Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 24th of June,

Travel Desk Tuesday, of course, with my excellent colleague Natalie Wilson, who I'm a little bit worried

about because she has just come back from, well, you tell me. Well, Simon, I got sick of Travel Desk Tuesday,

so I'm switching careers and I did spend the day

last week at the British Airways Global Learning Academy training as cabin crew. You're not actually

leaving this second, are you? Sadly not, no. It is only spent the morning there and it's a six

weeks, I believe, intensive course to to be officially Cabin Crew. So my

certificate is for an experience day and I don't actually think, I've not got my wings, so I'm not

off yet. Talk us through it. Of course, cabin crew absolutely rooted in safety. Absolutely. And I think

I was surprised how much safety does underpin everything.

I think before I went I was curious about the balance between service and safety.

I think what you see as a passenger is always the smiles and the service, but it was exhausting.

They have to think about safety and everything they do.

Definitely service is important and is normally delivered with a smile,

but at its core, safety is so important to the role of cabin crew. What does that involve?

Personally for me, I was taught to extinguish a fire in a smoke simulator with real flames. The phone

was fake. The flames were real to open and close the doors, which are unbelievably

heavy and not a one-step system. I would have told you I could open and close the door, but

it's not quite the same. I did get to inflate a life jacket and learn how to do the safety

demonstration, which I'll be paying a lot more attention to in the future. And that I think I barely

scratched the surface of things that

they actually have on their mind and protocols and procedures, even to just open the door,

...