The scariest thing that happened on a normal flight, and how the training turned out to be exactly right
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#1 United, Houston, and I want a thread that is not about the medical emergencies (that thread exists) but about the other kind: the moment on an ordinary flight where something went wrong and the training was, it turned out, exactly correct. New crew need to know that the drills are not theatre.
Mine
A smoke smell in the aft galley on a domestic sector. Not fire, smoke smell, faint, the kind you could talk yourself out of. I did not talk myself out of it. The drill: locate, isolate, inform. I found it (an oven with something on the element), pulled the breaker, told the purser, the purser told the captain, the captain declared a precautionary something to ATC, we landed normally, the passengers never knew. The whole thing took four minutes and every second of it was the training doing what it was designed to do. I did not feel brave. I felt like a checklist.
From colleagues
A decompression at cruise, the masks dropping, and a crew member who said afterwards that she did the drill (mask on, sit, wait for the descent, then the cabin) without a single thought in her head until it was over. Then the thoughts came. The training had held the space.
A disruptive passenger who became physical, and the restraint procedure, which everyone practises and nobody wants to use, used, correctly, by a crew of four who had never flown together. The captain said afterwards it was textbook. It was textbook because there is a textbook.
An evacuation, a real one, on the ground, for a fire warning that turned out to be false, and 180 people off in under two minutes because the commands were the commands and the crew shouted them the way they had shouted them in training and the passengers did what shouted people do.
The lesson
The drills are not theatre. The exact number questions are not pedantry. The purser who makes you do the door drill again in the briefing is not being difficult. The day it happens, your mouth and hands will do it, and your brain will catch up afterwards, and you will be grateful for every boring repetition.
Your version, the ordinary flight where it stopped being ordinary?
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#2 Purser, and mine was a lithium battery fire in a bag in an overhead, small, fast, and the drill (the water, the containment, the bag) done by a second year crew member who had never seen one and who did it exactly as taught. I told her afterwards. She had not realised she had done it well. She had just done it.
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#3 In training and we did the smoke drill this week, and I now know why the instructor made us do it four times. Four minutes, felt like a checklist. That is what I want to be.
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#4 easyJet, and the disruptive passenger restraint used once in four years, correctly, by a crew who had met that morning, and the thing I remember is the calm. Not the drama. The calm. The training is the calm.
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#5 @leahgatwick the training is the calm. That is the thread.
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#6 ATR, and the go around at Sumburgh in the crosswind that the passengers thought was an emergency and the crew knew was Tuesday, and the drill for that is 'sit down, look bored, say the usual', and it worked. The training includes the face.
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#7 Fourteen years, one evacuation, on the ground, false warning, and I have never shouted so loud or so precisely in my life, and it was the training shouting. I did not know I could. It did.