LAND, COLLIDE; CABIN CREW TO THE RESCUE

 

Reuters - "The cabin crew must have done an excellent job.  There don't seem to be any carry-ons.  It was a miracle that all the passengers got off."

Me - It's called highly effective training.  Miracles happen by accident. This was a well rehearsed drill, achieved through pure unconscious-competence at the highest level of positivity within the human spectrum of behaviour.  This is what cabin crew are trained to do.

I have trained aircraft maintenance courses in the Air Canada corporate offices in Montreal and below me on another floor there was an intake of flight attendants receiving their 7-week long intensive new hire training and it was bloody impressive (and profoundly noisy).  Not everybody will succeed.  I also have a daughter who is a Flight Attendant with Air Canada and is a proud graduate of their cabin crew training programme.  She knows what to do.

As a professional Aircraft Maintenance Engineer for over 50 years, and educator in this field for the last 25+ years, I always show the ‘4-steps’ below to my students, they’re all my peers, and some are ex-colleagues:

1. unconsciously competent
2. consciously competent
3. consciously incompetent
4. unconsciously incompetent

Bob and Eddie may have been correct when they wrote Three Steps to Heaven, but there’s four steps to learning.  I tell them, at best, a few of you will graduate at level #2 but a lot of you will take time to reach that level because of graduating at level #3.  I also tell them that their end-game goal is to attain level #1 but that can only happen when you engage in the activity of doing, and more reading (what you don’t read won’t help).

As Licenced Aircraft Maintenance Engineers (AMEs) we have a lot of help from technical manuals and schematic diagrams and Service Bulletins and Airworthiness Directives and In Service Activity Reports, Service Information Letters and the list goes on.  My world is different to the cabin crew world.  Often we have the luxury of time to get it right; that’s why there're so many checks on the work carried out by these professional AMEs.

Cabin crew personnel only get one chance to get it right the first time, under extremely arduous conditions.

Cabin crew personnel graduate at level #1 but hope they’ll never have to prove it to anyone but their evaluator/instructor.

Cabin crew personnel get a bum wrap and an even bummer pay-cheque.

Cabin crew personnel save lives in some of the worst conditions.  Do you remember Air France in Toronto?  At 16:02 EDT (20:02 GMT) on 02 August 2005, Air France Flight 358 overshot the end of the runway after landing on Runway 24 Left at Toronto Pearson International Airport and came to rest in a small ravine just outside the airport perimeter.  All 297 passengers and 12 crew members successfully evacuated that aircraft.

Cabin crew personnel all over the world hope that they never have to be in a superior situation (especially at the end of the flight upon landing) that requires their superior training to demonstrate their superior, unconsciously competent, judgement to save the souls on board, including the flight deck crew.

Cabin crew personnel also are skilled in the use of food banks because there just isn't enough money in their (criminal?) pay-cheque to cover food, rent, clothing, heat, travel.  There is always too much month left at the end of the money for these remarkable, people-oriented individuals.

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My cabin crew daughter is on her way home from working a flight to Australia over the New Year; she'll be landing soon in Vancouver. Assuming the flight is 'uneventful' and nobody needs the cabin crew's superior skills to save them, she will return to her place of residence and finish packing up in order to move back to Ontario and move in with her parents (us) because she needs to pick herself up again financially.

What’s that? Get a second job?  My daughter is fluent in English and French but the service sector in Richmond, British Columbia is looking to hire servers fluent in English and Cantonese/Mandarin as opposed to French.

Back here at home she has a second job all lined up and will literally commute to Vancouver from Toronto for her work rotation because this will allow her to have money at the end of the month.  This is not unusual in the world of aviation.  It’s that balance of end of money/end of month thing; you can be flight deck crew, cabin crew, aircraft maintenance

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TWO MORE THINGS

1. Five crew members of the de Havilland Dash-8 Classic Japanese Coast Guard aircraft, that collided with the Airbus A-350 will not be returning to their families.  The captain is still alive but injured.
2. Ordinary people sometimes become extraordinary heroes when reluctance is not considered an option for them.