Juliana Oliveira

Senior Cabin Crew, Vueling S.A.

Making the Practicals a Practice

Training aviation’s next era, after pandemic, requires from us resilience, dedication, and patience. Cabin crew training has been “caught off guard” when borders have been closed, contracts weren’t renewed, and despite technology was already well developed in the world, it still had to go through progress to reach adequately every cabin crew.

A cabin crew training goes through the theory, where each crew learns about procedures, equipment, and every part of the 700-page cabin crew manual. The initial training takes from 6-8 weeks and between the theory the practical days will also been added.

On an Operation Conversion Course, commonly called as conversion course, the time differs, and it is reduced to 10-15 days depending on the type of aircraft and necessities of the airline.

One common thing that I could find between airlines and their initial and conversion course is the duration of their practical days.

My initial research between cabin crew, both talking to each colleague individually and online questionnaire, made me realize that most cabin crew did not have enough practical training before their familiarization flights.

When asked on the online questionnaire that I created, “What is something that is missing on the cabin crew training on your opinion?”

Every answer given up to the moment was referring to the lack of practical days.

For this presentation, I propose speaking about the need of improving the mock up days, aircraft familiarization, where the 2-3 hours spent at the aircraft familiarization can be improved and used to practice normal operations, some abnormal situations and simulate a flight on ground. From briefing to preflight checks, communication with flight crew, safety demonstration, boarding, service, preparation to land, and not forgetting incidence with passengers.

Dividing classes, making them smaller for practices between emergency procedures practice at the mockup plane, and aircraft familiarization, we will create better prepared crew, with vision, focused on safety and security, less nervous for their theorical exams and staying longer at their airlines.

For a company to succeed, there must be insights as to which practices should be implemented into the organization to increase cabin crew awareness and achieve success.

Practice will meet opportunity and we will be creating prepared, confident, and knowledgeable cabin crew members.

Cabin Crew Conference
Day 2 – Wednesday 9th November 2022
Session 7 – 1415-1545