Right....whenever I fly with this particular captain I don't feel comfortable. He's a pleasant enough chap, but has the ability to put off anybody (ground staff, dispatchers, fuellers, first officers, cabin crew etc). He is the kind of person who's always in a rush and wants to get back early, so stresses people to the limit, almost always obtaining the opposite result.
The other day something happened that really made me want to talk to somebody in the company about it (but I didn't).
We all boarded the aircraft just after 5am, for a quick and easy MRS there&back.
As we were doing our checks etc my colleague and I started smelling fuel at the back of the aircraft. It was very intense. It then spread all over the aircraft. I pass my checks over the PA as usual and inform the purser that there's a strong smell of fuel at the back which is unusual. Captain replies "Till we fly these machines on hydrogen, you'll always smell that!"
The puser then comes to the back, and having smelt what we did, calls the CPT to check himself.
Captain arrives elegantly chewing his gum and says he can't smell anything. He then calls the FO who, at the CPT's question "you don't smell anything, do you" replies "No I don't".
We then call the other cabin crew from the fwd galley who in fact can smell the same.
Pax boarding is delayed till the air clears. During all this time, no explanation from CPT.
Pax then board and as we start pushing back and while I was reading the demo, the smell increases again. It's really strong, so much that I feel a bit sick at this point. Passengers start questioning us. We cannot give a proper answer as we don't know what is going on ourselves. We try to calm them down, but with a full load of business pax who travel every day and know the aircraft almost better than us, lying isn't an option.
It's only after lots of pressure that the CPT says that this was the 1st flight of that particular a/c after being in the hangar and the paperwork showed that it had APU problems before etc etc etc and a load of rubbish.
Now at this point I thought:
1) Why joke about our concerns? why not being grateful for noticing and reporting what was going on?
2)Why not telling us immediately what was going on? Was he scared we would delay the flight even further so that he would miss his roast dinner?
3) why create so much upset for nothing....especially if he knew it wasn't something to worry about?
4) Where is the responsibility towards the passengers (and crew)??? When worried pax questioned us I was so angry I wanted to say "I don't know there's something wrong with the plane but the captain won't tell me"-of course I didn't, and just because I care about them.
I really hope I won't fly with this person for a long, long time. But I know that Sod's law always work. So I hope I can find a way to deal with this before then. Because if something happens next time, I'll propbably do something more about it.
Thanks for listening!!!
FBW
