I’VE only been hanging out at cabin crew school for a few minutes and already I’ve learned the answers to a lot of questions. Questions like: why aren’t there more male flight attendants? Which is the worst on a flight: a stag do or a hen do? Can turbulence kill you? And maybe the most important question of all in 2018: why on earth do female cabin crew still have to wear make-up and skirts?

The answers to the questions come thick and fast from a feisty, funny group of students working towards the air cabin crew diploma at City of Glasgow College. Basically, these students, who are all 18 years old or thereabouts, want to fly in planes for a living and this is the best place in Scotland to learn how to do it: a full-time, one-year course with its own almost full-size, fulling working flight cabin.

Today, the group is learning about one of the ways that it can all go wrong at 10,000ft when a passenger starts to get aggressive. The teacher, a former flight attendant herself, Caroline Stevenson, shows the students the right body language to adopt: confident and assertive but not aggressive. Everyone here has seen how much some people drink before a flight so everyone knows that there will come a day when they will need to remember this lesson.

The group has also been learning about what to do in the more serious situation when a plane is forced to do an emergency landing. One of the students on the course – and the only man – 18-year-old Harun Karim from Stirling tells me the group was divided into passengers and staff and told to act out the emergency in the mock-up plane. It was pretty intense, he says. Lots of shouting. Lots of screaming. It felt real.

So I ask Harun and the other students why, when they know that they could face a situation like this for real, they want to do this job. Sheryl Tippen, who’s 19 and from Airdrie, says that naturally she had concerns, but that, thanks to the course, they now know the facts: cars are more dangerous than planes. Sheryl does admit though that she used to hate turbulence. “I’m all right now though,” she says, “because I know all the ins and outs. You learn about turbulence and the fact that it could never bring a plane down.”

What all the students are less fine about is some of the clichés and stereotypes that still hang around the job. That the job is glamorous, for example, and a succession of five-star hotels. Or that all the men flight attendants are gay. And then there’s the most persistent stereotype of all and the one everyone brings up when I ask what bugs them about the image of cabin crew: that they are “trolley dollies”. I ask them if they feel the job gets the respect it deserves and they all shake their heads.

The course teacher Caroline, who became a flight attendant in the 1990s and worked for First Choice, deals with the clichés one by one, starting with the one about gay men.

“Of course, there are gay men who are cabin crew,” she says. “But the idea that all the men are gay is a total fallacy. I don’t know why it’s happened.

“The other stereotype is the blonde bimbo with a trolley, but if people knew the tears and work of the training, they wouldn’t say that. I got the trolley dolly thing 20 years ago. Someone said to me ‘oh, you’re just a glorified waitress’ and I said ‘I don’t know any waitresses who spend eight days in the Bahamas.’”

The students are warned, though, that the search for a glamorous life is not a good reason to join the course, and, in fact, the job has got tougher than it was. Some cabin crew do have frequent stays away in beautiful places and they never stay in anything less than a four-star hotel when they are away, but Caroline believes that pay and conditions are not what they were at some airlines.

She says some mixed fleet staff, who fly a combination of long and short haul, are paid a third of what full-time staff were paid 20 years ago. She, and the students, also object to the practice of some airlines who charge for training.

Elaine Barker, who has been cabin crew for 26 years and currently works for Tui, agrees with this assessment. Elaine regularly comes in to speak to the students at the college and sees it as her job to be encouraging but to be realistic too about what the job means day to day.

“Now all companies are the same,” she says. “It is unfortunately all kind of money orientated maybe. It’s all sales and targets. Sometimes you think they’re a wee bit unachievable but it’s your job to be into the cabin to promote things for the passengers to buy and achieve these targets.

“If something happens outwith your routine – a faint, a heart attack – it’s my job to maintain the service. There can be one person down, sometimes two, but that service still has to continue.”

Some of the other changes Elaine has noticed have been more positive: there are many more men working in the job now, for instance – but what surprises me is one of the ways working as cabin crew hasn’t changed – on the whole, women are still required to wear skirts and make-up.

The girls on the course seem fine with it – 18-year-old Emma Russell, for instance, tells me that it’s part of representing the company and that reputation is important. Elaine Barker also thinks anything less would look unprofessional. “They like to see the girls well dressed and well groomed,” she says. “They might say: if they don’t bother about that, do they not bother about other things?”

Teacher Caroline is not so sure and thinks it’s time for change. “I do agree with you about make-up,” she says. “Why do you have to wear it – it makes no difference about how you do your job and in 2018 that is quite an old-fashioned idea.” The fact that all the women wear make-up may also feed some of the clichés we were talking about? “You’re probably right,” she says. “I would like to see the make-up rule change.”

Caroline would also like to see even more men coming into the job, which raises an important question for the class. Why (with one exception) are they all women? A few of the students say it’s because guys will face accusations about their sexuality, although the only man on the course, Harun, says it was never an issue for him and there are many more men than there used to be. Caroline is also working to attract more male students by getting male cabin crew to come into the college to talk about their work.

Experienced cabin crew, such as Elaine, are also on hand for students to tell it as honestly as they can: this can be a tough job and some of the restrictions are tough. Some of the rules you can’t do anything about – you must be at least 5ft 2in tall, so you can reach the overhead lockers – but there are other bottom lines. You have to be good at maths, for instance, so you can work out the exchange rates on duty free; you also have to be able to swim.

The other skills the teachers will teach you on the course, one of the most important being how to cope with people who are getting out of hand. One thing the students have learned is that alcohol has a more intense effect on a flight because the decreased pressure diminishes the body’s ability to absorb oxygen – essentially, it can mean that one glass of wine can have the effect of two or three. And, as we know, that can end badly.

Elaine says it can be frightening when people get too drunk, particularly if it is a group that have drunk too much.

“The hen dos are worse than the stag dos,” she says. “Very much so.” But don’t hen dos bond with crews that are mostly female? “No, the complete opposite because they see you as ‘who does she think she is?’” There are good procedures in place, though, says Elaine, that start at check-in; there also police patrolling the bars, although Elaine would like to see more controls on what passengers can take on board.

“I do think the duty free shops have to take responsibility,” she says. “Duty free now sell miniatures – again, they will have targets.” What about changing the rules to restrict people’s drinking before they get on a flight? “No, I don’t think so,” says Elaine. “Everyone who flies is an adult and is responsible for themselves.”

And, even though things can get out of hand, Elaine and Caroline would still thoroughly recommend cabin crew as a career. Elaine says you have to be honest with students and tell them that the job is not “glam” and that there are pros and cons like any other job, and Caroline says companies are definitely tightening the screw and cutting back on longer stays abroad. But for Caroline, it is still a great way of expanding your horizons and boosting your confidence. “There are a lot of things about the airline industry that I still think are fantastic,” she says.

And the hope for the students on this course who want to get into the industry is that what they have learned will give them the edge when they apply for jobs. They might not get all the respect they deserve – cultural clichés like trolley dolly are pretty hard to shift – but there are good reasons this course has a waiting list. For Harun, it’s all about getting a job now and getting up into the air. “This has got me even more excited,” he says. “I’m desperate now to get a job and start flying.”