Last week, readers of the New Yorker were treated to a paean to Irish airline of the year (that’s a pretty small field to choose from…) Ryanair, the king of ultra-no-frills flying. (Read the Gridskipper summary, since the article isn’t online.)

But Ryanair was also recently treated to an undercover investigation by the UK’s Channel 4. This is old news (the show aired in February), but the video is available online now. Click below to watch — it’s about 45 minutes long. (I admit I haven’t seen it all, yet, but some of the video is downright scary. My early favorite: The trainer asserting that passengers seated in 1A aboard Boeing 737-200s are definitely going to perish in case of a crash, because of the placement of the stair handles. Flight attendants should therefore not ask these people to assist in case of emergency, because they’re goners… none of which is true.)

The company responded to the network with a series of correspondence, disputing some of the charges, which you can read (series of pdf’s) on the Ryanair website.

The video is a disturbing insight into the training and life of Ryanair flight attendants. Even more disturbing than Hochschild’s book on Delta’s flight attendant training in the early 1980s, The Managed Heart, because passenger safety, and not “only” the well-being of airline employees, is in play.