Why the cabin crew keep their arms behind their backs when greeting passengers

If you’re an experienced traveler or just an attentive person, you may have noticed that cabin crew always keep their arms folded behind their backs when greeting passengers and when walking the aircraft cabin. When doing so, they also don’t appear to check that seat belts are fastened or that passengers’ phones are turned off.

It turns out there’s an important reason for this, and we at Bright Side are going to tell you what it is.

It’s really quite simple: before take-off, the cabin crew need to count the number of passengers onboard. This takes place either as they enter or when the passengers have all sat down. The cabin crew use a special counter to do this:

The cabin crew keep their arms behind their backs when doing the counting in order to not attract too much attention to themselves.