How's your ride.....?
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Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: UK
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How's your ride.....?
Everyone on the Atlantic is familiar with that question and hears it many times every sector. I've always wondered why our American colleagues seem so obsessed with chop/turbulence no matter how trivial it may be. We are all concerned about passenger comfort, and safety is obviously our principal concern, but so much chat about something you cannot control and which may not be relevant to your track seems unnecessary. Could an American colleague explain.....?
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: North America
Age: 64
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How is the ride???
Oki,
We have some 300+ million people in the “former colonies”, and a whole bunch of them fly every day. We have numerous airlines and many crews so I can’t possibly give you one answer that would explain why every “American” crew is asking about the ride. But here are some possibilities (from an American).
1) Our flight attendants are concerned about getting hurt; we loose many of them every year to on the job injuries. So, if we know the ride is bad we can pass on that information to our colleagues in the main cabin and keep them seated. If the flight attendants are not happy, neither is anybody else happy.
2) We live in a ridiculously litigious country. If the seat belt sign is off and the airplane gets tossed about somebody is likely going to try and bring a claim. People disregard the sign all the time-it's just the nature of the beast.
3) It’s just a habit, we hear our own crews and just about everybody else’s ask about the ride so it becomes a phrase we tack on to the end of the initial check in call on the frequency. Mindless parroting.
4) We are trying to figure out if it is prudent to turn off the seat belt and let our passengers get up. Or, if the seat belt sign is still on, trying to find out how long the lousy ride is going to last in order to give the passengers some useful information.
5) We’re getting old and crotchety and don’t like being jostled about and would rather know if it out there or how long we can expect to be in it……….spilling the drink on the “flight relevant reading material” and all that sort of stuff……
We have some 300+ million people in the “former colonies”, and a whole bunch of them fly every day. We have numerous airlines and many crews so I can’t possibly give you one answer that would explain why every “American” crew is asking about the ride. But here are some possibilities (from an American).
1) Our flight attendants are concerned about getting hurt; we loose many of them every year to on the job injuries. So, if we know the ride is bad we can pass on that information to our colleagues in the main cabin and keep them seated. If the flight attendants are not happy, neither is anybody else happy.
2) We live in a ridiculously litigious country. If the seat belt sign is off and the airplane gets tossed about somebody is likely going to try and bring a claim. People disregard the sign all the time-it's just the nature of the beast.
3) It’s just a habit, we hear our own crews and just about everybody else’s ask about the ride so it becomes a phrase we tack on to the end of the initial check in call on the frequency. Mindless parroting.
4) We are trying to figure out if it is prudent to turn off the seat belt and let our passengers get up. Or, if the seat belt sign is still on, trying to find out how long the lousy ride is going to last in order to give the passengers some useful information.
5) We’re getting old and crotchety and don’t like being jostled about and would rather know if it out there or how long we can expect to be in it……….spilling the drink on the “flight relevant reading material” and all that sort of stuff……
