A lesson in safety: How tips from flight attendants save lives

After a Delta Air Lines regional jet crash landed at the Toronto airport , public figures and internet commenters praised fast-acting flight attendants for getting all 80 people out of the overturned plane in minutes. They deserve the credit; the evacuation was textbook, despite no one having the exact training for such a specific accident.

"We have these scenarios that we train on based on what we know," said Christina Ling, a flight attendant instructor in Vancouver who has been in the industry for 25 years. "This one was unprecedented."

The flight attendants adapted, shouting instructions to shocked passengers and guiding them through emergency exits.

The incident was another example of how important it is to listen to flight attendants — not only during freak accidents like the flip in Toronto, but throughout the routine parts of your trip, like taxi, takeoff and landing, which are defined by federal regulations as "critical phases of flight."

It may seem like a tall order — it requires you to look up from your phone in those last moments before turning it on airplane mode. Passengers still tend to see flight attendants more like servers than first responders and tune out of in-flight instructions, despite recent catastrophes — like the deadly crash at Reagan National Airport in January, last year’s Japan Airlines collision that required 379 people to escape a fiery plane, and many cases of severe turbulence.

"People become complacent," said Deborah Perkins, a flight attendant in Salt Lake City who’s been flying for 36 years. "We read our announcements ... and oftentimes I’m competing with people really talking loudly."

If they’re not talking, they’re lost in a land of noise-canceling headphones and bottomless social media feeds.

Most of the time, flights go off without a hitch. But paying attention to flight attendants can be life saving.

Not only there to serve drinks

Flight attendants have had an uphill battle to earn respect from the traveling public. In the early days of the profession, they were seen as eye candy, not authority figures.

"As the jet age started ... there was a real marketing effort on the part of the airlines to objectify flight attendants and make it a part of their sales [pitch]," said Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represents 55,000 flight attendants at 20 U.S. airlines. "We’ve had to fight against that forever."

Today, flight attendants still work against a stereotype that their primary job is waiting on passengers.

"We’re gladly there to serve you your food, your drinks — but we’re there for safety," Ling said. "We go through intense training to keep you guys safe."

That training ranges from about three to six weeks, often unpaid, and is "90% safety-related and 10% service," said Rich Henderson, flight attendant for a major U.S. carrier and co-creator of the blog Two Guys on a Plane.

Flight attendant candidates learn evacuation procedures, basic first aid, how to deal with security threats. There are drills that imprint emergency commands and procedures onto a candidate’s memory. There are physical, written and practical exams.

"We’re trained to revive people from heart attacks, to respond to other medical emergencies, to fight fires, to respond to a decompression on the plane, major severe turbulence — all kinds of emergencies," Nelson said. "That is really the reason that we’re there."

Perkins was eight months pregnant during her training, which included free-falling out of model planes onto inflatable slides and practicing emergency water landings (called "ditching") in a pool.

"You get in the water, you get the whole lifeboat together," she said. "You learn about how to get people on, how to use the bailing buckets."

Once a candidate passes and joins the industry, they’re required to return to training about once a year. But before they even make it to training, they must get through the application process. Ling said airlines look for candidates with "safety-minded traits," like leadership skills, the ability to work well in a group, and keeping calm under pressure.

Little instructions add up in a big emergency

The latest airline disasters have shaken travelers, despite aviation remaining one of the safest forms of transportation.

"There’s hundreds of thousands of workers who are asking all day long, ‘Is it safe?’" Nelson said. "In doing that, we’re also doing our safety checks, which would include giving instructions to passengers to stow your bags all the way underneath your seat, to have your seat belt on and snug across your lap, to make sure that you’ve got your tray table up and your seat up."

Nelson said these are all the product of "survivability investigations" conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board following accidents.

"Everything we do, even the little things like telling you to put your tray table up ... is rooted in some sort of safety idea," he said. "I think a lot of people don’t think that way. They think, ‘These flight attendants are just nagging me.’"

The little instructions add up. Your laptop being stored securely means it won’t go flying during an emergency. Your bag being fully under the seat means you — and your fellow passengers — can get out faster in an evacuation when "seconds cost lives," Henderson said.

"It can be such a small thing that causes a ripple effect," he added.

Nelson encourages travelers — even frequent flyers — to listen for flight attendant instructions from the time you board; and yes, listen to the safety briefing no matter how many times you’ve heard it before. It could improve your ability to respond in an emergency.

If something does go wrong, "listening to the flight attendants’ clear instructions about what to do is going to help snap you out of the shock that you are likely to be in having gone through this critical incident and be able to respond in order to save your life," she said.

And if nothing goes wrong, at least you showed the flight attendants respect at a time they could use it.

"The job has become a lot harder, a lot more rigorous, longer days, shorter nights, less pay for what we do, fighting through all of that, but we’re still here doing the work of aviation’s first responders," Nelson said.