Psychology of a mentally stabled crew:

Many times I´m asked what does a person needs´ to be crew and it´s very difficult to answer that question in one sentence.

To star with you should be crazy, why? Because being crew is not all about pouring champagne and giving passengers a helpless fake smile of gratitude, it´s more about safety. We are in charge of the safety of everyone on board and we have to take care of the overall security of the aircraft. Bottom line, have you seen Asiana crew how they behaved in the San Francisco crash? Well, it´s like that; you put your own personal safety at the very end in the list. We are programmed to take care of ourselves but at the same time we are trained to prioritize the safety of passengers.

Other crazy point, we are thrilled during training on knowing how to operate a door in case of an emergency and in the bottom end most of us want to use that training in real life, that´s not normal. We are trained on how to extinguish fires or how to secure the cabin in case of a crash landing from a flaming aircraft coming down at full speed from 35.000 feet and we enjoy it. Most crew have a kind of psychological flexing brake barrier that crosses normal limits, why? When you put your hand in fire you automatically remove it an action which is called “basic survival instinct”. But when we see a fire we are programmed and know how to react correctly to expose ourselves in that situation hopefully not getting burned in the intent. That´s an example of one of the many reasons in which I believe that we are not basic, less on we have a “basic survival instinct”.

We tend to be lonely people and we accept it to survive. You become sort of a loner because even so you travel with crew they are people that you usually never get to really know, they become mates not friends and one thing is not the same as the other one. Even so you already worked with a particular crew in numerous flights it´s difficult to have that connection, why? You might be tired to be social out of work, you might feel that you rather use that time of bonding to sleep, you might not be as patient and tolerant as you were before being crew or a billion other reasons. We tend to have travel buddies but not friends. It´s difficult to find people that you can trust nowadays imagine in an industry were one day you fly with a group of people the next day with another group so on and so on. Trust is a serious dilemma in this industry.

Also, we generally don´t like to be tied up to things and responsibilities, why? Because we fly proximally 110 hours per months plus the hours during layover, beardy we can set foot in what we consider to be our home. In addition, some don´t even have to pay their bills. So how responsible we may be in our personal life’s when our own individuality is a mere extension of our professional background? 

Crew takes care of everyone else with limits and boundaries. We try to make passengers comfortable without getting to know them because as we treat so many people we have to do it in general terms, conditions and reasons. An example: some simply don´t like to be asked about their life’s even so they decided to open up and share past experiences and stories. In that limitation we move around being friendly but not over friendly, in small words: we are diplomatically polite, not more or less. Do you really think that when a passenger tells me a tragic personal story I´m going to feel reflected by the moral of it? Most likely no, why? Because the next day I will have to meet another passenger that probably will have another personal tragic story that he or she would like to share and in morals there is always a limit or else you´ll finish with schizophrenia. Limits are a must to survive in this industry and yes, we choose simple logical decision with the minimum amount of side backs.

Being crew is not simple; you should be special and it´s not an ordinary work. Psychological speaking there should be (from my humble point of view) certain assumed predispositions for a future crew: he or she must be sort of a loner – he or she should avoid personal discrepancies concerning creeds, politics and sexual orientations – he or she should have an extreme will to help others without getting emotionally involved – he or she should have a tendency to be more logical than sentimental, sentimental people don´t last long in this industry and last but least he or she should like emergencies and assume naturally that he / she might be involved in a deadly accident.

So yeah, to sum up things you ought to be a little ´original´ to become cabin crew.

(I don´t own the above picture)