How flight attendants are trained

• Each year, 100,000 people apply for a position as a Delta flight attendant, but only 3,000 people get the job.
• That's because getting the job isn't easy — new hires have to go through an intense six-week course.
• They learn everything from how to deal with medical emergencies to running an emergency evacuation.
• Business Insider visited the Delta Air Lines Flight Attendant Training Center in Atlanta to see what it takes to be a flight attendant.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Following is a transcription of the video:.

Patres Hillis: Stay seated. Recording: Evacuate. Evacuate

Trelawny Bundridge: Release seat belts. Leave everything! Bad exit! Go back!

Hillis: You could have no obstruction, no fire, no water, go to open your exit, and it doesn't work. It's jammed. A lot of the times, I think the perception is that we're waitresses in the sky.

Bundridge: First and foremost, we are safety professionals. Anything that can happen on the ground can happen in the air. Come this way, leave everything!

Hillis: My name's Patres Hillis.

Bundridge: And my name is Trelawny Bundridge, my nickname is Trel. We're here to show you what it takes to be a Delta Air Lines flight attendant.

Hillis: A lot of magic happens down here in the training center.

Bundridge: Over 195,000 applications come into Delta Air Lines, and of those, 3,000, for this year alone, will get to come through these doors and be a Delta Air Lines flight attendant. Initial flight-attendant training is six weeks of intense training. They start here in week one, and they learn about the foundations of Delta Air Lines. And then we go to week three, and those are non-phase-specific things, like security, emergency management, medical situations that can happen on board the aircraft. And then week six is all about customer service. And so, within those six weeks, we have a fully rounded Delta Air Lines flight attendant who is ready to go out there on any aircraft.

This area is what we call our mock-up areas. And these are aircraft that have been cut out from the desert. They've shipped them here, and our flight attendants go into these mock-ups, and they practice different types of scenarios.

Hillis: A lot of what we do is very customer-service-driven.

Bundridge: Flight attendants are able to balance that customer-service piece as well as being mindful of any type of emergency situation that could happen on board the aircraft. Stewdio is where we have all of our doors. Windows, tail, cone, exits.

Hillis: I'll talk through an evacuation here. After we've boarded the aircraft and we're ready to go, Trel is gonna arm this door, which means if we open the door armed, we're going to get slide deployment. When we practice our evacuation, we want the door to be armed. All right, Trel, you ready?

Bundridge: No pressure.

Hillis: Ah, no pressure. Here we go.

Recording: Brace for landing.

Bundridge: Bend over. Stay down. Stay seated. Stay seated.

Hillis: She's thinking about her commands, where her exits are. She's thinking about how to operate those exits, where her emergency equipment is. She's also thinking about people that got on board that could help her in an emergency.

Bundridge: You, help at the bottom. You, help at the bottom.

Hillis: And she's also gonna think about the people that got on who might need her assistance. We do want thinking flight attendants. We do operate with a lot of checklists. But in the end, sometimes things come down to a judgment call. We travel to different time zones, different countries. And maybe we can't sleep. And then you're expected to make good judgment calls, and you're expected to remember all your training and respond to emergencies and be Delta gracious and patient and all of that on lack of sleep as well sometimes.

We are gonna head to our motion-based trainer. It is our one and only trainer that does shake, does move.

Bundridge: Our flight attendants have a week of training for emergencies that could happen on board the aircraft and learning our different types of commands. This is one of them.

Recording: Evacuate. Evacuate. Bundridge: Release seat belts! Leave everything! Bad exit, go back!

Hillis: Come this way, leave everything! Jump and slide!

Bundridge: If you don't stay calm, then your anxiety will feed off of that person. It's definitely important to make sure you stay calm.

Now, welcome to our ditching mock-up. We have a 767 mock-up, and the flight attendants have on their life vest, and they jump right in, and they work together as a team to handle ditching, getting into a raft, helping each other stay warm while they're waiting for rescue.

Hillis: We like to take flight attendants, train them in these particular scenarios with the hope that they can take that knowledge and transfer it out to a real, live aircraft, and when those situations happen in real life, their training kicks in.

One of our most common emergencies is medical emergencies.

Bundridge: When there's someone who has a heart attack in the aisle, I know where the medical equipment is on board the aircraft, and I'm fully able to handle those types of situations.

Hillis: Are you OK? Are you OK? I'm Patres, I'm a flight attendant, I can help.

Typically on the aircraft, there would be three of us involved in this scenario. There would be an assessor, a collector, and a communicator. I was the assessor. Trel was my collector. She brought me my equipment, and then she stayed with me the whole time. The third person that we would usually have is our communicator. Communicator's gonna be talking to the flight deck. They're gonna be paging for medical assistance. They're gonna be trying to get in touch with stat MD. They're gonna be filling out our medical assistance form or helping us do that in some way.

Clear, clear.

Recording: Stop now. Do not touch the patient.

Bundridge: Anything that can happen on the ground can happen in the air. So, we have to be mindful of always being gracious, but in the back of our mind, always thinking of the other things that could possibly happen on board the aircraft and knowing that we're fully trained to handle any type of situation.

Flight attendants have to maintain a 90% average within the six assessments that they take.

Hillis: But once a flight attendant leaves and graduates and is a flight attendant flying out there on the line, their training isn't over. We have something called continuing qualification, and that is where flight attendants that are qualified and out there flying have to re-qualify every 18 months. They come back to training, and they do have to be proficient in their door evacuations, in their EMV scenarios, CPR, security. We do hold them to a pretty high standard.

Bundridge: And so being calm, being patient is something that we learn and we also give feedback on so that when they are on the line as an active flight attendant, they're able to handle any situation.

Instructor: Y'all like that now, don't you?

[trainees applaud]

Instructor: Y'all feel good about that. All right, good. Close the door.

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