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)
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