Celebrating Our Flight Attendants

By JEAN KAYANAKIS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, WORLDWIDE CUSTOMER SERVICE & SERVICE CENTER NETWORK, DASSAULT AVIATION

May 30 Is International Flight Attendant Day. You may not have known that. The tradition began in Canada in 2015 and is now celebrated by hundreds of thousands of flight attendants worldwide. Only a small number work in business aviation, and a smaller, elite group, numbering just six, works for Dassault Aviation.

They are among our hardest working employees (think about it; a Falcon 8X can fly over 13 hours, and flight attendants can spend hours prepping for a flight and more time post-flight—and there’s no such thing as a co-flight attendant to share the load). In the early days of business jets, planes were smaller and flight times shorter. Coffee and snacks were likely to be a self-serve operation.

But that is not how we fly today. Our Falcon 2000LXS can fly for over eight hours. Passengers use this range capability to work online, dine and sleep. This means the flight attendant is often charged with keeping SATCOM systems operational; aiding passengers in using them; preparing and serving meals; berthing and unberthing seats for sleeping; maintaining a tidy environment; and supporting passengers or customers from all corners of the world and multiple cultures, in many languages.

And they are there to support pilots, too.

I’ve written about flight attendants before, such as Ferry Meijer van de Nes, who works for an energy company that operates a large Falcon fleet. She was an early member of our OAB Completion Improvement & Innovation working group, helping us design better cabins.

We’ve profiled flight attendants in Above & Beyond magazine who helped evacuate employees around the world during the Covid crisis and who found these flights among the most rewarding in their careers.

Also, in Above & Beyond, we’ve written about our Dassault staff providing cabin familiarization training because cabin systems, including comms, entertainment, galleys and berthing setups all need to be thoroughly understood. This is supplemented by safety training.

We’ve interviewed Victoria Blanton, who manages cabin crews for Centreline Aviation in the UK. Victoria took the full flight attendant and safety training, then trained her own crews. She tells us everything must run like “clockwork” and does. Centreline operates two 900LX aircraft for RAF Squadron 32, the “Royal Squadron.” They fly the Prime Minister, other government VIPs and members of the Royal Family.

Of course, Falcons are flying heads of state and business leaders all the time. Falcon flight attendants keep them at the top of their game, ready for action the moment they walk down the boarding stairs. Usually, these flight attendants don’t get a lot of recognition.

Now, they do. Our thanks to all, and especially our fantastic Dassault team.