One airline in the US had a problem with people like you
upquicker, do you consider it "intelligent debate" to make an unfavourable and personal comment about someone whom you have never met solely on the basis of a few lines written?
I consider your tactic provocative, juvenile and and ill mannered. Also, people in glass houses etc etc. My spelling and grammar leave a lot to be desired, but I have the excuse of not being a native English speaker. What's yours?
Your posts seem designed to stir sh!t rather than initiate the intelligent debate you profess aspiring to.
Your question is interesting though. I see my role as that of a juggler. I try to achieve the optimum balance between safety and service while continually under severe time pressure and slightly understaffed.
Both aspects are important but not equally obvious, and we would severely fail our pax if we neglected either role.
When you say Be honest. Considering at one stage in America there was over 13 million take of and landings without incident do you not think that the safety stuff is now secondary to the service side of things?
you are either talking without a clue about the subject matter at hand, or are trying to start a flame war. As we say in my language "your argument falters on it's own absurdity".
If I have provided to our paying guests less than the optimum service possible taking into account the means at my disposal, I have failed as an FA.
If I have not managed to check that all my FAs know their SEPs, if I have not made sure they have done their checklists, door drills and security checks before the pax board, if I have not established a good working relationship with the pilots in the 2 minute sfaety chat between the Captain and myself, if I have not managed to make at least 75% of the pax pay attention to the safety briefing, if I have not eyeballed each and every boarding pax and have not managed to make the correct spilt second decisions about who is a potential danger to the safety of the pax and the airframe, if I have not checked that the cabin is secure for take-off and later landing etc etc etc ..................... then I will have failed as well.
Safety and service are what we are about. They are intertwined and indivisible. To try and rank either one as more important than the other seems to me entirely meaningless.