"Summary" of Our Final Exams

November 7, 2013

You might be able to tell from the frequency of my blog posts, I’ve decided to stop studying for class haha.  So far, it’s gone very well for me.

We had a quiz on evacuations this morning.  At this point, I have to be honest, I can’t think about the other things we did during the day because I’m so freaked out by the information I was just given.  Summary of the day, we worked on emergency medical situations – diagnosed patient symptoms and later practiced CPR on children, babies and adults.

Ok, so on to the important information.  At the end of the day, they told us about our final exams.  The exam is split up into two parts – an EME and an IOE.  For the EME, we are paired up with other people and put on an airplane simulator.  We pretend that we are on a real flight and during the flight, the instructors can throw different situations at us.  The “situation” can be Anything we’ve covered during training – from pre-flighting the emergency medical equipment, reading a flight manifest, dealing with non-compliant passengers, decompressions, evacuations, medical situations, etc… Anything we’ve talked about is fair game.  While this may not sound like a lot to you, we have covered a Substantial amount of material in the past 3 weeks and after each test, I promptly do a brain dump.  I can’t remember where all of the emergency medical equipment is stored on the A320 aircraft, let alone how to preflight it all!  In addition to that, I found out I’m paired with John, who I’ve never done a single scenario with.  At least to my benefit, John is a very hard worker and is detail oriented.  He is very focused and studies a lot more than I do, so I know that we will be over (and not under) prepared.  Some of my friends were paired up with people that I will call…. a bit absent minded, to put it nicely, so I’m thankful to not be in that situation.  So for the EME, John and I will be in an E190 simulator and we will be judged on how we act as individuals AND how we perform as a team based on the random scenario’s given to us. 

The second part of the test is call an IOE and I’m not sure what it stands for, but basically, we will be a Really flight attendant on a Real flight.  According to the FAA, our exam flight must be at least 5 hours long (omg).  The way my company designs it, we will watch an IOE coach on the way to our destination, have a short layover and then the flight back to Orlando, we will be the full flight attendant.  During the flight back, our coach will be grading us on everything we do.  Our instructors keep saying, “you are prepared for this!  You know what you’re doing!”.  However, I feel like I’m having a panic attack and I don’t feel ready!!  I can’t believe in a few days, I will be acting as a flight attendant on a real plane with real passengers!  To add to my stress, I found out that my IOE flight is going to Costa Rica!  Sounds amazing and I’m excited to go to a new country, however, I will be going to a Spanish speaking country (English speaker only here) and I will also have the added stress of dealing with customs paperwork (there are additional protocols for international travel).  I’m semi freaking out.