Med-View Airline and its Foreign Cabin Crew!

I’ve been accused of blogging once in a 'pink' moon, so here’s one for the New Year!

(image courtesy www.travelscopeng.com)

From my corner at the waiting lounge of the Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport in Abuja, I keep staring at the Med-View Plane that had just arrived from Lagos. My mind tries to process why the plane has the EU logo and that of another country imprinted on it. I try even harder to recall what the Med-view logo actually is; the blue wavy stripes at the tail of the plane do not seem the least bit familiar! Perhaps Med-View has commenced flights outside Nigeria, I conclude.

Soon enough my flight to Lagos was announced. We go through the normal security process and that’s when I see the first one. At the door of the aircraft is a Portuguese young man to tell you where your seat is. I have never quite made sense of the need for direction on a local flight. How much help is ‘your seat is to the right’? And while I’m at it, I have also never made sense of the seat belt in an aircraft! Were the aircraft to make a Flash Gordon spin, the seat belt would by no means hold me to my seat.  

Anyway, back to the Portuguese at the door of the aircraft. I’m thinking the Portuguese young man is the pilot but then the aircraft has other Portuguese ladies and gents strutting the aisle of the cabin, ensuring everyone is seated, plus the young man serves refreshments later, so he’s not the pilot.

So now I’m as confused as my friend was when she sent me a message some weeks back saying “Why does med-view have a foreign cabin crew?” with a confused smiley to match her confusion. Once I settle in, I quickly pull out my blackberry and type ‘Now I see what you mean. The foreign cabin crew is weird and so is the light Portuguese music playing while we wait for take-off’ on second thought, I typed even more ‘were it not for the size of the plane, I’d think I was heading out of Nigeria’ then I let the recessive paranoia created by watching too many movies come to the fore and I add yet again ‘what if they kidnap all of us? Just fly us out of Nigeria instead of out of Abuja?’  Don’t blame me. Like I said, it’s the result of watching too many movies and rescue mission series.

As I turned off my phone and sat through the shaky flight, rather than sleep all the way to Lagos as planned, I decided to share my curiosity and seek your thoughts. Are we the weird ones (My friend and I) for finding the foreign cabin crew on a local flight, for a local airline, weird? Where are the ladies and gents of the former Nigerian Cabin Crew? Do they still have a job? Have you flown Med-View recently? What do you think?

Oh and P.S: I settled on the Portuguese heritage of the crew because of the in-flight magazine which chronicles the heritage of Euro-Atlantic Airways. Apparently the wavy blue stripes happens to be their logo and so is the crew, whose uniforms have Euro-Atlantic airways on them.

Please note that I haven’t criticized or judged Med-View airlines, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the need for a foreign cabin crew on a local flight, and the impact on existing jobs.