The one thing every flight attendant dreads

It’s the moment flight attendants dread ... 

 

RUDE passengers. Flight delays. The pressure to look glamorous. On the scale of flight attendants’ most-dreaded moments, these mile-high issues don’t even come close.

Sarah Steegar, a flight attendant with a major US carrier for the past 15 years, reveals her number one workplace fear.


It’s that time of year again. The one every flight attendant dreads.
Normally I feel shy about any statement that claims to speak for all of us cabin crew — except this one. It’s the one thing you only have to mention in order to sour even the heartiest of stews’ stomachs: Requalification. Each airline actually has a different name for its torturous testing program (e.g. CQ, RET, EPT, SEP), but it all means the same awful thing.

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So what happens during this annual festival of nerves? For two or three days, all flight attendants participate in a course where any updates to their airline’s safety, medical and security procedures are reviewed. We’re then tested on them.

So what’s so bad about that?
A lot of the dread emanates from the simple fact that “Requal” takes place at our central training centre. For fun, we call it “Barbie Boot Camp”, but this place is no joke.

It’s where we all spent up to two months in “new hire training”, waking as early as 4am and working until perhaps 8pm, watching our class numbers dwindle as up to half of our new friends were booted for the most minor of deviations in conduct or script. For example, perhaps they commanded, “step out, foot first!” instead of “step through, foot first!”, or said something snarky to the wrong person.

It’s simply a place where dreams can be crushed on a technicality. So for us the training centre always smells like surveillance, and the mere sight of it ignites the flight attendant gag reflex. Call it a sort of PTSD (where the “t” is for training).

However, there is one good thing about Requal: you can attend on reserve days.
We’ll pretty much choose anything over the mere possibility of a 3am wake-up call to go to Kingston or Poughkeepsie (New York) — even the training centre. The month you’re scheduled to go to Requal is hard to change, but not impossible. Trust me, many of us find a way!

A flight attendant is given two months from the original scheduled date to attend Requal. If you fail to attend in time, your qualifications expire and you cannot hold a schedule until you sort it out.
That’s golden motivation.

In other ways, Requals aren’t so bad. In contrast to boot camp, the “scoring” is usually pragmatic and the emphasis is on identifying skills we need to sharpen.

I also have to remind myself that even though I enter feeling heavy-hearted, I always leave feeling great. Aside from the sheer thrill of having it over for another year, I leave refreshed on the finer points of our myriad (and constantly changing) procedures, and with any weaknesses of confidence shored up. Most flight attendants would begrudgingly admit that just because we don’t like Requal doesn’t mean it’s not a good thing.