Studying Airline Cabin Crew Training through Participant Observation

The final speaker for this session, and the ACSPRI 2024 conference overall, is María Larrea, and her interest is in the learning journeys of airline cabin crews. María has worked as a flight attendant and crew trainer and manager herself, and questions the extent to which formal training actually prepares cabin crew for their work.

Such training is often in a formal setting in classrooms rather than simulated cabin environments; the airline industry is highly regulated, and cabin crew activities are highly influenced by psychological perspectives, but drawing on sociocultural perspectives that see learning as a situated experience in natural settings would also be valuable here. How do new cabin crew members continue to learn in the context of their routine flight duties, then?

This project explored this by observing and engaging with a class of new cabin crew members working for a major Australian airline; these visited an actual aircraft only once during their training. Participants expressed some frustration with this; the theoretical training is less interesting and engaging for them than the actual aircraft visit, and there is considerably greater emphasis on safety training than actual passenger service. As a result, graduates of the training programme did not actually feel ready for service, and found the actual cabin environment totally different from the training exercises.

There is also plenty of further information that trainees pick up from their colleagues once in the field, and some of those practices depart considerably from the processes that are taught in training. As these trainees become more senior and themselves come to work with new training graduates, they will also pass on such divergent practices to new staffs, of course. Unpacking such complexities in cabin crew learning and identifying patterns of meaning is difficult, and reflects the co-creation of learning between participants and the researcher.

How do cabin crew trainees actually learn their roles, then? Through compliance with foundational rules; through comprehending their purpose by connecting this learning with interactions with other staff; through contextualising and adapting this understanding to other settings; and through contrasting and changing processes as they continue to evolve and change.