I’ll be the first to admit, I have probably flown half a million miles before I finally found out what “arm doors and cross check” actually meant. Just like every occupation, flight attendants have their own set of lingo that many flyers don’t actually understand. Sometimes they are mistaken as gossip about passengers, but a lot of times they actually pertain to safety and in-flight services.
A few weeks ago, Qantas published a list of abbreviations commonly used by their cabin crew. They call it Aviationese. Here’s a few:
CONFIG: Layout of the aircraft including how many seats in each different passenger cabin
CSM: Customer Service Manager – the most senior member of cabin crew onboard
CX: Cancelled. (Sorry…)
ETOPS: This is approval for certain types of aircraft with two engines to fly long distances over water and stands for extended range twin engine operations, not to be confused with EFTPOS (cheque or savings?)
FOD: Foreign object debris – this is anything like rubbish or material that is found on the airport taxiways and runways and could potentially damage tyres of the aircraft. No one likes FOD, so that’s why airports do “sweeps for FOD” on a regular basis.
Just recently, they followed that up with a blog post about some more cabin crew slang, with a video to go along with it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGiXxAEp4GM
I am constantly amused by the slang that flight attendants use, and I think knowing them actually makes for pretty good entertainment during the flight! How many of these did you know?
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