The remarkably successful evacuation of Asiana 214 compels me to write a post in appreciation of flight attendants who have the toughest job at the airline.
Pilots enjoy the fun and challenge of handling the fancy machine. By the time we get into an airliner we are very familiar with the environment of airports, air traffic control, etc.
In the Canadair Regional Jet that I flew we enjoyed about half of the fresh cold air produced by the “packs” while the 51 folks in the back sweated.
We had comfortable chairs and our own escape if we decided that we needed to leave those chairs in a hurry. Unruly passengers in the back? We could just lock the door and clutch our weapons (crash axe that came with the airplane; federally issued 10mm pistol that most of the captains seemed to carry (our airline was founded and based in Northern Kentucky so carrying a gun was as natural to most of these guys as carrying a phone)).
How about the flight attendants? They suffered from the same sleep deprivation and crummy hotels that we did but weren’t logging multi-engine turbojet time.
With up to 50 passengers on each flight there was always a chance that someone would be upset. I remember a day when a few thunderstorms had resulted in three-hour delays at JFK. A passenger was grousing that JetBlue wouldn’t be stuck in the long line that we were in (had he been able to see through the windshield he would have seen a JetBlue Airbus right in front of us).
On one flight we heard a woman shrieking through the locked door. After landing we learned what the trouble was. The flight attendant had started serving snacks from the back of the airplane. As we were a wholly owned subsidiary of Delta (based in Georgia) the two choices naturally included a bag of peanuts. So about 20 of these bags had been opened by the time the 23-year-old flight attendant reached the front row.
The shrieking was from a mother traveling with her two boys who were, in her opinion, so allergic to peanuts that the vapors from the previously opened bags would likely kill them. The flight attendant tried to explain that folks with peanut allergies were supposed to call ahead and the airline would wipe down three rows of seats with alcohol and not serve peanuts during that particular flight, but a stream of abuse continued to issue from the mother.
[The boys walked off the plane, by the way, without showing any ill effects from the peanut-suffused environment.]
The real challenge of being a flight attendant is getting people out. The training requires that they demonstrate they can evacuate an aircraft within 90 seconds, but of course a lot of stuff that is easy to do in training turns out to be tough in practice. So this posting is my thank-you note to flight attendants everywhere and to the Asiana 214 cabin crew in particular.
SEE ALSO: Heroic flight attendant was the last person to leave the burning Asiana 214