Fly Girl Fly High

What is the training like?

It’s not all about serving passengers and seeing the world. People often forget or don’t know that we are trained to do more than just that, in fact customer service was the last thing that was taught to me in ground school.

Ground school was not as easy as I imagined it to be at first, but I did do a little research and found a documentary series called Flight Attendant School (link to episode at the bottom). It follows new flight attendants going through ground school at Frontier Airways. I found this documentary very interesting, and helpful, definitely not unlike my ground school.

Before we started our training, it was a requirement for us to have our senior first aid. We still had to go over Aviation Medicine in ground school, but it was a prerequisite to have previous first aid knowledge. In AvMed we learn about administering medical oxygen to defibrillating a heart 35,000 ft in the air.

We also got taught our evacuation drills. Did you know that you have to evacuate 100+ passengers in under 90 seconds? Evacuation drills aren’t as easy as they seem, when you are tested, they make up a scenario and you need to act it out as though it was real life, and get those commands the 100%.

We also was taught how to fight fires, and the procedure behind it. As well as decompressions, and what to do. They make you remember small things like; what cabin altitude pressure does the oxygen masks drop down? How long does the oxygen last for in one unit? What flight level is safe altitude for breathing normally? What are the commands for an explosive decompression? And so on…

Then there’s serving the pilots; how to enter the flight deck, how much liquid goes into their cups, ensuring both pilots aren’t eating the same food, and overall keeping them happy. Trust me, happy pilots = happy life!

We also learn our pre-flight checks. These checks are done before flight and have to be done upon return to the aircraft. These checks ensure the security of the aircraft and the serviceability of emergency equipment. We cannot take off if we are missing or unserviceability of emergency equipment.

We learn how to inflate a life raft, slide down the aircraft slide, crack open an emergency exit, and use the radio in the flight deck to make emergency calls incase of incapacitation.

Then there’s the customer service part. We learn first class service to economy. They even booked us on a 2 day course to study different types of wines so we can recommend different types to passengers depending on their meals. We have to be on the ball when looking after the unaccompanied minors, even though they can be a pain in the ass. As well as the disabled and the non english speaking. We also learn how to arrest a passenger!

At my airline, there were 10 exams to take during ground school mostly theory with a pass rate of 80%, and there’s follow up exams every 3 months, plus every time they change the manual, so you have to keep up with your studying.

There is a lot more that I have missed out in this post, but this is the general bulk of it. If you have anymore questions about the training, send me a message, I will return.

As promised http://youtu.be/zbpu3bJo-HI watch the whole series, it’s very informative.

Manhattan, New York