From emergency
slide drills to make-up class to turbulence simulations, Flight Attendant School teaches new recruits how to be jacks-of-all-trades.
There it is. The building shaped like an aeroplane. Of
course! I'm standing in front of Emirates Aviation College, www.emiratesaviationcollege.com/
a short drive from Dubai International Airport, where I landed a day earlier after a 14-hour flight from Sydney. After flying with Skytrax's recently crowned World's Best Airline for 2013, Emirates, I'm about to get a behind-the-scenes look at the place where more than 17,000 cabin crew learn how to be international citizens of the skies.
a short drive from Dubai International Airport, where I landed a day earlier after a 14-hour flight from Sydney. After flying with Skytrax's recently crowned World's Best Airline for 2013, Emirates, I'm about to get a behind-the-scenes look at the place where more than 17,000 cabin crew learn how to be international citizens of the skies.
While I don't get to go inside the plane-shaped building
(it's a corporate office), the crew training facility in Building C next door
proves to hold many a skyward secret in its glassy, high walls. It feels like a
United Nations embassy — which is apt, given the 137 nationalities of the
airline's crew.
Groups of keen-bean students, known as ab initios
(Latin for "from the beginning"), wearing red shirts and black pants
bop in and out of Building C. I've been granted a tour of the facility to see
exactly how a mere mortal transforms into that most mystical of beings: the
21st century flight attendant.
The life of an air steward is often thought of in two
ways: all globetrotting glamour, or endless trolley-pushing terror. These are,
of course, generalisations. Like any job, it's what you make of it. The longest
hauls some hosties have to work are 16-hour flights to Houston, Texas, with
hours of preparation beforehand, and a five-hour break in the air. But the time
off in cities around the world, with accommodation paid for by Emirates, is a
priceless benefit.
Each prospective candidate does a seven-and-a-half week
intensive training course at the college, before a four-month probation period
of actual flying, and the eventual graduation. Safety and customer service are
of equal importance, and as I'm reminded later, a flight attendant is your
mid-air doctor, firefighter, police, safety officer, food and beverage provider
— and if you're lucky enough to fly first or business class — sky-bar
conversationalist.
The look: Creating
cover girls and boys
My first stop is the Image and Uniform Department. Like
any performance in society, the role of flight attendant has certain
conventions one must follow. As if wearing a school uniform, an Emirates crew
member must never let the facade of professionalism drop. An untucked shirt or
haphazardly assembled white veil and red hat is not on-brand.
The room is filled with mannequin heads, illuminated
mirrors and Clarins make-up (used for training purposes only; flight attendants
can use any weather-ready make-up brand once they graduate). In the course of
one eight-hour-day, the ab initios undergo a kind of finishing school
covering make-up, nail and handcare (men's nail polish included), uniform
maintenance, and even how to wear the hat.
I learn some interesting secrets along the way: the
uniforms, last redesigned in 2009, are made of a fabric treated with
nanotechnology, allowing no liquids to penetrate the fabric. Can you remember
the last time you saw a flight attendant with a stain on their shirt?
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| One of the First Class suites in the expensive display room |
You got served!
Next up is the Service and Training Department. All flight
attendants are trained for one day in duty-free products, which include
everything from expensive liqueurs to perfumes to Emirates exclusive products,
like a special edition bejewelled A380 Mont Blanc pen (a popular choice, I
hear).
I've never been one to indulge in duty-free shopping in
the air, but there are plenty of other high-flyers out there willing to fork
out thousands of dollars at 40,000 feet. For Emirates, mid-air duty-free
shopping makes up around $50m in revenue each year. Flight attendants with a
sales bent will actually bid to do routes with high duty-free sales, due to
attractive commission incentives. So which route has the biggest spenders?
Lagos, Nigeria. Yeah, I didn't see that one coming either.
"The most
expensive room in the building"
 |
| An A380 first class replica |
The giddy schoolboy in me comes out when we approach an
exact replica of the A380 top floor — first and business class. It's got the
first class shower-spa, 14 suites, and the first and business sky-bar. On my
visit, a tall, blonde flight attendant is being trained in cocktail-making. No
free drinks for me today, though — I'm strictly on the job!
Next door lies "the most expensive room in the
building": replica first, business and economy class seats for all
Emirates planes, so that every flight attendant knows each seat intimately. I
can't resist taking a lie-down in the A380 lie-flat bed ... one can always
dream.
Safety first: There
may be some turbulence ...
Unlike most airlines, Emirates conducts 70 percent of its
training in simulators, and 30 percent in a classroom. No expense has been
spared on the state-of-the-art simulators, which are easily the coolest parts
of the whole facility.
The Safety and Emergency Procedures Department has three
gigantic motion-based simulators of real A380s, A330s and Boeing 777s. They sit
on a giant pool of freezing water, with the emergency slides rolled out for the
ab initios' slide practise. Yes, one of the requirements in training is
to do a slide, but it's no laughing matter.
"Most of the stuff we teach them, they're never going
to use, or hopefully never going to," says safety instructor David.
Nevertheless, this is the part of flight attendant training that takes the
longest to nail — around two to five weeks of training, covering turbulence,
fire-fighting, evacuation, first aid, teamwork and communications.
I have a test-run in one of the flight simulators. Seated
on an exit row, I see a take-off animation through my window, and feel the
rocky ascent is if it were real. David cheekily decides to show me what it
feels like when the nosewheel stops working ... turbulence! A plate
falls! Bumpy landing! Lucky he didn't turn on the
screaming-passenger sound effects and smoke machine. Yikes!
More than 700 crew per day go through the safety training,
preparing them for any kind of situation in the mid-air, from learning how to
deliver babies (using mannequins), to using defibrulators to treat heart
attacks. My mind boggles at how much knowledge a flight attendant is required
to store, and possibly call upon, in a high-stakes situation.
The finishing
touches: Becoming a 'globalista'
My day at the college is capped off with the most creative
part of the training program. Five years ago, Emirates launched
"Nujoum" in a bid to instil the values of a universal service culture
among its multicultural staff. Avoiding the feeling of a corporate brainwash,
Nujoum, the Arabic word for "stars", is an interactive one-day
program that uses film, role play and physical activities to hit home its core lessons.
I've been told to keep the finer details of this facility
secret, so that future candidates get a surprise when they do the program. What
I can reveal is that there are five rooms offering up different challenges
based around the five aspects of what Emirates calls "the service
personality": Cosmopolitan, Personal, Considerate, Pioneering, and
Thorough. Each room is more surprising than the next, building up to a finale
designed to inspire future cabin crew to go that extra mile in their daily
lives.
This "experience day" takes place towards the
end of the training, at a time when the ab initios are about to gain
their wings to fly. Emirates' Senior Vice President of Cabin Crew, Catherine
Baird, credits the multicultural "richness" of the airline's staff as
key to its success.
"Our customers are 'globalistas', and so are our
crew," Catherine tells me. It's the crew's understanding what Emirates is,
and what you are … that makes for a memorable experience."
This is true: on my flight yesterday, the pilot announced
that the crew spoke a total of 17 languages on board. If I needed something in
Swahili, I would be well-catered for indeed.
While I didn't get the chance to push a trolley or do a slide drill, I finish my day in flight attendant school wondering,
"Could I ever become one?" I wouldn't mind being in Rio one day,
Lisbon the next....
Article written by Adam Bub who was a guest of Emirates. For
more info on the Emirates Aviation College, flight features and bookings, visit emirates.com
For more info
on things to do in Dubai, visit definitelydubai.com
