Corporate flight attendants have a new decision when deciding on a firm for their cabin security and service education. Alteon Education, LLC, a Boeing Enterprise, launched a system in November 2003 for corporate flight attendants at their facility in Long Beach, California. I was invited to participate in the class to get a much better concept about the instruction, their facility, and about Alteon itself and to share my findings with the aviation community by means of this site.
In an sector peppered with instruction organizations of varying sizes and capabilities, my very first thoughts about Alteon was that is was just a run-of-the-mill coaching agency. Alteon not only allayed my original misgivings, but they proved to me that all coaching organizations must be undertaking the identical thing: operating with the FAA’s blessings under FAR Aspect 142. Certainly, Alteon’s plan might soon grow to be the benchmark by which all education companies will be judged. This is excellent news for flight attendants who are confused or even mislead by some of the applications operating about the U.S.
I arrived in Extended Beach from JFK on a Sunday evening, picked up my rental car or truck and went to my area to prepare for my 7 a.m. Monday meeting with Alteon executives Jim Garner and Hal Collison. That morning, we toured the facility where I was in a position to see their completely equipped education rooms sporting individual laptop or computer operate stations complemented by the overhead media slideshow housing [certainly, whilst getting trained students could look at the pull down screen or at their laptop monitor to view the PowerPoint presentations]. On the ground floor of Alteon’s facility, I was brought to a area housing person flight simulators, each and every of which was for one particular Boeing product or a further.
By rent training room a.m. the remaining five students arrived and I settled down with them in a instruction room to begin the class. Soon after short introductions, Kathy Cummins was introduced as our service instructor for the first day’s class. The Corporate College of Etiquette was selected by Alteon to supply the service side of the instruction the initial day. The middle three days was all Alteon-run instruction. San Diego CPR was selected to present the in-flight healthcare, CPR, and AED education on Friday. When I inquired as to why Alteon outsourced portions of their 5-day plan, Hal Collison, Director, Flight Education, for Alteon declared, “We concentrate on what we are experts at and do greatest. The other portions of the course are outsourced to the incredibly greatest specialists in their field with years of experience and access to the most up-to-date course content material and instruction materials.”
Kathy’s session started with a discussion on dispatching a trip. Covered material incorporated the measures behind the scheduling and releasing of an aircraft for flight crewmember assignments show instances and reporting instances aircraft, flight and passenger information and arranging for catering and supplies. Students previewed a dispatcher’s checklist and discussed preparing for a six leg international trip employing an actual trip sheet to determine what meals service was necessary and where.
After two hours of classroom teaching, it was all hands on coaching for most of the rest of the day. Students boarded a company van and headed south to John Wayne Airport in Orange County for the executive service instruction portion of the plan. The class toured Signature’s FBO where we situated the catering order placed earlier with Air Gourmet. Soon after a discussion about refrigeration, we took the order outdoors to the waiting International Express which was graciously offered to us for the day by Monarch Charters. When we boarded the aircraft I was pleasantly surprised to see that we had full access to the galley and cabin whereby we were in a position to actually heat the meals as well as preserve the aircraft cool for the “passengers.”
Kathy gave the students a trip situation to work with and we went by means of all the pre-departure procedures including, passenger arrival take-off meal and wine service in-flight procedures ahead of and soon after landing and aircraft cleaning procedures. By mid-afternoon with our in-flight service portion of the instruction behind us we returned to Long Beach for added classroom coaching covering contracts and flight attendant business enterprise preparation material. Somehow we managed to squeeze in what seemed like two days of instruction into one particular day. By six p.m. the class was over and the service instruction portion of the system was behind us.
Pattie Adams took more than the class on Tuesday and for the next 3 days was tasked with guiding the class by way of the applicable FARs crewmember duties and procedures security hazmat and a lot more. As a backgrounder, Pattie was a single of the chief creators of Alteon’s new program, drawing on her practical experience as a contract corporate flight attendant as well as a industrial flight attendant, purser and instructor with United Airlines. Pattie’s knowledge in the corporate and commercial arenas was useful as she skillfully translated the language and procedural variations amongst the two arenas, one thing that was not lost on those in the class who have been new to corporate aviation, but possessed commercial practical experience only.
Mainly because coaching was done at Alteon’s Extended Beach facility, guest speakers from inside the corporation have been brought in to go over some of the highly technical aspects of flying. Palermo Gabriel discussed the mechanics of flight and Dick Bloomberg covered the aircraft systems, particularly what happens in the cockpit. Dick also gave the students a thrilling SIM ride, a regular value added feature for those attending this coaching system.
The third day of coaching covered turbulence and decompression and was followed by hands on practice of oxygen units and, later, aircraft doors, emergency exits and equipment. Slides and photographs of the many configurations discovered on the Gulfstreams, Bombardiers/International Express/ Challengers, and Falcons had been covered as well as for the BBJ and Boeing’s newest corporate entry, the 717 Business enterprise Express. Especially helpful to the class was the separate binder that we were provided for Emergency Checklists this Jeppesen size manual could effortlessly be taken on trips, which is what Pattie encouraged students to do.
By Thursday, we had been all eager to leave the classroom for hands on activity we have been not disappointed. Just after a classroom discussion on how fires start off, we filed outside, donned private breathing equipment (PBE) and practiced fire fighting procedures. Promptly after lunch the class boarded the cabin trainer and spent quite a few hours role playing. The day was capped off with a trip to the regional hotel’s outdoor pool for ditching procedures and workout routines.