A MANUFACTURER-HOSTED FORUM OPEN BEYOND ITS OWN FLEET

Bombardier has held the fourth annual Flight Attendant Safety Summit in Montreal, expanding the event to two days for 2026 with an additional half day added to accommodate further sessions and professional development opportunities. The summit is presented in collaboration with Bombardier’s Safety Standdown event and is open free of charge to flight attendants, managers, directors, chief executives and pilots, regardless of the aircraft type they fly.

The open-attendance model is the aspect most worth noting. A manufacturer hosting safety training accessible to crews operating competitors’ aircraft treats cabin safety as a sector-wide standard rather than a product differentiator — an approach consistent with the Safety Standdown programme from which the summit derives, and one that addresses a structural gap in business aviation, where flight attendants frequently work for small operators or single-aircraft flight departments without access to the recurrent cabin safety infrastructure that scheduled carriers maintain in-house.

Chris Milligan, Vice President of Pre-owned Aircraft Services and Flight Operations at Bombardier, said what began a few years ago had become a premier forum for flight attendants in the corporate aviation industry, bringing together flight attendants, safety professionals and industry leaders sharing a common goal of strengthening the standards, knowledge and collaboration that keep passengers and crews safe.

PROGRAMME CONTENT

The 2026 programme spans safety leadership, hands-on evacuation training, security realities and medical emergency response. Named sessions include ‘ICAO Initiatives in Advancing Cabin and Passenger Safety’ presented by Darlene MacLachlin, Technical Officer for Human Factors at the International Civil Aviation Organization; ‘From Take-Off to Touchdown: Children on Board’ by Georgi Hester, Early Years Consultant at Norland; a ‘Bombardier Instructors Masterclass in Cabin Safety’ by Lynnette McCoubrey, Bombardier’s Chief of Cabin Safety and Training; and ‘Behind the Smile: The Safety Power of Flight Attendants’ by Melanie Folcik Barillaro, Senior Aviation Accident Investigator.

The inclusion of an accident investigator on the programme is a meaningful element of the agenda. Cabin crew are frequently the source of the survival factors evidence in an investigation and the first responders in an evacuation, yet accident investigation findings more often reach flight deck training than cabin training. A session delivered by an investigator directly to cabin crew closes that loop. The ICAO session similarly connects working crews to the standards development process that ultimately governs their procedures.