"Flight Attendants Prepare for Arrival and Crosscheck"

An aft door on an Airbus A-319.  The yellow lever with the red cloth "tail" on it is where you would "arm" and "disarm" the emergency slide on this door.

Have you ever been on a plane and upon arrival at the gate heard a flight attendant announce over the public address system, "Flight attendants please prepare for arrival and crosscheck," and wonder to yourself, "What in the hell is a crosscheck, and why are flight crews so obsessed with them?"

Is a "crosscheck" violent?  Does it hurt?  What happens if you don't "crosscheck?"  All good questions.  You've come to the right place.

Upon arrival at the gate, if you were the "A," or Senior flight attendant, the first thing you would do is make the arrival and crosscheck announcement to the rest of the cabin crew, and then disarm the forward door, deactivating the emergency slide, on the left, front side of the plane (1L).  You would then turn around to the door on the other side of the aircraft, the 1R door, and confirm the other flight attendant had disarmed the slide on that door.  You would then both say to each other, "your door is crosschecked."  You are double-checking that the emergency slides on each door have been disengaged and can not accidentally deploy while the airplane is parked at the gate.

Then you would stay at the door and wait for the agent to open the door.  We were trained NEVER to open an Airbus door ourselves from the inside, unless in an emergency, because if the emergency slide wasn't deactivated it could rapidly deploy out onto the jetway, likely injuring the gate agent.  On most newer aircraft, if the door is first opened from the outside by an agent, the slide will be deactivated. 

Despite this simple procedure and copious training, inadvertent slide deployments occurred several times a month. 

(I only witnessed one slide deployment - when a cabin cleaning person opened a door they weren't authorized to open without disarming the slide.  The whole plane shook as if we were experiencing an earthquake.)

This is what could happen if you didn't "cross-check."

Any aircraft incurring an inadvertent - that is, non-emergency - slide deployment is unable to fly until the deployed slide has been removed and replaced.  If you're in a large maintenance hub, which in my case meant Pittsburgh, Philadelphia or Charlotte, this could often be accomplished in a couple of hours.  This still meant the flight was most likely canceled.

If a deployment occurred at an outlying, smaller station such as Albany, Norfolk, Kansas City or Sacramento - it meant you were, and this is a highly technical aviation term, "totally screwed."  Your long overnight at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, probably the reason you took the damn trip in the first place, just turned into a short overnight at the Best Western Airport Inn in Albany, New York.

As Flight Attendants, we were always told by management that an inadvertent slide deployment costs the company, on average, $40,000.  That included the cost of replacing the slide and accommodating passengers on the flight that canceled.

The flight attendant found responsible for the slide deployment - the flight attendant who did NOT "crosscheck" and make sure their assigned door was unarmed upon arrival - would be required to fly down to Charlotte, North Carolina and attend a two day refresher course before they could return to active duty.  Not fun.

If my memory serves, my airline averaged two slide deployments per month when I was there - a figure that could, and did, skyrocket in the first six months to a year after the introduction of a new type of aircraft.

That's a "crosscheck" in the airline business.

Now in ice hockey, a crosscheck is a two-armed horizontal push of your stick into an opponent's body.  This crosscheck often does hurt and results in a two minute minor penalty.  For this, you must go to the penalty box for two minutes and feel shame.  But it will not result in an unscheduled overnight in Albany, unless you're playing the River Rats of the AHL.

On behalf of this entire San Jose based flight crew, we'd like to thank you for joining us today.  If you're future plans once again call for reading material, we do hope you'll come back and catch our smile.

Flight attendants please prepare for the end of this blog post...and crosscheck.