Sristys Online Air Hostess Training

CABIN CREW

Who Are Cabin Crew

Cabin crew or also known as Flight Attendants, Air Hostess or even trolley dolly's! are primarily on board an aircraft for the safety and welfare of the passengers.

Modern airplanes are phenomenal pieces of technology, but they're not worth much if you don't have somebody who can fly them. The skills and expertise of veteran pilots are crucial to airline organizations, as well as to getting you where you need to go. The flight-attendant crew is also an important element in the flying process: Attendants try to keep everything running smoothly on each flight, and they deal with the desperate situations that arise when things don't go according to plan.

Air Hostesses

On a commercial flight in the United States, there must be one Air hostess for every 50 passengers. These airhostesses have a variety of responsibilities in their work, which begins before the first passenger boards and continues through the entire flight. Before boarding, the whole crew meets, the captain reviews the flight schedule and any safety concerns, and the lead attendant assigns each attendant to a particular section of the plane. Before the plane takes off, the attendants must:

Greet passengers and direct them to their seats

Help passengers stow their carry-on luggage

Make sure passengers near the emergency exits are prepared to help out in an emergency

Run over safety procedures or show a safety video

Check every seat to make sure all passengers are buckled-in and that their seats are in the right position

Lock the doors and arm them so that the emergency slides will inflate if they are opened

After they have worked through this checklist, flight attendants strap themselves into their jump seats. Once the plane levels off, the attendants prepare food and drinks, load the refreshment and meal carts, and serve the passengers.

A flight attendant serves a typical "in-flight snack," drinks and peanuts.

Additionally, attendants must make sure that all passengers adhere to the safety guidelines, and they have to deal with any emergency situations that come up. If there is a problem with the plane, the crew must keep the passengers calm and help them exit the aircraft if necessary. Attendants must also be prepared to deal with terrorists, irate passengers and various medical emergencies. In situations where most people would be paralyzed with panic, flight attendants have to keep their wits about them and work through the emergency.

Before each flight, the flight crew reviews safety measures with passengers.

To deal with all of these duties, an air hostess must possess certain abilities and personality traits. Airlines look for friendly people who can memorize a lot of information and keep a cool head under pressure. To get a position with an airline, potential flight attendants must interview for the job, pass a medical exam, and work their way through a rigorous schedule of instruction and performance reviews. During the training period, which can last between three and nine weeks, a potential attendant lives with other candidates at a hotel or dorm facility, where they attend classes on everything from food service to dealing with armed hijackers. At this time, the candidates may receive a weekly allowance for expenses, but they aren't actually considered airline employees. They are not hired officially until after they complete the entire training course and pass all tests. To find out how you can become an airline flight attendant, check out this site.

There are many more air hostess applicants than there are air hostess vacancies, so only a select few make it through the entire process and get hired by the airline. The position is competitive primarily because of the unique benefits it offers. In most airlines, flight attendants can fly domestically and internationally at minimal cost (as little as $5 for a domestic trip) as long as the plane has available seats. People are also attracted to flight-attendant work because it doesn't have a five-day, "9-to-5" schedule.

As with pilots, a flight attendant's work schedule is determined by seniority. Newer flight attendants have to fly reserve, rarely knowing where they will be headed the next day. They are at the mercy of the crew-schedulers -- the airline employees who figure out who needs to be where on a day-to-day basis. After a year, or in some cases many years, attendants may hold their own line, maintaining a regular, set schedule.

The world of flight attendants and pilots has changed considerably since the beginning of commercial aviation. In the next section, we'll see how early airline crews differed from the ones that fly today.

HISTORY OF CABIN CREW

Since the very first airplanes, pilots have been the stars of the aviation world, though their role has evolved considerably over the years. The major developments in the world of pilots have been due to new equipment and changing training standards. When airplanes were first invented, they had a relatively simple control system and were often piloted by the designers themselves. Flying was a difficult skill, but since absolutely everybody was an amateur, the only way to pick it up was by trial and error.

As airplane technology advanced, more and more training was required. Automated systems and sophisticated instruments did a lot of the flying work for the pilot, but the pilot also had to understand what everything did. If you've read How Becoming an Airplane Pilot Works, you know that pilots have to go through a lot of work before they can fly for the major airlines.

The first widespread, standardized pilot training came during World War I, when militaries started to put soldiers up in the air. Military aircraft training was expanded during World War II and the following decades.

In the 1920s, the U.S. began regulating both aircraft design and pilot training, and the only practical way to meet airline standards was to have extensive military flying experience. In the 1930s through the 1960s, the vast majority of airline pilots in the United States were white men with some military background. Today, there are more and more women and minority pilots, and roughly half of all current U.S. airline pilots were never in the military.

The world of flight attendants has also changed significantly since the beginning of commercial air travel. The first airliners were actually mail planes with a few extra spaces for passengers. On these flights, you had to take care of yourself: The plane crew included only pilots, and they were so busy flying the plane that they didn't have time to attend to passengers.

Eventually, some early airlines added cabin boys to their flights. These crew members, who were usually teenagers or small men, were mainly on board to load luggage, reassure nervous passengers and help people get around the plane. In 1930, a young nurse named Ellen Church, along with Steve Stimpson of Boeing Air Transport, came up with a new sort of attendant. Church proposed that registered nurses would make an ideal addition to the flight crew, as they could take care of any passengers that got sick. Boeing, then an airline as well as a plane manufacturer, hired eight nurses for a three-month trial run. The new attendants, who would come to be called "stewardesses," soon became an integral part of the airline industry. In time, these attendants were no longer required to have a nursing degree, but the nurturing, maternal character remained a key element in the profession.

The original eight stewardesses, registered nurses who went to work for Boeing Air Transport in 1930

Until relatively recently, airline stewardesses were under strict control. They were not allowed to be married -- ostensibly because husbands would complain that the long hours kept their wives away from home -- and most airlines had certain constraints on their height, weight and proportions. Their clothing was similarly restrictive: At most airlines, stewardesses wore form-fitting uniforms and were required to wear white gloves and high heels throughout most of the flight. While it was a perfectly respectable occupation for young women, early stewardesses were generally underpaid, had minimal benefits and were in a subservient role to pilots.

Early on, airlines imposed tight restrictions on stewardesses.

During the 1960s, '70s and '80s, flight-attendant unions, as well as representatives from the equal rights movement, brought about sweeping changes in the airline industry that addressed these problems. Since the 1970s, the policy of the major airlines has been to hire both men and women as attendants and to have no restrictions on size and weight. Flight attendants now share many of the same benefits as pilots, and airlines recognize them as a crucial component of the air-travel industry. After all, to most passengers, the flight attendant is the face of the entire airline.