More than two decades after joining British Airways, cabin crew veteran Hajati Treacher-Morley – Hattie to her friends – embarked on a new career at Skyborne Airline Academy, which trains pilots and cabin crew to industry-leading standards.
Having written Skyborne’s new seven-day cabin crew training course, which includes a day of customer service work, she is now head of cabin crew training at the UK-based firm, and reckons that, as the airline industry starts to recover from the COVID-19 crisis, its only female-dominated sector ought to be just as appealing to women as it has ever been.
“I spent a lot of my time at British Airways flying,” Treacher-Morley tells Runway Girl Network. Then, in the midst of the pandemic, the airline offered voluntary redundancy “and I don’t know why, because I thought I’d never leave BA, but it felt right.” She left on 31 August 2020 and joined Skyborne in December.
Providing cabin crew attestation, Treacher-Morley’s course covers the generic training required before a newly qualified student moves on to their airline for company and aircraft type-specific instruction. An attestation qualification can also make a candidate more attractive to an employer, although the qualification only becomes ‘live’ once they are qualified on an aircraft type. Airlines typically send recruits on an attestation course because it saves the in-house time and resources that would otherwise be committed to generic training.
Speaking during final preparations for the first course, Treacher-Morley bubbled with enthusiasm. She had come straight into the Zoom call from the fire training area at Skyborne’s Gloucestershire Airport home, breathless after dashing across the airfield in a fire service vehicle.
Her students will fight ‘real’ fires inside a shipping container equipped to simulate an aircraft interior and learn how to evacuate passengers from a smoke-filled cabin. “We have wet training too,” she enthuses,…