Authors: Heather Poole
“Why?” asked a classmate who had dared not to wear the color my airline had recommended that year, Clinique red. Instead she wore one that looked a lot like, well, no shade at all, a glossy nude. I liked it. But I knew better than to wear it.
“So passengers can read your lips during an emergency,” said an instructor, matter-of-factly. None of us knew if he was serious.
The following day, Glossy Nude didn’t show up for class. We weren’t surprised by her sudden departure. We had no idea if she had quit or if she’d been kicked out. Most of us didn’t even think twice about it. Well, except for Georgia, who came to the conclusion that women’s lib had gotten the best of Glossy Nude. She made a group of us promise not to let it happen to us. I agreed, even if I disagreed about the unflattering shade of red that had been chosen for my pale skin.
Lipstick turned out to be the least of my worries. First off, living with my roommate was a challenge on its own. On top of all our obvious differences, I quickly discovered that Linda constantly apologized for everything. And I mean everything.
“Sorry,” she’d whisper into the dark when the muffled buzz of her alarm clock beeped under the scratchy sheets. Class wouldn’t start for another three hours, yet Linda was up and at ’em anyway, apologizing again for throwing back the covers too loudly. After hopping out of bed, she’d tiptoe across the worn carpet. Once inside the bathroom she’d shut the door, and then, and only then, would she dare flip on the florescent light, so as not to bother me—her words, not mine. Which were always followed by “sorry,” whenever I told her not to worry about it.
Before my own alarm could jolt me out of bed, Linda would be long gone, already seated at a long table in the cafeteria with two other “mature” women from our class. They’d endlessly quiz each other over weak coffee, dry toast, and runny eggs, courtesy of the airline. Me, I rarely ate breakfast. There wasn’t enough time to eat. Okay, the truth is, I couldn’t drag myself out of bed early enough for breakfast. When it came to sleep, every second counted. God forbid any of us dozed off in class during a long, drawn-out monotone lecture over the correct way to organize a beverage cart or the importance of saying hello and good-bye to passengers using a different greeting each time. It became a game of who could go the longest without repeating. Hello, good morning, how are you, welcome aboard, nice to have you, thanks for joining us, good to see you, morning, hi, good-bye, see ya later, thanks for flying with us, looking forward to seeing you again, have a good evening, see you next time, bye-bye, good night. Get caught with your eyes closed during any of this, and you’d get sent packing. Thank God for the vending machine stocked full of Mountain Dew. I guzzled gallons of the stuff in order to stay awake.
Falling asleep in class wasn’t the only way to obtain walking papers. Being late resulted in the same thing. This is why flight attendants have perfected the art of power walking. If for whatever reason we weren’t in our seats come class time, no matter how good the excuse, we were instructed to leave our training manuals beside the locked classroom door and immediately return to wherever we’d originally come from. None of us wanted to go back home. We were all here to fly away! But because the airplane doesn’t wait, neither would our instructors, who always smiled as they explained the dire consequences. I took notes. The way they treated us was an art form all to itself, and I figured the ability to be so politely condescending would come in handy at 30,000 feet. Or maybe it was 35,000 feet? I didn’t know for sure yet, but it wouldn’t be long before we’d all learn that cruising altitude depends on several factors, including weight of the aircraft, fuel, humidity, air temperature, winds, turbulence, and air traffic.
Given how crazy everything else at training seemed to be, I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised when our food service procedure instructor turned to the chalkboard and started drawing out football plays. Well, it looked that way at first! Dumbfounded, we just sat in our seats staring at the board as he drew lines to represent aisles, boxes for carts, and arrows to show movement. And every plane seemed to have at least two different “plays” for us to memorize.
The way in which we were instructed to serve passengers depended first on the airplane. There are “two-class” and “three-class” flights, as well as three different services. A two-class flight has a first class and coach cabin. (Imagine two big boxes with several smaller boxes inside.) A three-class flight includes business class, but here’s where it gets confusing. A three-class flight might only provide a two-class service if the business-class seats have been sold as coach seats. It happens. (Two sets of three small boxes lined up side by side with six arrows pointing forward
and
back.) First class isn’t created equal, either. What a lot of passengers don’t realize is on most two-class flights, passengers get a business-class service in what is considered the first-class cabin. And while first-class service on a long-haul, three-class flight is exceptional, it often bears no resemblance, other than in name, to its counterpart on a two-class flight to Oklahoma City where the flying time is short and the ticket prices are cheap. (Five small boxes inside one big box. No arrows.)
Many smaller airlines only fly one type of aircraft, so their training, I imagine, is fairly simple. At my airline we work on all different kinds of airplanes, so we had to be trained on each one of them: F100, S80, 727, 757, 767, MD11, DC10, A300. We took on a new airplane every week. Each aircraft type is a completely different configuration in terms of number of passengers, lavatories, and galleys; the use and location of emergency and medical equipment; the operation of window and door exits; and how to command an evacuation. Over time an airline might retire its aging fleet and replace one type of aircraft with something newer. Flight attendants will then have to fly back to the academy on a day off to be trained. If flight attendants don’t get qualified on a particular aircraft, they are not allowed to work it. And because they’re unable to operate and command an evacuation if necessary, they are not considered “jump-seat qualified,” which means they will not be allowed to take a jump seat on a flight that’s full when they’re trying to use their travel passes to go on vacation or get to work.
Each aircraft galley is completely different when it comes to size and storage, so the type of plane affects the service. The 737 first-class galley is so small that a can of soda can’t stand up on the counter because an oven is located right over it. Some flight attendants might be inclined to pull out a cart, park it in front of the first-class entry door, and use the top as extra counter space. We didn’t learn this technique in training because the airline didn’t want us to block an exit, even in flight when it’s physically impossible to open the door. I don’t get it, either. The DC10 has the exact opposite problem. The airplane has a monster galley that first class, business, and coach all share. Carts are stored underneath the galley, so a flight attendant has to take a one-person elevator down to where the carts are kept and to spend the remainder of the flight sending up the correct cart at the appropriate time. You can imagine how popular this assignment is with new hires. Antisocial senior flight attendants love it.
The easiest way for a flight attendant to know which service to provide is to open up all the food carts and take a peek inside. A vegetable crudité after takeoff or salad toppings that include something other than a sprinkle of parmesan cheese and a choice of dressing is a sign it’s a true first-class service. But during training, when we finally got to practice what we’d learned on a mocked-up section of an airplane galley, the cart was empty! There was no way to guess the service when no food or beverage was allowed on the trainer. With only a single empty cart, an empty coffee pot (to serve both decaf and regular coffee, as well as tea), an insert of empty soda cans, and half a stack of plastic and Styrofoam cups to work with, I placed a real napkin down on a real tray table and asked a couple of classmates with opened flight manuals resting in their laps if they’d like something to drink. The instructors scribbled notes down on their clipboards as we made small talk while I served a pretend vodka tonic with a twist of pretend lime. Nobody complained about the service, or even the food! In our minds it tasted delicious.
On long-haul and international flights the service in the premium cabins is elaborate. There are predeparture drinks, appetizers, hot towels, salads, entrees, an assortment of breads and wines, desserts, and more. In first class, we were taught to use a three-tiered cart for amenities such as magazines and newspapers, as well as for salad and dessert delivery. Imagine my surprise to learn that our tiny drink carts at Sun Jet were really three-tiered dessert carts at other airlines. No wonder it had taken forever to do a service! It turned out that at a normal airline, the dainty silver cart was supposed to be accompanied with the “horse shoe” method for serving appetizers and desserts to first-class passengers. This meant we served one side of the first-class cabin, pulled the cart up, and then served the other side. Drinks and entrees were to be hand-delivered. In business class, drinks and entrees were also hand-delivered, while salads and desserts were to be served from a regular cart, not the three-tiered cart.
In coach, regular carts were used for everything. On most flights in coach, we were taught to move the carts forward-aft (front to back), but sometimes an aft-forward service worked best. That is until the aft-forward service was cut out altogether a year or two later—in coach. In first and business classes it still remains. The direction of the service depends on the flight number (even or odd) and the direction we’re flying (north-south or east-west). On shorter flights using larger aircraft, we learned to converge two carts if we wanted to finish the service. One cart would work aft-forward while the other worked forward-aft until they met in the middle in order to make the service quicker. (After 9/11 we stopped doing this, because having enough flight attendants on board to work two carts simultaneously in coach became so rare.) Then there were the “wide-body” (two-aisle) versus “narrow-body” (single-aisle) flights. On the wide-bodies—767s, MD11s, DC10s, and A300s—the instructors pounded into our brains that we must keep the carts as close together across the aisle from each other as possible. Not always an easy task to accomplish when some crew members were faster at serving than others.
Successfully passing a test on one aircraft didn’t mean we had a clue what to do on another. Take, for instance, the emergency exits. There are single slides, double slides, tail cones, and wings. Even on a single aircraft the emergency doors and windows operate differently. The commands one classmate had to yell while at a window exit were completely different from the ones I yelled while at a door on the same plane. We were tested on a mocked-up section of a plane that looked exactly like it did in real life—except that the first-class entry doors were about eight rows from the window exits, which were about ten rows from the rear exit doors. This became even more confusing and difficult because there were always at least three of us being tested on evacuation drills at the same time, one of us positioned at each exit. We had to remain focused. The best way to do it was to outscream one another. To add to the stress, our instructors would throw in things like a fire or an exit door that wouldn’t open or a slide that wouldn’t inflate or a passenger who was too afraid to jump. Then we’d have to break into a whole new set of commands and procedures. We could score an A, B, C, or D on the computer tests that covered medical, safety, or security, but when it came to an evacuation, it was pretty much pass or fail. If we looked out an exit window in the wrong direction to make sure our pretend slide had indeed inflated, buh-bye! If we pointed to the back of the plane at the pretend engine and told passengers on the ground to run “that way,” the wrong way, adios! Forgetting to position ourselves between the jump seat and the fuselage wall while the slide inflates with air and a pretend frantic passenger eager to escape a smoke-filled cabin might push us out to our death. One wrong word, one slip of the tongue, one teeny-tiny mistake and we were immediately told to stop without an explanation. After three strikes, we were out for good.
Linda would get so worked up before her drills she’d start to feel ill. But medical training is the only thing that frightened the heck out of me. I’ll never forget the day our most laid-back instructor placed an infant doll on top of a table in front of the classroom and told us about the time a passenger rang her call light because her child was turning blue. Our instructor grabbed the naked plastic doll and checked for breathing. Resting its back on the length of her arm with her hand cradling the baby’s head, she then flipped the doll over, balancing it on her other arm that rested on her thigh and began banging it with the palm of her hand—
whop, whop, whop!
Then she flipped the baby back over and using two fingers pushed hard on its scratched and discolored chest three times. We watched in silence while she flipped and banged, flipped and pushed, a long blond ponytail flipping along with it, until whatever the baby was choking on came out. Our instructor cradled the doll in her arms and told us that while she may have saved the doll’s life, on her flight she hadn’t been successful. Another instructor took over when it looked like she might cry. After we each took turns practicing the Heimlich maneuver on an infant, we learned what to do on children, adults, and pregnant women. Next up was CPR. Dozens of lifelike dummies lined the floor. Our classroom resembled a horror movie, or even worse, a morgue. With the heel of my hand I pushed as hard as I could on a plastic chest that barely moved and counted to sixty, my partner giving two breaths, for what seemed like hours.
It didn’t matter how many times I went over the conscious and breathing versus unconscious and not breathing checklist, I just couldn’t seem to grasp it. So I organized a study group with other classmates who were having trouble. We met after dinner in a hallway to role-play medical scenarios. Georgia played the unconscious woman. A purple hair scrunchie wrapped around her wrist represented a medical bracelet. She had diabetes. Linda became a nurse after someone suggested we page for a doctor—but we came to find out Linda wasn’t really a medical professional, because when we asked to see her credentials she didn’t have any. Sneaky! While Joseph ran to get oxygen and the medical kit, Linda, who had transformed back into a flight attendant, called the cockpit to report what was going on. I could handle nosebleeds, air sickness, diabetic comas, and seizures, but the thought of losing a passenger freaked me out. Just dragging Georgia’s lifeless body over an armrest and into the aisle for CPR seemed daunting. And would I really be physically capable of dragging a grown man by the ankles to an emergency door to get him down a slide in the event of an evacuation? I’d take faulty hydraulics or an engine fire over a medical scenario any day.