Must-Watch: Fly High Institute Nagpur Training Videos

I just can’t stop watching these videos, as they’re so good… or something.

Fly High Institute Nagpur training videos

Fly High Institute seems to be some sort of a customer service training academy based in Nagpur, India, designed largely for people who want to become flight attendants. I’ll talk more about that in a bit, but first let me share what makes me so interested in this place.

More from OMAAT Air Greenland Acquiring Airbus A320neo To Fly Between Ilulissat & Copenhagen Read more

Fly High Institute has a huge presence on Instagram, and has over 250K followers, with some of its videos getting well over 10 million views. Why are so many people interested? Well, the company posts all kinds of airplane training scenario videos, and they’re… very entertaining.

Essentially the students of Fly High Institute are supposed to show how they would resolve all kinds of customer disturbances.

For example, take a look at the below scenario where “an absent-minded old man forgets his phone at airport security,” and totally loses it.

This guy seems to be a problem passenger, because in another clip he demands a cup of water, and gets really angry when the flight attendant doesn’t bring it fast enough. This is captioned with “elderly passengers tend to have lower levels of patience.”

This man also apparently suffers from a low blood glucose level, because “people with low blood glucose levels are more likely to throw a tantrum.”

Then there’s this seat recline dispute, where one very self-important person is doing very important work on her laptop, and another very self-important person needs to rest because he has a very important meeting and didn’t sleep much the night before.

Then you have the lady who demands the crew immediately get out of her way so she can use the bathroom, then she sits in the flight attendant jumpseat and refuses to move, until the crew offers her a better seat.

Then you have a situation where there’s turbulence, so the crew advises passengers that they need to stay seated, and that hot drink and food service has been suspended. A man pushes the call button and demands a hot coffee and something to eat. He tells the crew to mind their own damn business about safety, and just focus on getting him his hot coffee.

This is an interesting approach to training

I often comment on how flight attendants in the United States are often very bad at deescalating situations, and immediately resort to threatening to have someone removed from a plane, calling the police, etc.

But my gosh, the scenarios here seem to have the opposite extreme, where the flight attendants just let passengers walk all over them and abuse them. It seems their deescalation method is to basically just let people continue being jerks and abuse them until they calm down.

These passengers are just absurdly hostile, and need to be put in their place. Is it just me? From watching these videos, my takeaway would be that the way to get what you want on an airline in India is to just be a complete jerk and keep yelling until they give in.

I’ve written in the past about the Pan Am training videos from back in the day, and I think those strike a much better balance between providing professional customer service and showing empathy while not being trampled all over.

Is this how flight attendant recruiting works in India?

Videos aside, I think this raises an interesting broader question about flight attendant recruiting in India. Here in the United States, if you want to become a flight attendant, you just apply directly with an airline. Customer service or airline experience is always a plus, but there’s no need to attend any sort of flight attendant training school. Rather all training is provided by the airline, once it’s decided that you’re the right candidate.

Fly High Institute has all kinds of videos of proud graduates, emphasizing how parents made big sacrifices for their kids to attend Fly High Institute, and get their dream job as a flight attendant. Fly High Institute’s website even claims that many airlines recruit from the institute, ranging from Air India, to IndiGo, to SpiceJet, to Vistara.

To those knowledgable about flight attendant recruiting in India, I’m curious, is this the standard? Do most people who want to become flight attendants first attend a for-profit flight attendant training school in hopes of being recruited by an airline? Is it hard to land a job as a flight attendant without attending one of these institutions?

Bottom line

If you’re an aviation geek, do yourself a favor and watch the training videos from Fly High Institute Nagpur, a customer service training school in India. I’m not sure what to make of all of this, other than that I can’t stop watching these videos…

What do you make of these Fly High Institute videos, and the approach to customer service displayed?