I'm a former flight attendant with Compass Airlines, which is a regional company that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Northwest Airlines. Compass has made the news a few times since it's inception in July of 2007. It's had a few emergency landings for reasons such as failure of the landing gear. But the latest reason the company's in the news is really a scary thought. A flight attendant has been charged with setting a fire aboard a civil aircraft, which carries a possible max. sentence of 20 yrs. Seems that lil' Eder Rojas, 19 of Woodbury MN decided that he didn't like having to work the schedule of trips from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada very much. He deliberately set a fire in the rear lav of the Embrear 175 on May 7th, 2008, forcing an emergency landing in Fargo, ND because the cabin was filled with smoke. He told authorities that he brought a cigarette lighter through security at the MSP airport and after setting the fire in the trash can of the rear lav, stowed the lighter in an overhead bin on the plane where it was later found.
What I can't understand is why fool didn't just call in if he didn't want to work that route?! Being that I've been trained on that particular aircraft by that company, I know the inner workings of the fire detector and extinguisher systems in the lavs. I don't see how the fire could've gotten as bad as it's said to have been unless he found a way to by-pass the fixed halon extinguisher that is literally in the trash can itself. But what's really crazy about it all is this isn't the 1st time he's had a "fire" in the lav on a flight that he was working. The 1st incident was a little while ago, I won't say the exact timing of it because I'm unsure myself. But a friend of mine who still works for the airline as a flight attendant says that he was on the same route when there was a fire in the rear lav of the plane, and they had to make an emergency landing, where I'm not sure, but he was made out to be a "hero" for putting it out so quickly. I look at it like this: From having an insider's view of the company and knowing more than the average jane, I can say that they really need to screen the applicants more thouroughly from the beginning. I know for a fact that at least half of my training class should not have been there for many reasons. The hiring age set by industry standards is typically 20 or 21 as a minimum, and at Compass you can get on at 18. This allows people who aren't yet mature enough, such as this lil BLEEP, to be hired. Second, they just recently had a training class where several people were fired due to not knowing how to read and/or write! Now how the HELL do you expect to save someone's life if you can't even read the sign on the handle that tells you how to open the door in case of an evacuation?! AND, they've hired several people who are just flat-out mentally unstable. I had a few of them in my training class, lol. But at the same time, you get what you pay for. When you start people at $15.00 per hour for the 1st 6 mos, then go to $17.00 per hour, and only give an additional $1.00 per hour raise each year, what do you expect? I know this may seem like alot to the average person, but typically you only work, or rather only get paid for, 80 hours per month. Traveling all the time costs money for food, clothing, and you have to keep your appearances up to standards, which can cost you a pretty penny each month as well, especially for a woman. Panty hose alone could cost you more than $50 a month because I've never had a pair that I could wear more than once while working. They get caught on everything and run all the time. But I digress, lol. It's the above reasons why this airline has had this issue to come about. I think they're conducting open houses in mental wards across America and hiring every psych job in the US to be a flight attendant. It's scary enough for passengers on commercial flights as it is. Most still feel threatened by terroristic hi-jackings, planes colliding mid-air, and crashing in general. Now they must be alert for the flight attendants, who are supposed to protect them, being upset about they're schedules for the month and setting fire to planes 30, 000 feet in the air!!!
