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.