Originally Posted by
wiggy
I suspect there's a fair chance safelife may well be crew. Certainly what he/she describes (door areas on some types being arctic cold) is a common observation and may well be one explanation for what you experienced.
However aside from the cabin crew winding the zone temperature up ( which does sometimes happen) the air conditioning systems themselves on some types aren't really that sophisticated and you can get considerable differences within a zone.
In that particular case I wonder if there had been a partial system failure - there's always the chance that due to some defect a particular zone's temperature may become very difficult or impossible to control with any finesse, e.g. if it's own "mixer valve(s)" fail. On many of the Boeing's there's often the ability to override the whole system from the Flight deck and run everything in a degraded mode but it's bit of black art and very difficult if not impossible to get every zone running at an ideal temperature .
In my experience, cabin temp is controlled from the flight deck not by the cabin crew.