Never Stop Studying

*HUGE apologies for my absence dear readers. That’s the nature of this job! Always busy! I’ll try and keep it more up to date x


Ground school was fun that first day. Everything was so new and we only discussed the cool stuff about the job – the glamorous side of it I suppose: the uniform, the hair, the hair, the make-up requirements, the travel allowances, the days off, the opportunities. It was all so interesting – all the superficial things people think about with flight attendants are true. D, who had spent the golden years at the big A airlines, told us how she used to be expected to wear certain brands, shades and fragrances of nail polish, lipstick and perfume. When I really thought about it, it made sense. If all the A girls wore Chanel No 5, then it was a good memory for the passengers. If they smelt that fragrance out in public somewhere, it could well make them think ‘Those A hosties always smell like that’ and it was a good reputation to have. It really is so much about the image when it comes to cabin crew.

We talked about hairspray brands, the best type of hosiery that would stand the test of time and the coloured stones you weren’t allowed to wear in a ring (on only certain fingers!). There was so much to do with appearance – but it has to be. Flight attendants are the face of the airline. They’re who regular Joe’s think of when they think of an airline. And passengers are just as superficial as my job sounds – every second question I get from friends, family and perfect strangers about my job is about the uniform or the high heeled shoes or the make-up.

I remember we finished early that day. I was probably home by 5pm. That was the last time that would happen.

Because the next day we knuckled down and the real work began. First were safety procedures: we powered through passenger seating requirements, seatbelts, seat positions, refuelling actions, exit rows, safety briefings, jet blasts, engine spool down, anti-collision beacons and tarmac no no’s. It was endless, and it was only the first day. We blitzed through chapters in the manual, constantly learning. It was actually a little tedious – hours and hours of reading through the chapters, section by section, highlighting and circling and discussing and explaining and trying so hard to understand. We spent the majority of the day doing this, everyday. There was just such an extraordinary amount of information to learn. It was quite hard to comprehend sometimes, just how much I had to know, and I often wondered how I would get through four weeks of this – was it really possible to learn so much in such a short period?

And people really dismiss flight attendants. They say ‘how hard can it be? You’re just serving tea and coffee in the air!’ Ahhhh if only they knew just how hard it is. I feel like it is now my personal mission to re-educate these people who think being cabin crew is ‘just serving tea and coffee in the air’. It is so much more than that. That is about, hmmm, 0.5% of the job.

Going through the manual day after day, I was scared to learn just how much of this manual I needed to know verbatim. I didn’t even know what verbatim meant! But it didn’t take me long to find out.

We had our first exam on day four. I found it difficult – if you hadn’t studied your ass off you wouldn’t have passed. It was probably about ten pages long and took us a good chunk of the morning to complete. Later they told me that that first exam was probably the easiest of all the exams we were going to sit during ground school. Not for the first time, I wanted to mutter: “What have I got myself into here!?”

I passed that exam, but it wasn’t easy. We sat exams every two to three days. It was simply a matter of spending Monday learning the content of a bunch of chapters and Tuesday doing an exam on it. And if you got less than 80% it was a fail. It was pressure like I’d never felt it.

The girls in my ground school called me a perfectionist, but soon we were all staying up until 4am studying the night before one of those dreaded exams. When I’d been at high school and uni and would be studying for an exam there would always come a point where I would pack my books away and head to bed, thinking that if I didn’t know the material by then I never would. Then I would try and wing it the next day if I didn’t feel confident with the study I’d done. And that was always good enough. If I just scraped through then there was nothing to worry about. But you couldn’t just scrape through ground school. You can’t only ‘sort of’ know how to resuscitate a passenger or use a fire extinguisher. It’s all or nothing. I couldn’t not know this material. If I didn’t know it inside out and upside down I wouldn’t pass (and how awful to brag to all your family and friends that you were training to be a flight attendant – and bask in all the glory that that status gave you – and then flunk out!). I stayed up for hours every night, rewriting and rewriting my notes, then rereading and rereading them. I had hundreds of palm cards that I went through until I absolutely knew the information they contained off my heart. It sounds over the top, but I simply couldn’t rest until I knew that I knew it. And sometimes that did mean staying up until four in the morning. Then I would get up at 6 and, bleary eyed, putting my make up on in front of the bathroom mirror, I’d wonder why I even bothered to go to bed. I was living on so little sleep that 2 or three hours barely made a difference. I still felt like I’d been hit by a truck.

I never pulled an all nighter, but I came mighty close. There were even a few times when I called one of my ground school trainers at ten o’clock at night to ask a question. Luckily, they understood, and had told us we could call them any time. I felt bad calling their personal numbers, during time when they were away from work and probably just wanting to relax, but I quickly learnt to put my embarrassment and shyness aside. If I didn’t ask that question I would never know the answer, and that could prove dangerous in a situation in the future on the job. Again, bottom line was I simply had to know this stuff. There was no way to avoid it.