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Finnish airlines Finnair: how the crew trains and a little about the insides of the kitchen


Training center for cabin crew. You can see the inflatable ladder, a model of the same ladder in the form of a raft for the pool. And opposite to all this is a sauna. Because in Finland they cannot build a pool without a sauna. Yes, right at the training facility too.

So get to know Finnair Airlines and Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. Finnair is already 10 times in a row the best among the airlines of Northern Europe and the sixth in safety in the world. Grades by JACDEC and Skytrax. About how it is rated below. In general, a post about an airline, a training center, a mobile application and a kitchen for passenger flights.


Finnair


One of the oldest airlines in the world, fly already since 1923. Moreover, the first flights were made even before the construction of the airport. They took the Junkers F.13 with floats and made ice stripes. In 1936 they switched to normal chassis.


The Shaitan Link simulator of those times when even just a cockpit with handles and the ability to swing already halved pilot training time. The rarity hunted by museums and collectors is just two working in the world. The designer was engaged in musical instruments, so you can see 4 accordions below.

The company is one of the most punctual and safest in the world. Since 1978, without emergency situations on airplanes. By the way, we delivered one of the emergency situations - on June 14, 1940, the Junkers Ju 52 Kaleva was shot down by the Soviet Air Force over the Gulf of Finland. All 9 people on board died.


The company became a Finnair around the time of nationalization, when the government consolidated more than half of the shares (which, in general, is understandable, because for the time of World War II aircraft were needed for another).

In 2019, 14.7 million passengers were transported (with a population of Finland 5.55 million people). HEL traffic - almost 22 million passengers by the end of 2019 ( here there is a good set of analytical reports, the airport calmly opens them).

Where do so many people come from in a small country? This is because there is a very good location for flights to Asia and across the Atlantic - a short northern route with a transfer to Helsinki, which makes the local airport one of the most interesting hubs in Europe. Yes, there is a big and expensive Heathrow nearby, and later I will talk about a similar situation in Qatar. Historically, the country's location provided another cool bonus: the proximity to the border of the USSR in the 80s made it possible to go along the northern route to Japan. It was important not to get into our airspace, because then transit flights were prohibited.

The company developed well until about 2015, when low-cost airlines began to nibble pieces of the market. What is nice, instead of trying to somehow crush the low-cost airlines, the Finns chose the path of future development. And they supported them. Finnair has come to their senses and continues to grow, in particular, because the same new companies give passengers for transplants. They understand that the more you have a home transport hub, the better the future. Now for Petersburgers, for example, Helsinki-Vantaa Airport is known as a window to Europe, because it can be reached by bus, and there itā€™s already cheap to fly along Schengen. Helsinki Airport can also be reached by plane: every week, 27 Finnair flights from St. Petersburg and 28 from Moscow leave for HEL: travel time 40 minutes and twenty hours, respectively. By the way, these are my favorite Embraers (the same ones where the business class for boarding differs from the house-keeper only with a curtain). Finneira also has integration with the railway: you can buy a ticket for Allegro almost like a connected flight and transfer to the airport. From Leo Tolstoy from Moscow there is a free transfer from Tikkurila to HEL by electric train (more precisely, it is free if you transferred in 80 minutes or less).

All. Now youā€™re about a picture of the ecosystem, and let's talk about the details. The safety of an airline largely consists of a fleet of equipment, its maintenance procedures, human factors and automation. Everything is fine with iron: the latest simulators and the first order for the A350 in Europe. This, by the way, is another tight integration of the carrier and the manufacturer: Finnair took these boards, and the rest watched how and what they do with them. The service procedures were not shown to us (and in Russia, too few will show), but I have no doubt in the Finnish mentality of meticulous leisurely detail.

And the most interesting, of course, is automation (examples will be a little further in the next post about the airport, itā€™s very cool in a couple of places). And now about the human factor. This is the calmest airline I've seen. The training manager says that they have a very relaxed atmosphere, but they are demanding. This is expressed in the fact that they conduct about 4 thousand end-to-end metrics on the actions of the pilot. As you know, I am from retail, and without end-to-end metrics I can not imagine any operational activity. But we collected 4 from an ordinary store and about 60 from a large one. And here the pilot has 4 thousand pieces in his character card!

So, in flight no one loads the pilotā€™s head (at least, according to the coaching staff). For example, there is no bonus for fuel economy or anything else that creates conflicts between safety and flight economics. But at the same time, at the end of each cycle, the school looks at the report on indicators and, if there is something out of the norm, itā€™s just incredibly ā€œworthā€ working out the corresponding group of skills. That is, you were mistaken a couple of times slightly - wait for the instructor who will not let you fly until you work out this possibly weak spot before automatism. Yes, you will sit and hammer into the simulator, but such is life. Another amazing feature - in the office there is almost no hierarchy, except in cases of critical decisions. The training manager claims that on board the same: everyone is equal, but in a critical situation the teams are not discussed,but they are executed quickly, clearly and without unnecessary bazaars. I only began to suspect about five years ago that such an effect could be achieved without an army approach, but here the whole process seems to be.

And hereā€™s the simulator itself:



This is the A350 cockpit, which can swing, jump, even dance break dance. It cannot turn over 180 degrees, but maneuvers with lateral obstruction, corkscrew and other things completely overpower. With me, the pilot worked out something like this, which is why she constantly jumped sharply half a meter and tumbled to the side.



All school trainers are practitioners of PIC. There are no theoreticians, and the coach must be able to do with his hands what he teaches in working out critical situations. If you have everything in order with the indicators, every six months such a trainer still takes your dossier and chases you for 4 hours at a compulsory training (hour of a briefing, 4 hours in the simulator cabin, half an hour or an hour analysis). Not the entire flight is modeled, but only the most interesting part, so in 4 hours you can try a lot of everything. I note that I used an old simulator across the road at the Aviation Museum and killed two planes in 4 minutes. We have the easiest way to ride a simulator - SportEX in Moscow (Su-27), Afimall City in Moscow and RIO in St. Petersburg (A320) and on an old fighter in the aviation museum in Zhukovsky. If you want to feel like a loser - I highly recommend it.

The state has about a thousand pilots and about three thousand members of the cabin crew. So yes, flight attendants are trained at the same school. If you are suddenly not up to date, then these are people who are primarily needed in order to provide emergency response, in the second - as psychologists, and already in the third - as a service. The class of service is the simplest:



Here the guides listen to short lectures and then train in a real salon with real food (because Finnairā€™s kitchen is across the road).

What is characteristic, there is an angle that filmmakers really like:



Therefore, requests for the shooting of advertisements or feature films regularly fall into the school for staff. They donā€™t shoot ads here because they donā€™t want to mix the bright image of the state brand with any remedy for diarrhea, but with the films there is a different logic. Somehow it turns out that if the film shows a scene on an airplane, then the chances of this airplane to fly successfully are very low. Therefore, no.

This is a first aid class:



A very interesting approach to completing the first-aid kit. As you may know, we only have a bandage in the cabin of potent drugs. Everything else interesting lies in the emergency reserve in the wing or in the compartment of the inflatable ramp, that is, in the usual situation you canā€™t get it out of the cabin. Finnairā€™s first-aid kits are fully equipped, but they cannot use strong conductors without a medical education. The logic is like ours, only if there is a doctor on board, they will give him everything he needs right away. If there is no doctor, there is a satellite full duplex link to the duty medical service on the ground (there is always a doctor on such duty), you can also contact the hospital.

Here is one of the most important things in training:



This is a fire chamber. If something goes wrong on board, fire and smoke often occur. Those very nice beautiful stewardesses who smiled affectionately at you take fire extinguishers near the station and act at the speed of Alexander Lazutkin, who put out the fire in a box of oxygen drafts at Mir station.






Specifically, this one photo from a training session from the company's archive.

There are many possible flash points - from the garbage bin with toilet paper and passenger luggage under an armchair or upstairs to the kitchen. In the simulator, a flame comes from there, everything is filled with smoke and the corresponding sounds are still played. Sounds critical to lithium burning - Finnair technicians burned 10 laptops in different modes and recorded sounds.


The simulator was invented by former firefighters, now it is their main business

Therefore, flight attendants can now, even at several flash points, automatically determine where the lithium battery is burning and extinguish it from afar in the first place. So as not to grovel.



Here is a training session for working in the salon. An important psychology story: cabin crew trained to detect people with fear of flying. For example, in a lesson they are taught the basic signs that a person is afraid (there is a smell of alcohol in the signs, so they sniff you carefully at the entrance - people often try to drink on the ground, and this is only worse). Then - the correct, as it were, random-pick-up approach, neatly engaging in a conversation, which then leads to the fact that the client will eventually calm down.

Here is the easiest emergency exit simulator:



Here you just need to exert force. On our airlines, sometimes you need to carry a 90 kilogram mannequin before this exit, so girls often go to the gym for power. Finneira does not have this - by the way, the age of the flight attendant is practically unlimited here (I heard about the 52-year-old stewardess), there is no standard for lifting loads - and experience decides everything.

On the other hand, there is a point with the fact that the pilot also has no restriction on body weight. This is where a special grip is practiced to get the unconscious pilot out of the seat. Plastic on the sides simulates equipment, you canā€™t step on it:


For a year around the world, approximately two pilots need such help from the cabin crew (heart attacks, poisoning, and so on).


The fire ax (which must be checked before each take-off) is very neat here


All equipment should be extremely familiar.



This is a new cool thing - self-rescuers with an oxygen-insulating device. They guarantee that the conductor will remain conscious during smoke and will be able to walk quietly (and not hang on the mask). If anything, itā€™s a good idea for paranoid people to keep such a house above 10 floors in case of fire. Chemically-coupled oxygen has now appeared for long-term storage.


Vests for swimming, of course the


pool you have already seen. The ladder on top is a mass-dimensional layout of the present (it is reusable), on the bottom - on everything except the length, like a real one.


On the rear cab, the actions in the cabin are worked out with a difficult landing. Dishes fly, passengers scream, baggage falls, everything is done, then you still have to get out with everything awry. By the way, extras "from the street" are never called there - only students or trainees of the extras school. Because for an unprepared person, the whole complex can give rise to a lot of new entertaining phobias.

And at the end of the sauna:





Since the training center is used not only by Finnair, but also by 37 more airlines, the question always arises whether this is a mandatory procedure. But after swimming in the cold water of the pool, everyone understands how important this is. By the way, yes, the ability to swim is an essential skill of a flight attendant. In Finland, all flights are either over the oceans, or over the lakes of their native country.

IT part


The most progressive department is the mobile team. They are the first to implement Agil (everything else in the company is done by waterfalls) and they have a couple of nuances in development. Firstly, it is Scrum without sprints. That is, how - ā€œ10-minute hateā€ every day, review once a week, demo and retro once every two weeks. Itā€™s more interesting with sprints - the whole company lives in 3-month tactical planning cycles, these are business sprints. Therefore, in practice, sprint is equal to the introduction of one feature. Implemented - took the next one.

The company's application on iOS + Android, makes a quarter of all registrations, has 2.2 million installations. Team - 2 designers, 9 developers, 2 QA, Scrum-master (aka support) and software. People from 9 different countries communicate in English. There is our Eugene - he is a leading designer. For many locales, the design is different: the Chinese in the cultural code have a flickering mess, the Japanese have minimalism and so on.

Since the process is specific, so that there is no imbalance between the operating systems, 3 developers can do both iOS and Android. That is, they move to where there is more work now.

An interesting topic with user polls. They watch NPS 2 times a year (now 68), and from the application you can send a bug or a feature request directly to the developers' mail (by the way, if you are suddenly asked to ask about work - yes, this is their direct mail in the form of feedback past all official people). That is, the developer responds to the feedback. This is quite unusual for me: on the one hand, itā€™s convenient for the process when you know the client, and on the other, itā€™s politely to answer and reassure the Japanese user correctly by etiquette, this is a skill that may not be needed in this position. Therefore, there is often an employee of the call center who acts as a translator in both directions. But, nevertheless, established weekly duty on this post.

The airport has an application. But in Fineyrovsky, you can register, get a push for Apple Watch with a change in boarding gate. Or order something from the storeā€™s assortment on the ground directly to the salon (convenient for souvenirs, damn it, considering that their prices on land are the same as in the city). Come - and your purchase is on the armchair. The application can show QR, which perfectly rolls everywhere in your home airport for a boarding pass.

Developers do not fly by themselves, but they do full-scale tests at the airport 3-4 times a year. HEL has rush hours after Asian flights, and at this moment they pass tests with suitcases in their hands. The airport is constantly being rebuilt, so there are quick updates in the application, what and how is closed-open. I will also talk separately about HEL, and I will show there a couple of such important features such as the suddenly opened service passage, which saves 10 minutes.

There is a week of innovation - this is when the whole company gets feature requests and arranges such a strange subspecies of the hackathon to introduce everything at once. The last time we saw on the watch information about the luggage belt where your bag is spinning.

It remains to show the kitchen


Security also includes the level of passenger departures. For this, it is important to complete the aircraft on time. Including food. Finnair cooks for himself, including for return flights (with the exception of a pair of the farthest). Some statistics per day:
  • Up to 1800 trolleys are loaded for 200 flights (this is 1.3 tons of food) for 30 thousand passengers (12 thousand receive full meals).
  • 940 end-to-end indicators (here itā€™s more understandable, mainly this is the time of operations and temperature).
  • 6.7 tons of water, 2.4 tons of blueberry juice (so far only Finnairs carry blueberry juice on board).

Experimental kitchen for developing recipes and training cooks (when for the same Japanese airlines you need to cook, first theory, then work with a Japanese chef together, then under his supervision, then yourself):



This is how the reception looks:



Food from trusted Finnish suppliers isnā€™t driven through an introscope. It is assumed that if the supplier is good and the batch is sealed, then it is safe. But even apples come in individual packaging:



Cold shop:



Hot shop:





Refrigerator (trolleys are here):


On flights, non-standard breakdown by food: 40% of the consumption of fish portions. Food is loaded on expectation, the error is balanced by the fact that the crew does not choose a portion, but eats what the passengers did not choose. But the pilots are always two different portions, as usual.

All food is designed to crawl under the camera door to enter the standard tray of the trolley and be stored for 24 hours. The process looks like this: the boss receives a list of restrictions, a list of supplier products and thinks what to do. And then it becomes 4 menus: one for the time of year. Next year, dishes change by a percentage so that passengers ate different things.


Juices come ready and load like that. Snacks too. What is important, manufacturers have long been well aware of what happens to their products during air travel, so on board they all inflate from low pressure, but do not burst.


Salt and spices are put in about 1.4-1.5 times more than on the ground. Testing of dishes before selling is carried out on crews and kitchen staff, they on the ground know how the taste will change in the air.



Most of the preparation of food about logistics is to get the right products, collect food from them on cards, pack, refrigerate, deliver to the board on time and so on. Considering what is being prepared for the entire airport, it is impressive. More precisely, it is impressive how they manage to pass peaks in moments of bad weather. When a strong crosswind begins, flights are delayed and all logistics become unstable. Because at some point it will be necessary to download everything at once. And given that Finnair is proud of its punctuality, these situations must be handled. In 95% of cases, there are schemes of the kitchen in different modes, and for the rest - there are emergency layers! In general, when any event manager has a problem with food, puffs are used. Here they can quickly rivet sandwiches or get any pastries out of deep freeze.And everyone will be happy. There is still something like dry packs.

A non-standard menu is done this way: if it can be prepared in the kitchen, it is cooked as usual, but simply not in thousands. But if you canā€™t, then you can order a restaurant in the city. Kosher meals must be ordered in advance, the restaurant will be warned in 24 hours, the dish will be delivered in 10-12 hours, then loaded with the rest. That is, non-standard portions are stored longer.



When there were school weeks, school meals were served on board - it was cooked in the kitchen. They took the best food school in Turku, exchanged experiences, updated the recipe to meet the requirements of flight meals, and began to serve.

What exactly in the ratings determined Finneira's coolness?


Skytrax World Airline Awards are measured by passenger reviews and targeted surveys. To rise high, you need to have, for example, online: an understandable site where you can quickly find everything, a quick, obvious ticket booking procedure, and quick registration. But the plane does not have a tattered interior, to maintain cleanliness, to maintain a normal on-board library of films, to maintain the overall level of crew service, to feed tasty or a lot, make seats more comfortable and with a greater distance and so on. Of the latest updates, the company made Wi-Fi (from 4.95 euros per hour for several megabytes in instant messengers), updated its business rooms, washed down this application from a post higher (than they took a lot of points in online dispatch), poured into the on-board library a bunch of films, magazines, books, newspapers. Again, from the buns - the system of updating the air in the cabin,there are many options for lighting (there is a "northern lights"), fully folding seats in the business on long-haul flights.

For the JACDEC safety rating, the number of accidents and incidents is multiplied by the risk factor (roughly speaking, one incident for 10 years in a flat airport or two in an airport with a difficult terrain), weather in the directions, fleet age, route network, IOSA audit results ( it is something like Rospotrebnadzor IATA) and ICAO. That is, a high line in the rating is, rather, processes and maintenance of conditions, and not a well-established history.

That's all for today. Thanks to the head of Finnairā€™s representative office in Russia, Maria Anufrieva, senior customer service manager Marina Presnyakova, communications manager Manti Vyataynen-Pereira, Evgeny Cheremnykh, Timo Lekhtikvari from the development team and Merrier Alhol from the training center. Right here in our corporate hub most of all about transport.

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