Fighting Fires, Literally…

I spent the end of last week in flight attendant training at Flight Safety in Savannah, GA.  It was AWESOME.  It’s the most real training I’ve ever experienced.  We spent Thursday in lecture, which was H-A-R-D.  I tried to remind our instructors that flight attendants are not people who sit for a living.  But then Friday came.  Friday was drill day.  For me, it started with fire.  (captions are above picture)

This was my group for the drills:

This was the fire simulator.  It is an actual aircraft that’s been gutted.  They light a class A (causes Ashes) fire in the lav:

 

During the drills we are not just putting out the fire.  We are also communicating with the pilots while sternly telling all the passengers to remain seated and remain calm.  This is my instructor and the window we have to exit through.  (These pics were taken before the real drills. He was showing us what we would be doing:

 

This is the guys getting ready to save us incase we stink at putting out fires.  Actually, they are in full gear because they stayed inside the aircraft for all of our drills:

This is me getting my Portable Breathing Equipment (smoke hood) filled with air so that I can breath normally while fighting the fire. (The smoke hoods on flying airplanes have O2 cylinders that have never been used):

 

Heading in to fight the fire:

Here I am escaping through the window:

Next, water drills.  They had their own pool equipped with a slide raft that you would have to slide down during a ground evacuation on a commercial flight.  We slid down the slide and then over to the raft where we had to flip it over as if it had landed in the ocean upside down.  We then went to the simulator where we had to escape through the window, go out onto the wing, inflate our life vests and then swim to the raft and climb inside.  They had machines that blew water to simulate a storm.  They also had a simulator that was a helicopter rescue.  We had to use all three ways that we might be pulled into a helicopter while all the water was blowing at us, which is how it would be if a helicopter was hovering over you:

 

The last part was the cabin simulator.  During these drills we are running through what we would do in the case of planned and unplanned water and land evacuations.  I wasn’t able to take very many pictures because we were all busy at the same time.  When one was the flight attendant the others were the passengers.  These simulators are really cool because they move up and down and back and forth depending on the type of emergency.  They also make noises and the lights flicker and everything.  This is a picture of the flight attendant throwing the raft out of the emergency exit window:

These are all the pics that I was able to take.  Hopefully you now know that when you fly you are in good hands.  Every flight attendant who is trained in the US is capable of everything you are seeing here.  We are all very well trained.  The best news of all is that very few flight attendants ever actually use what they learn in training. 

Happy Flying!