Why Cabin Crew should ALWAYS write up an incident - no matter how small!

October 6th 2026

Happy October everyone, and thank you for joining me, once again, as I moan and whinge about the events of the month before!

I’m only joking, of course. I really do hope that isn’t how my blogs come across, but I have to admit, I do find my monthly recant a good way to get a few things off my chest!

So, here we are. Autumn is upon us, the shops are full of Halloween and Christmas, and I’m still feeling quite nostalgic for those long summer evenings.

Heck, it will only be a couple of weeks before the clocks go back and we’re back to our fluffy socks, with the heating on, and telling ourselves that we actually quite like the cosy evenings, won’t we?

Because that’s what we do. We make the most of things!

Now, I have to admit, I’ve begun writing this with absolutely no idea where I’m going with it, so I hope it comes together somewhere along the way.

I’ve had a week off too, one of the upsides of being part-time, and I haven’t really given flying a second thought since I left Heathrow... was it seven days ago? Eight? And that is one of the true beauties of this job.

We never really take it home with us.

Nobody expects you to pick up a call on your day off. There isn’t a laptop sitting accusingly on the kitchen table, reminding you that you should probably just log on for ten minutes. And there’s an unwritten rule that you absolutely do not check your work emails until the next time you fly.

Because, well, receiving a haughty email asking you to explain why 27G has claimed that he wasn’t offered a single drink for nine hours can really ruin a perfectly good day off. Not that we get those very often.

And the truth is, Betty in Customer Relations is generally just looking for something to write back to them. She probably doesn’t believe that 27G spent nine hours parched and abandoned while the entire crew deliberately walked past him carrying trays of beverages and laughing.

But still.

It can feel personal.

You find yourself standing in Tesco three days later thinking, I bloody did offer him a drink! He was asleep! What did he want me to do, prise his mouth open and pour it in? And nobody needs that kind of negativity while they’re trying to decide what to have for dinner.

So, no.

Work emails can wait.

If I’m going to be offended by 27G, I’d much rather do it on company time and not on my days off.

I did have a customer once who made a terrible fuss when we accidentally knocked his head with the trolley. I mean, he did seem to poke it out at precisely the moment we passed, but you’d have thought we’d been travelling at full speed by the yell he made. Honestly, the whole cabin turned around.

He demanded ice, insisted there was a dent in his head when not one of us could actually see one, and required quite a lot of attention for what, to our eyes at least, appeared to be a fairly minor bump. But we dutifully fussed over him, offered first aid, documented everything and made sure he was okay.

And then, of course, a week later came the email. Apparently, he had suggested that he’d been offered no first aid whatsoever and was now threatening to sue the airline for his immeasurable suffering and injuries.

Well, you can imagine the messages between us that day.

Thankfully, we had all done exactly what we were supposed to do. Reports had been submitted, everything had been documented and there were enough witnesses to confirm that he had, in fact, received plenty of attention. We all sent in our versions of events and then we never heard another thing about it. I suspect it was thrown out, but who knows?

What I do know is that once something like that has happened to you, you become much more vigilant. Write everything up, even when they tell you they’re fine. Offer the first aid anyway and make a note if they decline it. Make sure somebody else knows what happened, because nobody wants to be sitting at home a week later trying to remember whether the man in 32A had an ice pack for twelve minutes or fourteen while he claims the trolley took half his skull off.

And now, suddenly, I’ve remembered something from last month that actually is worth telling you. It’s funny, isn’t it, how a little trip down memory lane can trigger another memory?

Yes, Hyderabad.

It’s somewhere I don’t fly to very often, and we carry national crew on those routes to help with the language barrier and the cultural differences, which can make the flights quite different from some of the others we operate. But I have to say, one thing that always overwhelms me is the stoicism of so many of the passengers, especially the elderly ones.

They board with their sweet smiles, often with very little English, settle themselves into their seats and just get on with it. Some of them will sit cross-legged for most of the way to London, barely asking us for a thing, and then we land at Heathrow after all those hours in the air and you discover that London isn’t even their final destination.

A wheelchair is waiting to take them straight through the airport to another flight which, more often than not, is heading somewhere in America or Canada. So after nine or ten hours with us, they might have another seven, eight or even ten hours ahead of them, and all because they’re going to see a son or daughter, or perhaps to meet a new grandchild, thousands of miles away.

And they just get on with it. No moaning that their tea wasn’t hot enough, no asking how much longer there is to go every twenty minutes, no complaints that they’ve been travelling since yesterday and still have another flight ahead of them. Just a smile and a thank you.

I find it incredibly humbling, especially when I can barely make it through a twelve-hour duty without announcing to anyone who will listen that I’m exhausted, while some little eighty-year-old grandmother beside me has already been travelling for eighteen hours, has another eight to go, and is still smiling because at the end of it she gets to cuddle a grandchild she might not have seen for a year.

How selfless is that? And actually, how bloody impressive?

Well, it was one of my elderly ladies who had an unfortunate accident with a cup of tea, which somehow slipped straight off her table and into her lap.

And I could see from her face that it was painful too. Your skin must be so much thinner when you’re one hundred and five years old. My rough estimate, of course. She was probably more like seventy-five, but either way, I knew I had to help her.

The problem is that sometimes our first aid training doesn’t really prepare you for the practicalities of every situation. For burns, the instruction is simple: cool the affected area with water for at least twenty minutes.

Fine.

But what the manual doesn’t explain is the best, or indeed the most dignified, way to achieve that when the affected area happens to be an elderly lady’s delicate parts.

Well, I can tell you exactly how it played out.

Half the crew were on rest and our only national crew member was male, so there I was, Susan the Sorter, unravelling yards of sari in the confines of a tiny aircraft toilet to reveal an old lady’s vagina, gently manoeuvring her down onto the toilet and then casually pouring bottles of water over her for the next twenty minutes.

Honestly, the situations this job puts you in.

She didn’t speak a word of English either, so we couldn’t even have one of those awkward little conversations that might have made the whole thing marginally less bizarre. But I can promise you there was a full-on dialogue taking place inside my head throughout.

Right, sorry about this. I know we’ve only just met. Yes, I appreciate this is rather intimate.

No, this isn’t usually included in the service. Just another seventeen minutes to go...

Meanwhile, she simply sat there looking up at me and giving me these sweet little smiles which I swear said, I have absolutely no idea why you are doing this to me, but you are wearing a uniform and therefore I must comply.

Bless her.

I do hope she understood what was happening. Aman definitely tried to explain it to her beforehand, and she seemed happy enough to let me carry on, but I do sometimes wonder whether she might actually have preferred us to just give her the bottles of water and let her get on with it herself.

Still, the burn was cooled and, thankfully, she didn’t need to be wrapped in Burnshield afterwards, a practical challenge I’m not entirely sure my training had prepared me for. Her dignity was restored as best we could, and she returned to her seat seemingly none the worse for her unexpected encounter with Susan the Sorter.

And, most importantly, it was all documented.

Because I’d learned my lesson from the man with the dent in his head.

Once she was safely dressed and back in her seat, I wrote the whole thing up in probably far more detail than anyone would ever need and then simply tried to forget about it. Because if Betty in Customer Relations ever did receive an email claiming that I had stripped an elderly lady half naked in the toilet and poured bottles of water over her against her will, I wanted her to have all the facts.

Thankfully, Betty never came calling.

But here I am, several weeks later, dragging the image of an elderly lady’s vagina back into my mind just so I can tell you the story. It’ll probably be there all day now too, just as it stayed with me until I finally fell asleep on landing day.

There are some things that are incredibly hard to unsee, don’t you think? And for me personally, a disproportionate number of those images seem to have come from my job.

But that’s part of why we love it. No two days are ever the same. We cross paths with more people than most people working in a normal job ever will. We see things, hear things and do things that we never would have done had our lives not taken this route. Something completely crazy will happen on one trip and you’ll think you’ll remember it forever, but it’s never very long before something equally ridiculous, touching, terrifying or downright bizarre comes along and overshadows it.

And that, I think, is the thought I’ll leave you with this month.

Whatever craziness today threw at you, you got through it. And whatever tomorrow throws at you, you’ll get through that too.

Preferably without having to apply Burnshield to anybody’s vagina.

Much love,

Susan