Tech Writing

[Lu Romero - W4LT]

Having worked on two separate occassions with folks from
that area of the world on site, I can relate to the second
story. I will never forget my first encounter with a Saudi
Men's Room.

OK, one from me before the plug gets pulled.

On my first sojurn out of Broadcasting in 1980, I became a
partner with a former post production client and a software
developer in a company that did video/computer based
training courses as a subcontractor for a Flight Simulation
company.  One of our projects was cabin attendant emergency
proceedures training courses for Fokker F-27 and F-28
airliners.  We were a three person company.  For my part of
the work, I did everything, wrote, produced, directed,
edited, shot; My ex client did the sales and business and
the other guy did the computer integration and programming
for the laser disk based system we developed.    

We really wanted to be the best at this, so we did lots of
study as to how people learned from our courses (it paid
off, our client bought us out and we all made a few
dollars!).  In our research, we found that the cabin crews
from Zimbabwe Airlines absorbed the training exceedingly
well and passed all our courses with the highest averages of
all the airlines that subscribed to our service, which was
surprising, as among them was KLM, Ansett, USAir and
Finnair, all much bigger companies.  Obviously, someone at
Zimbabwe Airlines was serious about making their cabin crews
the best at emergency proceedures.

So my partner had the bright idea to invite the Head of
Cabin Crews and a senior Stewardess to come visit at our
offices in Pittsburgh to find out how they got so good at
emergency proceedures.  He could have done this over the
phone, but he was big on "sizzle" and "face time", and I
didnt want to go to Africa with him, as it would have  put
me behind on other project deadlines.

These two people (the male was 22 and the female 19) show up
after a very expensive and long flight from Harrare on our
nickel, and we sit down and begin the interview.  I started
the video recording and my partners and I went over how
impressed we were with their level of training and how happy
we were that our program was providing them such great
service.  We were especially impressed with their prowess at
manually lowering the landing gear on the Fokker 27
turboprop, a complex operation that most crews rarely did in
actual service.  And their crews were all very young and
relatively inexperienced, which also amazed us.  How did
they get so good at this stuff?  

They looked at each other and looked back at us with
perplexed faces, and then the Cabin Crew Cheif said:  "Mr.
Jordan, Mr. Romero, Mr. Moon... We dont understand... We
have to lower the gear manually quite often on our F-27's.
You see, hydraulic failures, electrical system problems and
pressurization loss are quite normal in daily operations.
We thought this part of the training was rather trite, as
these things happen all the time.  We always wondered why
you called them emergency proceedures?"

To Zimbabwe Airlines, emergency proceedures are standard
operating proceedures. And practice makes perfect! Cabin
crew emergency proceedures become normal when aircraft
maintenance is non existent.

Some of the stories they told were incredibly funny in
retrospect, but chilling at how they cheated death by
airplane on a daily basis. Moral of the story: Never fly on
Zimbabwe Airlines!

I wish I had saved that videotape!

-lu-W4LT-
K3, P3 (in assembly)


-------------------


|Message: 15
|Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 01:01:15 -0700
|From: Chuck Smallhouse <[hidden email]>
|Subject: [Elecraft] Tech Writing
|To: [hidden email]
|Message-ID:
<[hidden email]>
|Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
|
|Before Wayne or Eric cuts this topic off, I'd like offer a
bit of humor.

 



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