Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

I don’t mean to be ignorant, but what are these critical safety functions? The closest thing to safety that I’ve seen is they give the speech at the beginning about oxygen masks and remind you to buckle up.

Given that the inflight safety demonstration is on video now, what’s the critical safety role?

View on HN

Literally flight attendants exist to help with the safety of passengers in any sort of abnormal situation. That they serve beverages is just kind of the thing they do when there's not a critical safety function.

An extreme example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neerja_Bhanot

The critical role is if something goes wrong to be able to help the passengers be safe. E.g. non-normal landings and medical emergencies.

Another less "critical" role, but still not something I want a pilot doing, is dealing with disgruntled passengers.

They also ensure that rules are followed and that people, e.g. in an exit row, understand what they need to do. If pilots couldn't begin preflight until passengers are seated and buckled it would take forever to depart.

Speaking of boarding, flight attendants also deal with seating and baggage issues. Again, it would delay departure.

Any time you have hundreds of members of the general public in a confined space, you're going to need a staff to manage whatever they throw at you, or to run an evacuation. Same reason theaters have ushers.

First aid, detecting issues in the cabin, firefighting, checking the emergency exits and opening them or directing passengers elsewhere in case of an evacuation, ...

Dealing with passengers that have an sociopathic entitlement complex who get violent..

Just what comes quickly to mind: Door in flight / in park. Helping put the oxygen masks on (if that's required, I'd assume that pilot/copilot is otherwise occupied). And of course getting people out during an evacuation.

My wife is cabin crew at BA. The best example I can give of things they need to know is how to let a bomb explode and leave the aircraft going. There's a procedure on how to cover a found bomb with layers of chairs, wet blankets, etc. She also needs to know all the ways to extinguish a fire, depending on its source.

My safety worry wouldn't be the lack of flight attendants per se, it would be distracted pilots. The pilots have enough to keep track of already. The last thing we need is having planes start crashing because a pilot was distracted dealing with a passenger.

You're misunderstanding the linked article. There will still be flight attendants, just now they'll be pilots. I.e. there will be two pilots solely in charge of flying the plane, and then additional pilots in the cabin doing the flight attendant duties.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com