Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Training Flight #1

This past Saturday was my first training flight. It was a turn to NY-LGA. We were on the ground in New York for all of 40 minutes. It was exciting to finally be up in the air putting everything we've been learning about in the classroom to use.

The real flight attendants on my flight have been with the company from the beginning. While they all had a lot of little tips to make the job easier/more efficient, the mantra of the flight seemed to be, "I know they taught you to do it this way, and do it that way for the test, but this is how we really do it up here." I was surprised how soon they started in with this, not knowing if I was the tattle tale type or not.

I was the safety information model on the leg out. I managed to keep up pretty well, but probably looked like a puppet with a broken string up there. Once we reached cruising altitude, I was in charge of passing out the snacks. It felt like this duty took forever, but when I got back to the galley and asked the flight attendant, he said snack service went faster than it usually did when he worked with other trainees.

My least favorite parts of the flight already are trash pick up and compliance check. We are not allowed to say "trash" when collecting trash. It might be misconstrued as an insult to a passenger. And, we're not supposed to let the passengers put their trash in the bin themselves. We are expected to touch every single piece of trash in the cabin of the plane -- yippee. Every time the captain turns on the fasten seat belt sign and before take off and landing we have to do a compliance check to make sure every one's seat belts are buckled and their seat backs and meal trays are upright. This includes waking people up if they're sleeping and their seat belts are not visible.

The flight, although fairly bumpy, went smoothly. No medicals, no disturbances, and I didn't spill hot coffee on anyone.

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