Hi to all my facebook friends. I read your posts once in a while but I have never actually posted. So this is my first post and its pretty long. As a lot of you know, I retired in June after 30 years of teaching high school Spanish. I have since started a new career: Flight Attendant. I am now working as a flight attendant for Delta Connection and United Express. I spent almost the entire month of September in Indianapolis for flight attendant training. It was by far the most intense and stress filled 3 1/2 weeks of my life. Basically you have to do everything exactly right or you get released from training. The training days were long, sometimes over 12 hours and a couple of times we went until 3:00 AM. There were 8 written tests (usually around 50 questions) and a 140 question final. If you score below 90% (you were allowed a total of 2 re-takes) on a test you get sent home. There were also 6 drills you had to perform perfectly or you get sent home (you were allowed 3 attempts on each drill). The drills were hands-on demonstrations of emergency and first aid procedures that often had 30-40 steps with exact spoken commands you had to say. You did these one-on-one in front of an instructor who often threw in some twist to trip you up. I studied like crazy and survived (I got a 139/140 on the final) and got my wings. I was looking to do something completely different and challenging in retirement and I certainly found it. The airline industry (like education) is very seniority driven and I am at the bottom of the list. All new flight attendants start off on reserve, which means you have to be able to get to the airport within 2 hours of being called. There is also hot reserve which means you have to be at the airport with your bag packed and in uniform from 5am to 3pm in case a flight attendant suddenly cant make it (like a traffic accident for example). Ive had to do a lot of hot reserve. You can hang out or sleep in the crew lounge or walk around the airport if you want. Fortunately I was awarded Columbus as my base so I dont have to commute like a lot of new hires do. I flew with one pilot who is based in Columbus but lives in Puerto Rico and another pilot who is based in Columbus but lives in Dallas. I just got back from working a 3-day trip. We flew from Columbus, OH to Denver to Edmonton, Canada to Chicago to Jacksonville, FL to Houston and back to Columbus. The overnights were in Edmonton and Jacksonville. So Im planning to post more often to let those of you who care know where my travels are taking me.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:40:47 +0000