, or be subject to fines for not
doing it and could end up being suspended, or worse, fired for not
following the regulations.
You
do get some rogue flight attendants who seem to make their own rules,
however when it comes to violating an FAR, flight attendants sometimes
will bring out the fangs to ensure a passenger complies. Yes, there are
proper ways to ensure passengers comply, however when you have
passengers who simply ignore the requests many times, and think the
rules don't apply to them, it can really make for a long flight because
now the passenger has upset the flight attendant who simply is following
procedure.
Anyway, back to training...
for those flight attendants who fly international routes (that's flying
50 nautical miles from the mainland) they have to learn 'Ditching'
procedures and how to don life vests, and how to inflate rafts that are
either located in ceiling compartments, or special locations, then how
to get people out of the plane, down the slide/life rafts, and into the
rafts
.
This can sometimes be a challenge, but it is a requirement and believe
it or not, your flight attendant must retrain on this every single year
to maintain their qualification.
During initial training, there is
a day left to learn about appearance. We can joke about how ragged
those flight attendants look from the U.S., however at one time, they
went through a grooming class to learn how to wear their uniform, put on
their make-up, and how to tie a tie.
Most
foreign carriers still have strict guidelines, but it seems that the
U.S. airlines have really relaxed their policies and some don't seem to
care about how they look, or what their self image shows.
I try to
tell my crew that looking good often makes you feel better, and will
often show the passenger that you care, not only about yourself, but
about the airline you work for and you are Proud to wear the uniform.
Yet, I am often met with resistance especially when so many airlines
keep laying off flight attendants, making more stringent work rules for
the crews, maximizing duty days, and give them less than minimal
lay-over rest.
Either way, I still try to do my best and show that
I care about what I do, especially ensuring my passenger doesn't know
what kind of termoils my company is doing to it's employees.
With
all the hard work we must endure during training, and annual recurrent,
it's gratifying to know that when an emergency situation arises, we can
evacuate a plane full of passengers safely and efficiently, help a
choking passenger, know what to do in case of a heart attack, comfort
someone who fainted, battle a fire, or do our best to sooth someone who
is in the middle of a seizure
