A personal note from Mateusz Maszczynski on why The Cabin Crew Forum was created.
I was not the obvious person to become cabin crew.
I was coming from a completely different career, my CV was badly out of date, and I had no idea how to present myself for a job in the real world. My first instinct was to hire a professional CV writer. I paid around €150 for the privilege. It was, to put it charitably, a disaster. The CV they produced was generic, poorly structured, and completely wrong for cabin crew applications. At the time, I did not know enough to realise that. I only found out the hard way.
The first airline I applied to was Emirates.
Six Attempts, Multiple Countries, One Golden Call
My first Emirates Open Day was an eye-opener. The room was packed, the energy was overwhelming, and I was cut at the very first round. I had no idea why. I had prepared as well as I thought I could, turned up looking the part, and walked away with nothing.
Like most people in that situation, I turned to Facebook groups. And in those early days, they were genuinely useful — not so much for practical advice, but for the emotional reality check. Seeing hundreds of other people describe exactly the same experience was oddly reassuring. The process was brutal, subjective, and often felt random. Knowing that helped.
What those groups could not give me was a reliable approach. So I started researching properly. Not skimming articles but going deep — reading everything I could find about how recruitment actually worked, what assessors were trained to look for, and how automated screening systems were already sorting CVs before a human recruiter ever laid eyes on them. Most candidates had no idea this was happening. I did not either, at first.
It took six attempts and Open Days in multiple countries before I got the Emirates Golden Call. I am not going to pretend that was purely down to skill. By the final attempt I was significantly more prepared, significantly more confident, and knew the process inside out. But I also got lucky with a different recruiter on a different day. That is the honest version. The process is genuinely subjective, and sometimes the room you are in matters as much as the candidate you are.
Leaving Emirates and Starting Again
When it came time to leave Emirates, I found myself back at the beginning in one important respect: I needed to apply for jobs again. This time, though, the landscape was different. European carriers were not Emirates. They were not selecting for a specific look or a specific nationality. They were selecting on ability — could you show, with specific real-life examples, that you had the skills the role required?
That needed a completely different approach to the CV, the application, and the interview. I went back into research mode. Days of it. I had to essentially relearn how to write — not just update a CV but understand what it was actually trying to do, and how to put it together so that both automated systems and human recruiters could pull out the right information quickly.
When I got the job at a leading European carrier, I stopped and looked at what I had built up. Months of research. An approach that worked. A set of interview techniques I had tested in real applications at real airlines. And a clear picture of what was out there for candidates who needed this kind of help.
What the Market Was Offering — and Why It Was Not Good Enough
The Facebook groups I had relied on early in my Emirates journey had changed. They were increasingly filled with AI-generated posts featuring glamorous images of Emirates cabin crew and advice along the lines of “wear this lipstick colour and you might get through.” Some of it was well-meaning. Most of it was noise. None of it was grounded in how recruitment actually works.
Meanwhile, a whole industry of online courses had sprung up. Pay a fee, watch some videos, receive a certificate that meant nothing to any airline recruiter anywhere. Some of these courses were charging serious money for advice that was, at best, generic and, at worst, actively misleading.
Some of what you will find on CCF might seem less exciting than the glossy content on other sites. That is deliberate. Glamour gets clicks. Accurate information gets people jobs.
I had spent months building something better than any of that. It seemed wrong to put it behind a paywall or dress it up as a course. So I did not.
The Experiment
The Cabin Crew Forum started as a free resource. Everything I had learned — how to write a CV that gets past automated screening, how to answer interview questions in a way that actually works, airline-specific knowledge built from being in those rooms — published openly, for anyone.
But I wanted to know whether it actually worked beyond my own experience. So I kept applying. Not to airlines I intended to join, but to airlines whose recruitment processes I wanted to understand. Could the approach I had developed at Emirates transfer to a completely different carrier with a completely different process? Could the interview techniques I had refined in Europe work at airlines I had never flown for?
The answer, consistently, was yes.
That gave me something most cabin crew advice sites cannot claim: an approach that had been tested across multiple airlines, multiple countries, and multiple recruitment formats — and that I could be honest about when it did not work. Emirates, as I have written elsewhere on this site, has a recruitment process that is genuinely hard to prepare for in conventional ways. The subjectivity is real. No amount of preparation guarantees a Golden Call, and I will not pretend otherwise.
What CCF Is — and What It Is Not
The Cabin Crew Forum is not a course. It is not a guarantee. It is not a collection of AI-generated tips dressed up as insider knowledge.
It is a free resource built from real experience — from Open Days attended, interviews passed and failed, CVs written and rewritten, and a genuine determination to understand how airline recruitment actually works rather than how it appears to work from the outside.
The advice here is the advice I wish I had found when I paid €150 for a CV that did not work and walked out of my first Emirates Open Day wondering what had just happened.
It is free because it should be free. Information that helps people build careers should not sit behind a paywall.
Where to Start
If you are new to cabin crew recruitment, the Ultimate Cabin Crew Recruitment Guide is the right place to begin. It covers the full process from CV to final interview.
If you are preparing for a specific airline, use the navigation to find the relevant airline section — the content is organised by carrier so you can go straight to what is most useful for where you are in the process.
If you want to understand how to answer interview questions in the way that recruiters actually want to hear — and the way that AI scoring systems are built to reward — start with the SOAR guide.
And if you are preparing your CV, the free templates are a good starting point. They are free. Obviously.