Thanks for this very informative post. We've seen from the CCR thread that BA do watch this board. It's good to see that the service wasn't terrible and that they were trying.

The issue of the safety video and cabin lights is very basic and would apply whether it was Jet2 or Singapore Airlines -the safety demo should be broadcast at an audible volume, and cabin lights MUST be dimmed for takeoff and landing during dusk and darkness.

I guess that the lights on the widebody aircraft are operated like the a/c -by 'zones' -meaning that they can dim, say, the club world upper deck but not the main deck, or turn the traveller cabin lights on but not the First cabin, and so on. It may be that the CSM dimmed some zones but not all, but I'm not sure how this would be done on a 747. You would have thought that one of the 13 other cabin crew members would have bing bonged the CSM and told her that the lights weren't switched off in their area!

All CSMs have experience as senior crew on some carrier or another -and it's just amazing that they seemingly don't know how to dim the lights. I imagine that working with the Airbus (with both touchscreens and older control panels), Boeing 777s and 747s might get confusing, but this is just basic. They even dim the lights on Ryanair (saves £££ too!)

And as for bringing a croissant with bacon and egg on the same plate...that's just done because they don't know what the correct procedure is, or maybe because they don't know what plates are meant to be used for what.

It seems to me that whatever training is given, it's not up to scratch. It's all very well training people how to wear their uniform, and what order to do the service in, but is there any actual hands-on, assessed, training to show them what a sideplate is, where it is loaded in the galley, what side it should go on etc? There must be an aircraft manual to show crew how to dim cabin lights and work the IFE etc -I'd be amazed if there wasn't. If the CSM is never told that what they are pressing isn't dimming the lights then they'll never know! I would rarely if ever say anything to crew about poor service, but things such as a safety demo that can't be heard isn't good enough and needs to be dealt with straight away. If there was a problem with the video system, they should have done a manual demo. But again, the other crew shouldn't just stand there and acquiesce if something so important isn't being done right -safety is a shared responsibility and any one of them could and should have intervened.