At 1000am on 6th May 2012,
My mind is obsessively dwelling on an observation that I have been making while inside the aircrafts on the past several flights that I have undertaken. It is about the awkwardly clumsy manner in which flight attendants attempt to serve in-flight food/snacks to passengers, especially if the flight duration is short. Don’t airlines look at innovations and use lateral thinking to make the lives of their cabin crew and those of their customers better?
Firstly the design of the container boxes that are used to stock the food trays and transport them along the aisles! It looks like these were designed many decades back when air travel was undertaken by far fewer numbers, all cabin crew were agile and nimble “twenty somethings”, and customers more patient. And then to the whole process of serving food! Today one is more likely to see mid-aged flight attendants call out across to another colleague across the aisle for a replenishing a particular type of food packet (veg / non-veg), or rush towards the end of the flight to nervously pour tea or coffee into a plastic cup. It is also a common sight to see the clumsiness and long-winded process for collecting the trays and cups back, and putting them away into the container boxes. This also leaves very little time and flexibility for the cabin crew to serve in other ways to passengers who may need help (to think that for a whole 45 minutes that food is being served, passengers are dissuaded from walking up or down the aisles even to go to the toilet!).
So where is the solution or set of solutions?
To begin with, I strongly suggest that the day for re-designing of the container box to accommodate for easy storage, retrieval and reloading of food trays, at chest height of the cabin crew, clear labelling of tray compartments using colour codes, as well as automating through a system of levers and pulleys, the internal movement of tray compartments so that the physical back-breaking efforts of cabin crew (to withdraw trays or load back empty trays) are minimised, has arrived. It is all not rocket-science and would not be capital intensive.
There could be other sets of solutions that are employee-friendly, customer-friendly and environment-friendly. All it needs is for all stakeholders to think laterally and collaborate.
Hoping that airlines are already working at such solutions, I wish you all a more comfortable and pleasant flights in the future. Wishing you also a great week ahead.
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