Day One

My first day of ground school was not too different from my recruitment day – at the beginning of the day anyway. I was way too early of course, and super nervous. We all stood around awkwardly in front of the building that would be our home away from home for the next four weeks and gossiped about who had made it and who hadn’t. It was a nice surprise to see so many friendly faces from my recruitment day – people I was hoping would get through, did. R was there, as was M who’d had a go at the dream airline with me. In fact all the people who had sat at my table during group exercises with J had been successful. There were also seven other girls whom I’d never met before who had been to a recruitment day a week after mine. I didn’t know them then, but soon we would be best buddies.
As we walked inside and up the stairs to the seminar room I still couldn’t work out if I was more nervous than excited or the other way round. One thing for sure though was that I was stoked to be there.

And then I saw the training manuals on every desk. A huge ring binder, it was thicker than a phone book. And slipped into the cover was our class timetable for the next month. Every day was chockablock – fire fighting, wet drills, first aid, dangerous goods training, self defence training, CRM, cabin service, EPs, exams, exams, and then more exams. It was hard not to be overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t wait to get started. We did the expected meet and greet and heard more stories about life as cabin crew from S and R, our ground school trainers as well as L, the HR manager. L was a former flight attendant with a classy middle eastern airline and I got the feeling that apart from her HR duties that day, she was bought in to bring us all back down to earth about how unglamorous being cabin crew is. She’d had it good in the Middle East, flying with sheikhs and politicians and royal families and living the high life. But that’s not what it was going to be like here, she said. Here we would not be flying mums and dads, kids and other assorted holiday makers. Most of the time we’d be flying miners to mine sites. The airports would be dusty landing strips in the middle of nowhere. The aircrafts did not have televisions in the backs of the seats, nor would we board them via aerobridges. It was not going to be anything like what we imagined.