A quick link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4759300.stm
The whole flight crew & everybody on board was panicking, people were tossed around in the cabin like ping-pong balls, yet one Stewardess was singled out for what she said.
Why?
And why is Virgin Atlantic mixing condemnation of one young woman with endless protestations of how safety-oriented they are?
What doth thou opine? :dubious:
8000 foot drop, in seconds!
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article348172.ece
Yeah, I read about that elsewhere.
While I sympathise with the woman, it’s just not on for a stewardess to panic, IMHO. Sure, if the flipping wings sheer off or something, go ahead. But a bit of turbulence, however unnerving to your average Jodn Doe who flies twice a year, shouldn’t be a cause for concern for a stewardess. The plane is built to withstand turbulence, and to my knowledge, no 747 has ever crashed because of turbulence at altitude.
I’m not sure what “seconds” means here, but I did once experience a 1 kilometer+ drop aboard a Singapore Airlines 747, somewhere over the middle east. I’m estimating the fall lasted no more than 15 seconds. Scared the living tar out of everyone aboard - except the stewardesses, who calmly held on to a nearby chair until the plane stabilised. Amazing.
Flight attendants do have a certain role in remaining calm. I’m a bad flyer and turbulence scares the hell out of me. The only thing that I can do to keep calm is to watch the flight attendants. I figure that they’ve flown thousands of miles a week, and I should only be truly terrified if I note that they are scared. Otherwise, I can rest assured that this sort of thing happens all the time.
That being said, 8000 feet in a few seconds might not happen all the time, and might be an acceptable time for a human being, flight attendant or not, to panic.
She might be in the wrong line of business, or in desperate need of a vacation and maybe some counseling, but beyond that, feh. She’s human. I hit an about 2000 foot drop from Minneapolis to NY once, and the woman next to me was screaming bloody murder, and I was laughing at her. We didn’t speak the rest of the flight. I still feel guilty about it, but it’s one of those things, you don’t know how you are going to react until it happens to you.
What I find far more interesting is the link Bosda posted. Pentagon develops brain implants to turn sharks into military spies
:eek: Friggen Lasers!
Agree it is her job to remain calm.
I also undertsand she is a human being with human failings so:
My feeling is that she is either inexperienced – in which case some mentoring and coaching can help her or that she is in the wrong line of work.
In any event, it is Virgin’s responsibility now to make sure this never happens again with her … am not advocating firing her - maybe make her a ticket agent or “gate boarding pass Lady” or put her in admin in the worst case scenerio.
I recall reading somewhere she has been flying with Virgin for 8 years, but I can’t find a source for it now.
I suspect the writer used those quotes slightly out of context. Look at the intro.
After being told for oh-so-many years that the flight attendants are there PRIMARILY for my safety, I tend to believe them.
I don’t expect them to be waiters and waitresses in the sky.
And, as such, I expect them to BE professionals when things go wrong. If she is there for my safety, she has no freaking business panicking, period.
If she’s there to serve my snacks and drinks, nothing else, then I don’t mind her panicking. This is, however, not the case.
I don’t want a policeman- or -woman coming on to an armed robbery, dropiing her gun and shrieking, “OMG! They have guns! Help! Help!”
I don’t want a paramedic attending me to say, “He’s in deep shit! We’re gonna lose him! Somebody DO something about this, as I can not handle it!”
FAs (flight attendants) need to adhere to their often-spoken mission. The behavior of this one was simply inexcuseable. Can’t handle the heat? Get out of the kitchen.
I would worry about her ability to actually function if it had been a true emergency. Anyone watching Flight Attendant School on Travel Channel? They happened to be filming when that plane crashed and burned in Canada last year. The point the instructors made over and over and over again was that there were no casualties because the flight attendants didn’t panic and performed their jobs in an emergency to evacuate the plane before it caught fire. If the attendants were running around screaming “oh my God the plane is burning” then people die.
To the OP, what would the airline be trying to cover? That they flew through turbulence? That a plane landed safely? Is that somebody’s fault?
How 'bout an Autopilot malfunction? Leading to a rapid, 8000 foot drop? That could cause it.
Why are they yammering about safety in the same breath as blaming this young woman.
Something smells like week-old trout, to me.
I don’t see how an autopilot malfunction could cause a drop like that; autopilots don’t really work that way. An 8000 foot drop is not unheard of for severe turbulance, though it’s quite likely that it took many tens of seconds, and not the two or three that the article breathlessly implies.
It may be worth noting that we should probably be a bit skeptical of the claimed 8000’ drop in “seconds”. If the number of seconds was 5, that’s 1600’/second which is around mach 1.4 - well in excess of the speed of sound and not likely to be survivable.
And autopilot never malfunctions? No matter the cause of the turbulence/rough travel, the stewardess didn’t do her job as a stewardess is expected to do. If I had an employee running around saying that the plane was going to crash, I would try to tell eveyone that the flight was safe and that I take safety very seriously. In the first article, the airline said basically, “A plane hit turbulence, someone panicked, we’re looking into the incident, nobody was ever in danger” I can’t read the second without paying.
Doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. Now, if you have proof that there was no turbulence or that the plane malfunctioned or the pilot/copilot caused the disturbance, I’m listening.
I dont’ have much to add except to say that my SIL, who was a FA, hated flying and used to sit in her jumpseat with her eyes closed and her fingers in her ears as much as possible. She said she got thru flights by pretending to be a waitress on a large moving restaurant.*
*Yes, my SIL is an idiot. How did you know? But also it goes to the point that not everyone doing the job is suited for the job.
PS-I think she might have panicked. She might be new or new-ish. If a nurse did this in a code situation, it would call for counselling, not firing, but the analogy doesn’t quite fit.