Super jumbo beginnings

My training for the A380 was long and hard. Many times I wondered to myself why I had voluntarily offered myself up yet again to do another ground school. I’d already done two ground schools before, and every time I promised myself ‘never again!’. I actually know a lot of crew who have actually said that and kept their word, so traumatised by the stress of a ground school to ever go through it again.

It’s absolutely understandable though. My first ground school at charter was 3 weeks long. At Qantaslink it was a month. For the A380 it was seven loooooong weeks. Still, despite my never again feelings, I think with every ground school you do they get easier. You know what to expect, how to study, when to stress and when not to.

The day before ground school started I decided to do a dry run to the training centre so I knew where I was meant to go on my first day. Having only had my car delivered from WA a few days before I was very new to Sydney roads and pretty nervous. Driving in the suburbs was fine but I had to go to Mascot for training, which isn’t exactly in the city, but for a shy Perth driver unused to tolls, en masse traffic and tunnels, it was an experience.

And only after driving around Mascot for mmmm probably an hour that afternoon did I realise just how big the Qantas campus (I know, that’s what they call it!) is. It should have its own postcode! So many buildings spread here there and everywhere, from catering to hangars to engineering to uniforms to bus stops to simulators to swimming pools. It’s crazy town! Thank god I did that recce the day before is all I can say.

What followed was seven weeks of emergency procedures and customer service training. There was so much to learn, it blew my mind. I was so used to a 717, which had just 3 exits in the cabin and two crew stations, and suddenly I was trying to commit to memory all the equipment at every single one of the 16 doors and 16 crew stations! I was not in Kansas anymore Toto! Learning a double decker aircraft was overwhelming, but of course now I look back on it and wonder what I was worrying about. But it’s different learning it out of a manual than actually being on board and touching and feeling and seeing every piece of emergency equipment.

I was super impressed that at our training centre there was a large warehouse type area that housed many mock up aircraft doors and aircraft cabins. It is where all the crew, no matter what aircraft type they fly, come to do their yearly recurrent emergency procedure exams. Because the aircrafts themselves need to be off flying somewhere rather than on the ground being used for training purposes (which is how it worked at charter and Qantaslink for me), the crews would all come to this facility and use the mock up doors. Sadly the A380 is so new that there was an A380 door available but not an entire cabin, like there was for the 747, so we did many of our simulated emergency situations up in the 747 trainer instead.

It was awesome though. This was an entire chunk of cabin, fitted out just like the inside of a 747, and a sealed off little room up the front of it was where our trainers would sit and play the sound tracks for a water landing or a depressurisation or an aborted take off. They had the ability to turn the cabin pitch black, fill it with smoke, put ‘fire’ at any of the doors, even have the sounds of screaming people play over the sound system. That part was creepy, I thought, hearing the terrified screams, even if they were just a tape.

Many hours were spent up in the 747 trainer, often late into the night, taking turns with my classmates to practise every conceivable emergency situation and get our commands straight. We threw open the doors, hunted for children trapped under seats in a smoke filled cabin, wore oxygen masks, put out oven and locker and toilet fires, even jumped from a ridiculous height down an escape slide to the ground below. It was all so interesting, yet unbelievably stressful at the same time – especially when you would just get to such a point of exhaustion that you couldn’t remember the right order in which to say your commands (or couldn’t say them at all!), or you threw open a door that had fire outside it when you really should’ve left it closed. So many people think being a flight attendant is easy, like it’s just chicken or beef, tea or coffee, but it’s not. I feel like it’s my mission in life now to educate people just how serious and hard it actually is and how not just anyone can do it. Out of my group of fifteen classmates only thirteen made it to graduation. It is cut throat, and you have to have the goods every step of the way.

One of the perks of seven weeks training - dinner at
Rockpool, one of the best restaurants in Australia

  

Ground school totally takes over your life whilst it’s on. You can’t do anything else during that time. You have to study every spare moment you get, because you have an exam every second day and you have to get at least 80% to pass. You have to know how to survive at sea, how to save someone from choking, how to use sea dye or signal a spotter plane with a piece of mirror and the sun, how to use a fire extinguisher, how to deal with a terrorist, how to collect rainwater from the canopy of a life raft. It’s full on. I was studying so hard and practising my practical emergency procedures and commands so much that I often went to bed thinking about lifejackets or which doors of the aircraft to open in a ditching, and would wake up with lifejackets the first thought that popped into my head. I could not escape it for seven whole weeks.

We also had customer service training for many of those weeks, which I actually didn’t enjoy as much as emergency procedures training. But it was interesting nonetheless. The customer service training is the flowery – yet equally important – side, whereas emergency procedures are the rough and tumble you have to save people’s lives side.

Finally a week before my 27^th birthday, I was ready for my first flight. My first destination? The City of Angels.

Moving up to the big time – Sydney, long haul and the A380

In January of 2013 I answered an ad for Arabic speakers at Qantas. I am of course not an Arabic speaker, but I thought I would apply anyway, in the hope that maybe they would call me after they had found all their Arabic speakers. I really didn’t think they would.

VH-OQA 'Nancy'

But then in February I got an email inviting me to a recruitment day in Sydney. Just like on that first day on the Dash 8, I just about filled my pants. I couldn’t believe it – the ultimate of dream jobs, suddenly within my reach. I don’t know how I pulled it off, but I swapped a few shifts with other crew, and just a few days later I was on a plane to Sydney, nervous as hell.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the entire day was great. I had done so many recruitment days like this by now, but this one was just off the charts. I had such a good feeling. I knew how they worked and what they were looking for and what would impress them, and I know I aced it. I even surprised myself with getting up and speaking in front of the whole room when normally I hate public speaking. But I got up and the words flowed out so easily and I wondered for a second if I had finally reached the point where I no longer got embarrassed and red in the face at standing up in front of a crowd and talking. It was a pivotal moment for me.

We had a lunch break and eagerly waited to see who had been cut from the group and who was going to be asked to stay on into the afternoon for one on one interviews. I sat with a few people I actually already knew – the aviation industry in Australia is so, so small, that you always bump into someone you know. Everyone used to fly with someone you know or someone went through ground school with someone else. It’s such a small world, so when I fronted up for this recruitment day in Sydney it did not surprise me in the least that I would straight away see two people I used to fly with there too!

I made the cut, and went back after lunch and had an interview with two lovely cabin crew managers. One of them had previously flown on the 717 with Jetstar so we straight away got on like a house on fire and discussed this shared trait a lot during my interview. It was great to find some common ground and I took it as a good sign!

By early April I’d finally found out I had the job, and I bid a sad farewell to the 717 and the Qantaslink team – the Linkette’s as we called ourselves – and packed up the only life I’d ever known in Perth and moved to Sydney. I had a month between finding out I had the job to starting training. It was ridonkulous!

I went over to Sydney one weekend before my start date and went flat hunting. I did not know what I was doing in the slightest with this, as I had never rented before, so thank god I had a good friend from Newcastle come to Sydney for a few days to come and see some flats with me. She was much more knowledgeable than me, and when we went to the last place on my list on the very last day, me getting more desperate by the minute to find somewhere to live, I finally felt like I’d struck gold and filled out an application on the spot. I knew no better, but as we drove away my friend was indignant. “That place is SO yours.” And she was right.

It’s weird living by yourself after moving out of the family home. I’d never lived alone before. Though nothing bothers me about being alone. I knew sharing would be a good way to live a bit more cheaply, but I knew nobody in Sydney, so it would’ve meant living with strangers, which I wasn’t 100% keen on. So I ended up in a little one bedroom flat near the beach south of Sydney.

My new home in Sydney

It was cool to have my own little place though. It wasn’t much, and certainly wasn’t in a nice suburb, or have any fancy extras like a balcony, or a parking space or air con, but it was all I could afford, and I liked it. In between training at Qantas I decked it out with furniture and photos from my travels and really made it my own. I also found that I actually enjoyed doing my own laundry and shopping and making my own meals. I’d done a fair bit of that when living with my family too of course, but this was different. I revelled in being so responsible for myself. I felt like I could do anything.
 

Which was lucky, because I needed that kind of self belief to get through A380 training. All seven weeks of it…

Hear all about it next entry!

Finally in my treasured boomerang dress

Jorgs

Adventures on the 717

I started flying on the 717 in September 2011. As I’ve mentioned before, settling into a new aircraft type takes time – well, at least it does for me – and for the first few months I felt uneasy and wondered if I’d made the wrong decision coming across from the charter side of the business. I was wearing the uniform I’d always wanted to wear, and flying on a bigger, better aircraft type, but I felt dumb and useless, and like all the other crew had to pick up the slack for me. On the 146 and Dash 8 I had known my stuff, even worked my way up to be an inflight trainer myself, and I was comfortable, but on the 717 I felt a bit out of my depth.

A picture of a 717 taken from inside the cockpit of a 717!

Thankfully this didn’t last and I was soon loving flying on a Boeing. The 717 is pretty unique I think, and not many airlines around the world fly it anymore, but it’s mostly reliable and a good size for certain routes. I stopped flying to mine sites and started flying to actual towns on the 717, which was an exciting leap up in the world. I also got much more exciting overnights than just Karratha, like I had at charter. Now I got to overnight in Cairns and Darwin, and I am telling you now, I absolutely loved Cairns!

My Dad is from Queensland, and when he was not long out of university himself he came to Perth for a job that was supposed to last a few weeks. He ended up staying because he loved it so much. I have always secretly thought he stayed because Western Australia is quite a lot like Queensland. Extreme temperatures, friendly people, a really laid back, holiday-ish type lifestyle and vibe. Brisbane and Perth are not the fast paced cosmopolitan type cities that Sydney and Melbourne are.

Cairns, Queensland

Anyway, I think I loved Cairns so much because being in Queensland, it was a lot like home. Just like how my Dad had felt about Perth when he first went there as a young man. I had so many great overnights in Cairns. We would do one or two night trips, going via Ayers Rock. On the two night trips, on the middle day, we would do an Ayers Rock return and then spend another glorious night in Cairns. We stayed right on the Esplanade, moments away from a tonne of restaurants, ice cream parlours, bars, backpacker hostels, boat charter and diving equipment shops. Cairns is so laid back, a backpackers paradise. I instantly fell in love with it. The hot humid weather that hung around even at night time always enticed me to walk with the crew out to dinner somewhere, or along the boardwalk or down to the marina to read all the obscure names on the boats docked there. Cairns was – is – casual and carefree and almost made me want to ditch being a flight attendant and come to Cairns with a backpack on my back and dive and swim and surf and tan by day, and wait tables at night to pay for it all. What a life.

Working for Qantaslink also meant I got some semblance of staff travel benefits too, and I used them many times to travel to Sydney and Melbourne, and then in 2012 to the US and Europe for another epic round of Contiki. It was fabulous (well, except for the time I got stranded in Los Angeles for three days on staff travel…but that’s a story for another time!).

Working on the 717 was awesome. There was much of the same team dynamic with the flight crew and cabin crew that I’d adored at charter, and we had fun on board, looking out for each other, drinking endless cups of coffee to stay awake after a 4am sign on, constantly marvelling at the beautiful sunsets and sunrises and landscapes that Western Australia gave us. It was pretty sweet – the best job in the world.

A spectacular Goldfields sunset

Once, my crew and I got stranded in Broome on an unscheduled overnight, and because we were naïvely unprepared, we had next to no spare clothes in our crew bags for such an occurrence. I think I had a spare hair lackie and a spare pair of undies and that’s it! So the lovely ground crew at the terminal in Broome gave us what they gave to passengers who were stranded – some poorly screen printed company pyjamas so that we didn’t have to wander around town in our boomerang dresses! Although once I put on this grey shorts and t-shirt set I considered for a second which choice would actually be worse. But it was nice to rip off the panty hose after a long day, so pyjamas it was!

Because it was a very last minute decision that we were to overnight, I suppose there was a bit of a scramble to find us some accommodation. Despite our hopes for a nice stay at Cable Beach, we still ended up at what must’ve been a 4 or 5 star place. I got a fully self contained room with a lounge room, a bedroom, a laundry, a kitchen and a spa! It was glorious! The girls and I explored a bit of downtown Broome in our pyjamas and had a drink at the local, hoping to spot the RAAF guys who had reportedly just landed. We didn’t see them in the end, but an afternoon of gossiping with your fellow crew is never an afternoon wasted, so it was a great overnight.



Such sexy pyjamas!

That’s another thing I love about being a flight attendant – the gossip! We sure do love to have a chat, and someone always has a story to tell about a passenger or our friends at a rival airline, or a trip that they just did that was crazy, or speculation about the company, or any other company. There’s always something to talk about, and I personally love hearing and sharing war stories with my fellow crew. Everyone always has a story to tell about a diversion they had last week or how turbulent a flight was or how rude a platinum frequent flyer was. I live to hear these stories – as they’re always juicy and interesting, and I love how no one else but other cabin crew would give two hoots about it or find it the slightest bit interesting.

Truth be told, a lot of being a flight attendant is waiting. Eating, and waiting. You’re always waiting for something – for the aircraft to be fixed, for the catering to be loaded, for the passengers to board, for the seatbelt sign to go off, for the seatbelt sign to go ON, for the rest of your crew to come back from their rest break and so on and so on. So what better way to fill that time than chat with your colleagues (when and where appropriate of course – not when you should actually be doing some work!). I’ve heard some hum dinger hostie war stories in my time, and experienced quite a few of my own! There’s a reason why we call it Galley FM.

But those too are stories for another time, so make sure you keep coming back and checking my blog for new entries!

Jorgs

Them early hostie days

Howdy readers!

I know I said in my first entry that I was a flight attendant, so I thought I would expand on that a bit in this entry. Hopefully a few people are keen to hear about my job!

I’ve been flying since 2010, when I was just 23 years old. I’d had my whirlwind trip to Europe the year before and by 2010 knew not what on earth to do with the Bachelor of Arts degree I’d gained in 2008. I was qualified for nothing basically, except to continue to wait tables, bar tend and make coffees. But I’d been doing that since I left school in 2003. I didn’t want it to be my life!

Like a lot of people I suppose, I had always looked in awe at flight attendants when I was younger. They were so glam. Maybe I could do that?

Long story short, after probably half a year of applying to different airlines and going to recruitment days and interviews, I got a job at a charter airline. It was the start of something big for me. I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did. But I loved it from the very first day. And it sure beat washing dishes and making lattes.

The training was harder than year 12 and uni combined, but I thrived. I started flying the BAe146 type aircraft, a small plane of usually between 75ish and 100 seats. We flew to mine sites and outback towns where the sun was so strong on the tarmac that my high heels would sink into the bitumen. I ate in mess halls with the miners, ripped ticket stubs at the door of the terminal, hurled eskies full of catering out of the aircraft hold and crawled up and down the aisle of the plane on my hands and knees every morning checking to see that the life jackets were all accounted for. It was not glamourous at all, but it was still fantastic.

My first time on Barrow Island - oh the isolation of that place!

I knew no different of course since this job was my first flying job, but charter flying is grubby grunt work. Like I said, it wasn’t glamourous. We cleaned the planes ourselves, emptied the rubbish bins, spoke the safety demo (no video screens on a 146!) and endured many pre dawn starts. But the team was small and intimate at that base – there were probably only 100 or so cabin crew and maybe 50 or so pilots at a guess – and we operated usually as a team of two pilots with either two or three cabin crew. I knew all the pilots kids names, and when we had overnights in Karratha, a mining town at the top of Western Australia, we all drank together, ate dinner together, drove to and from the airport in the same car, even went sightseeing together (not that there is much to sight see in Karratha!). When someone was running late for sign on in the morning at the base we would sneakily sign on for her with her computer code, and if she was really late we would do her pre flight checks for her. It was a nice little group of people. I miss them. And looking back now I would never want to start my flying career any other way. It was such a fantastic foundation, getting my hands dirty the real way, whilst at the same time revelling in opportunities like getting to sit in the flight deck and having a Forrest Gump moment where before me the sky was such a brilliant array of blues and pinks and oranges that I couldn’t see where the ocean ended and the sky began. It took my breath away. Another time I was sitting in the flight deck jump seat landing into Karratha and the Captain pointed out how if we looked to our left we could see the sun setting and if we looked to our right we could see the moon rising at exactly the same time. It was magical, and only cemented my love for my beautiful home state even more.



My last ever flight on 'The Quiet One' VH-SBJ Dash 8 (note the red dirt!)

After a year of flying the 146 I did a conversion course to fly the Dash 8 aircraft. This was a teensy bit scary as I had to fly the Dash 8 solo. Just two pilots up in the flight deck and me all by myself in the cabin. The company I worked for had two Dash 8’s – one had the capacity for 50 passengers and two cabin crew, the other 30 passengers and one lonely cabin crew. My first day after training I was happy thinking I was heading off to the Brockman mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia with a good friend of mine as the second crew member. Then I got to sign on and discovered my flight had been downgraded to the smaller Dash 8 and I was doing my first ever trip without my inflight trainer as a single crew. Yep, I almost shat myself. Then I rushed out to the aircraft, my head swimming with all the things I needed to do – after all everything had to be done by me – all the emergency equipment and security checks, all the catering, all the preparation, and I had to do it all in time before it was time to board, which I also had to run back over to the terminal for to do myself. Phew! It was a crazy first day on that little plane, but in the end it all went according to plan. I quite liked crewing by myself after a while – I could do things all my own way and in my own time, and I felt so independent and capable.

I only flew on the Dash 8 – while at the same time still flying on the 146 – for about six months before I interviewed to jump ship to the airline services side of the company, which operated the Boeing 717’s for Qantaslink. It was the real flight attendant dream of mine coming to life – getting to wear that iconic boomerang dress.

Stay tuned next time for 717 adventures,

Jorgs

Another spectacular sunset off the Pilbara coast - I never get tired of seeing this beauty!

Cabin allllllll to myself!

Welcome to my diary

Jorgs, that’s me. I was going to call this blog Wanderluster, since I’m such a travel nut job, but I decided that this blog isn’t going to be exclusively about my travel adventures, so best not to name it that! Feels like the hardest part of starting a blog is choosing a cool name for it. Hopefully this one is cool enough to entice a few readers.

Of course my name isn’t really Jorgs – that’s an abbreviation of my surname. If you follow this diary you’ll get to read about my job as a flight attendant and my many adventures in many far flung countries, look backs at my past adventures in far flung countries and lots of my thoughts too just on being a twenty something girl who is trying to find her feet and make a life.

I thought now would be a good time to start a blog, as I am about to make a big life change. For the past 17 months I have been living in Sydney, where I took up a new job flying internationally. It was something I always wanted to do – live somewhere other than Perth, in Western Australia, where I was born and lived my entire life, and my dream job being offered to me in a city I had visited many times and always adored seemed like a great opportunity to do that.

So I did it. And it has been interesting and fun and crazy and a fantastic learning curve for me. But it was also overwhelming and lonely and expensive and I didn’t make nearly as many friends as I thought I would. So I’ve decided to head back west, where the majority of my family and friends still live, and be a proper West Australian again. I’m going to keep my job, and simply come to Sydney whenever I have to work (for a flight attendant getting on a plane and commuting to another city for work is like getting on a bus every morning and going into the city for regular working folks!).

In just over a week I will be leaving my little flat that I had made my home, and my Dad and I will be driving across the Nullarbor back to Perth. A week after that my only sibling will be getting married and I will be trying to settle back into living with my parents (what have I done!?).

So stay tuned for more bonkers tales of the bonkers life of a commuting flight attendant!

 

Me on one of my many adventures in the US - this one is Yosemite National Park in California, 2011