Wet drill
Practical ditching training in a pool: life jackets, slide-rafts, righting a raft and survival after a water landing.
Definition
The wet drill is the practical water survival element of cabin crew training, run in a swimming pool with a raft or slide-raft. Crew practise donning life jackets, boarding and righting a raft from the water, using survival equipment and managing passengers in the water. It is why every airline requires you to swim unaided, and under EASA it recurs every three years; many other regulators follow a similar cycle.
What it means for you
If you cannot swim, you cannot pass initial training — it is that simple, and the swimming requirement in the airline's criteria exists for this drill. The drill is physically demanding, usually done in uniform trousers and a T-shirt, and it is one of the most memorable days of the course; crew who dread water often say it is the one that finally made them feel like crew.
In practice
During initial training at Emirates, a class of forty spends a morning in the training pool boarding a slide-raft from the water in full kit before the afternoon's written SEP exam.
Go deeper
Related terms
4 terms- SEPSafety & trainingSafety and Emergency Procedures — the core safety syllabus every cabin crew member is trained and re-examined on.
- Recurrent trainingSafety & trainingThe mandatory yearly refresher and check that keeps your SEP, first-aid and type qualifications valid.
- EvacuationSafety & trainingGetting everyone off the aircraft through the exits within 90 seconds, on the captain's command or the crew's own assessment.
- Initial trainingSafety & trainingThe four-to-eight-week course that turns a successful candidate into a licensed, type-qualified cabin crew member.