Well jensdad, here's my take on your question. Roughly a decade ago BA decided to only recruit staff with a second language; the recruitment team advertised in all the major European destinations to find linguists. Once they all started work however we discovered a problem. Those 300 crew who spoke say Italian were not really wanting to spend their whole career operating to places that they already knew, they wanted (unsurprisingly) to see the world. So after a few months on Eurofleet, they applied to transfer to Worldwide. So it is that, on a flight to HKG you could well have a fluent Italian speaker, a native Spaniard and some conversational French and German but the flight to Rome has a Punjabi speaker and someone who can 'sign'. Add to that the different cost of living in each country and a Turkish speaker would earn significantly less than a German speaker.
For some longhaul routes we get around the problem by employing ICC crew who are based say in Japan, China, India, etc and just shuttle back and forth to their native land. As they are employed on that basis they can't transfer off of the route. Having crew based all over the world though to supply every single language would be both expensive and a logistical nightmare. In an ideal world we cabin crew would all speak half a dozen languages but since we don't we tend to get by on gesticulating and when really stuck by appealing to bilingual passengers. Luckily enough for us in the UK the accepted language for aviation is English.
Ottergirl
Last edited by ottergirl; 17th January 2012 at 13:06.
Reason: dodgy spelling