by Meghan Daum
This is called a turnaround, a day-and-a-half stint during which this crew will fly from their base in Philadelphia to San Francisco and then to Charlotte before returning to Philadelphia. We are on a Boeing 757—a “seven-five,” in airline speak. All of the flight attendants are in their thirties or forties, four are women, three of whom are married, and two are men. All have been flying for at least ten years.
To contemplate what it means to be a flight attendant for ten or more years is to consider, after getting past the initially ludicrous notion of serving drinks at 37,000 feet, the effects of the relatively recent, popular tendency to put flying in a category that also includes walking and driving. To say that flight has become pedestrian is something of a Yogi Berra-ism. But to say that air travel has infused itself into the human experience without leaving marks or building up potentially problematic immunities is to view technology in a Pollyanna-like manner that may have gone out of fashion when applied to phenomena like the Internet and surveillance cameras but continues to thrive in the realm of travel. When it comes to technology’s hold on our quality of life, cyber porn may be insidious, but jetliners are by now almost quaint, older than Peter, Paul, and Mary, as common as the telephone.
This is true and not true, a dilemma that often emerges when, as is the case in air travel, the glorious evolves into the stultifying and we are forced to come up with ways to re-experience, if not the original novelty, some form of entertainment. This is where the flight attendant appears onstage. When flying began, she was part of the show, as slick as the aircraft itself. Even through the 1970s, passengers were moneyed and expensively outfitted; ladies wore gloves on DC-4s. To deplane using a movable staircase was, for a moment, to do as rock stars and presidents did, and respect was paid accordingly. The idea has always been that the persona of the flight attendants should reflect that of the flying public. In that respect, little has changed. The only difference is that today the flying classes seem a little more public than in the past. The flight attendant, too, is given to the bad manicures and bad perms of any girl next door. She’s still part of the entertainment, it’s just that this is a lower-budget production. This may gnaw at passengers, but those holding $99 tickets to Miami may do well to look at the larger picture. Perhaps the flight attendant wouldn’t remind us so glumly of the girl next-door if so many of us didn’t live close to the airport.
Still, passengers pay attention to flight attendants, not during the safety announcements, when they’re supposed to, but later, while flight attendants are eating dinner or reading Cosmo or doing normal things that are somehow rendered out of sync because of the uniform. During our five hours and twenty-six minutes to San Francisco, we hit some “light chop” twice—airlines discourage pilots from using the word “turbulence,” which frightens passengers—and the seat belt sign goes on. Passengers get up anyway. They visit the flight attendants in the galleys. They ask for playing cards and more drinks and hand over their garbage to be thrown out. Wayward business travelers amble around the first-class galley and take stabs at the same kinds of conversations they impose on people sitting next to them. “Where do you live? Do you like it there?” and then “Could you get me another drink?”
Even as he accepts an empty pretzel bag from an unshaven, Reebok-wearing passenger, Carl, who is working in the main cabin tonight, manages to put a spin on his role as service provider. “We’re a few notches below celebrity status,” he says. “The moment people see a crew member, their eyes are on you constantly. People will come into the galley and just stare while you eat dinner. You have to watch everything do you and say.”
Carl is thirty-six and has been a flight attendant with US Airways for twelve years. I am asking him questions in the aft galley (“aft” is used to describe anything located behind the wings) where he and Jim, his friend and colleague, have fashioned a seat for me out of a stack of plastic crates because I’m not allowed to sit in the flight attendant-reserved jump seat. They have poured salad dressing left over from first class into a plastic cup and are eating it off of their fingers. “We have a needy bunch tonight,” Carl says. “But not as bad as if we were going to L.A. Certainly nothing like Florida.”
A lot of call buttons have been ringing tonight. A lot of people cannot seem to figure out how to use their headsets to watch the in-flight screening of Tomorrow Never Dies. A fleshy, spacy eleven-year-old boy repeatedly visits the aft galley asking for more soda, more peanuts, some ice cream. “You’re a pretty demanding kid,” Carl says with just enough smirk so that I notice but the kid does not. Carl and Jim disagree as to whether the boy qualifies for the unofficial passenger shit list that is compiled on every flight.
“He’s a pain in the ass,” says Carl.
“No, he’s obviously slow,” says Jim. “I feel sorry for him.”
Still, no one is punching anyone in the nose tonight. No one has threatened a flight attendant with bodily harm or become obstreperously drunk or engaged in the sort of activity that would merit a presentation of those restraints stored in the cockpit. The fact that these sorts of incidents are ascending at an alarmingly steep angle, mostly for those pesky reasons having to do with the invasion of a public mentality into what was once perceived as a private space, dominates much of what is written and discussed about flight attendants these days. It is part of the reason that I am here in the aft galley dipping my finger in salad dressing tonight, the other part having to do with discerning whether the deglamorization of the job is the cause or the symptom of all that aggression.
What is at first most noticeable about flight attendants is the chronic disorientation that follows them both on and off the job. With work space measured by aisle widths and hours either stolen or protracted by virtue of time changes and date lines, flight attendants occupy a personal space that must prove stronger than the artificial and ever-changing scope of “real” time and geography. Flight attendants are always tired and usually bored and, though they are required to wear a working watch at all times, understand distinctly the difference between knowing what time it is and feeling what time it is. A forty-five minute break on a transatlantic flight demands the ability to fall asleep instantly on the jump seat. They must learn to literally sleep on cue.
But there is another layer in the psyche of flying that transcends the burdensome working conditions of flight attendants. It’s a set of notions that has a lot to do with life on the ground and yet can best be unpacked by examining the ebb and flow of life on an airplane. Just as air pressure will make one martini in the air equal two on the ground, the malaise of modern life extends its claws in cartoon-like proportions on an airplane. It’s a sickness aggravated by tiny bathrooms and recirculating air and laptop computers that allow no excuse to take a break from work. “What I hate is when passengers won’t put the computer away when I try to bring them dinner,” Theresa, a sinewy Mexican-American flight attendant for US Airways, tells me. She is in the first-class galley eating chocolate syrup out of a plastic cup. “They never look up, never take a break to enjoy the flight. They never just look out the window and see how beautiful it is.”
This is a disease of plastic and its discontents. It is what happens when sleep becomes a greater novelty than gravity defiance. It is what happens when the concept of New York to London seems more like changes in a movie set than a journey involving thousands of miles of empty sky, five degrees of longitude, an ocean. It is what happens when the miraculous becomes the mundane, when we are no longer amazed by flying but bored by it at best and infuriated by it more often than not. And it is this hybrid of nonchalance and aggression that has largely come to define the modern air traveler. It’s what causes passengers to punch, slap, spit, swear, make obscene gestures, grope, and fling food at flight attendants and each other. It’s what makes people dismantle smoke detectors, throw tantrums when they don’t get a meal choice, and threaten to get a crew member fired over such infractions as not having cranberry juice. That the flight attendant must act as an a
gent for the big, impenetrable aircraft as well as for the small, vulnerable passenger is both a corporate conflict and a metaphysical conundrum. As boring as the airplane may be at this point, its technology remains distancing and unnerving, sometimes even terrifying. And whether the flight attendant is aware of it or not, her duty is to bridge the gap between the artificiality of the cabin and the authentic human impulses that play themselves out in that cabin. She has to shake her ass yet still know how to open the exit door.
The more tangible reasons for her condition have to do with numbers. Every year more seats are squeezed on to planes, seat width has become narrower, flights are oversold, and cheap tickets attract passengers that would otherwise be taking the bus. Flight attendants blame the overcrowding on federal deregulation, which occurred in 1978, and essentially legislated that airlines were allowed to spend as little money as possible per flight as long as they did not violate federal safety standards. This introduced significantly lower ticket prices; it costs an average of twenty-four percent less to fly today than before deregulation.
Out of this was born the era of the $99 ticket. It also meant an abrupt end to luxury air travel; the pillbox hats were traded in for unwashed hair. “We’re taught in training that people can’t get on board if they have curlers in their hair or no shoes on,” said Tracy, another US Airways flight attendant. “And if they have to publish that [in training manuals], that’s frightening.”
“They show up wearing jogging suits,” Carl says. “And I doubt that they’re wearing any underwear under those things.”
“I hate it when people in the exit row put their feet up on the bulkhead,” a Delta flight attendant told me a few weeks later. “If you were a guest in someone’s house, would you put your feet on the wall?”
It seems like such a small complaint, but then again this is the sort of gesture that shapes the psyches of those who work in the air. This is not her house. And yet it is. This is not a house at all, and yet it’s the place where a huge number of people spend a huge amount of time. As more and more Americans carry the detritus of earthbound life to this tube in the air, measures must be taken to make them feel at home without allowing the frontier to become lawless. “When the door closes, we must play every role,” said Britt Marie Swartz, a Delta flight attendant who began her career at Pan Am in the late 1970s and actually cooked eggs to order in 747 galleys. “We’re doctors, lawyers, travel agents, therapists, waitresses, and cops. No one would demand all of that from a normal person.”
* * *
The first thing aspiring flight attendants learn when they attend a recruitment meeting at the American Airlines training school near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport is that, if hired, they will make a base starting salary of around $14,000 a year. The second thing they must do is fill out a lengthy questionnaire designed to give recruiters an idea of their basic character makeup. When I visit the training facility, I am not allowed to see this questionnaire, although I am told that the nature of their answers will lead to what interviewers call “probing points,” wherein candidates are asked to talk about themselves in ways that may or may not indicate personality traits incompatible with airplane social dynamics. “There was one grammar outburst,” a recruiter says as he emerges from an interview. “I think I detected a double negative.” Although I must sign a release saying that I will not print or repeat any of the questions asked of candidates, I am allowed to print the answers they give. And as I spend an hour watching a sweet and painfully sincere twenty-four-year-old from Arkansas hang herself on the basis of about two answers, I am amazed at what an art the recruiters (all of whom are former or working flight attendants) have made out of selecting their coworkers. The candidate, carefully outfitted in an Arkansas version of a power suit, complete with Fayva-type pumps and a neckerchief, seals her fate based on the following responses:
“I would say ‘I don’t find that type of humor funny’ and walk out of the galley,” and, “If nothing else worked, I wouldn’t lie. I guess I would say, ‘Your feet seem to be causing an odor. Can you please put your shoes back on?’”
The woman is sent back to Arkansas with the promise that she will be notified by letter within six weeks, which means that she most certainly will never be hired. Though the recruiter, who looks and speaks almost exactly like the weatherman on my local ABC television affiliate, cannot put his finger directly on what turned him off to her, he tells me it has something to do with apparent inflexibility.
During the week that I observe training, I spend most of my time with a class of sixty students. They have been selected from an original pool of 112,000 applicants, all but 4,000 of whom were eliminated via an automated telephone screening system. American has one of the most rigorous training programs in the industry—flight attendants from other carriers frequently refer to them as the “Sky Nazis”—but it is also among the most sought-after employers, both for its reputation and its pay scale, which is high by industry standards.
The training facility is an awe-inspiring complex. Occupying a large building next door to the flight academy, it contains a hotel, conference center, and salon, as well as a multitude of offices, lecture halls, and several life-size cabin simulators. The simulators, which fill up large rooms, look like movie sets of airplanes. They hold real seats, real galleys, and real doors. The windows are filled in with painted renderings of fluffy white clouds. The flight attendants practice serving real food to their classmates and are observed closely by their instructors. Part of their training involves getting accustomed to erratic hours and last-minute schedule changes; their day can begin as early as 3 A.M., and individual students often receive telephone calls in the classroom from a mock scheduling unit, which informs them that drills or simulated flight times have been reassigned. Business attire must be worn at all times. This means jackets and ties for the men and no skirts above the knee for the women. Flight attendants both in and outside of American have referred to this training program as Barbie Boot Camp. New hires consult at least once with the American Airlines salon manager, who suggests suitable hairstyles—the French twist is especially popular—and teaches the women how to apply makeup, which is to be worn at all times during training. Several of the students privately refer to the image consultant as Sergeant Lipstick, who is known to keep tabs on the freshness of application.
Throughout the week I am escorted at all times by a representative from the corporate communications office, an impeccably groomed and perfectly nice woman who leads me through an itinerary that has been set up specifically for me. Almost all of the classes I observe have to do with aircraft evacuation. One class involves food service, another is centered almost entirely around a device called the Automated External Defibrillator, which American recently acquired for most of their overseas jets and which, I am told several times, many other airlines do not have. To my disappointment, I have apparently missed the phase of training that involves personal appearance standards. When I ask twice if I can relocate to the hotel at the training center in order to interview the experienced flight attendants who are housed here for their annual recurrent training, I am subtly put off both times; like a demanding passenger, I am denied my request without ever hearing the word “no.”
It seems to me that flight attendant training has relatively little to do with the actual job of flight attendant. Although the trainees have ostensibly been hired based on a vibrancy of personality and the good sense not to say “I don’t find that type of humor funny,” there is something so sterile about the vibe of this education that it’s hard to imagine how their lessons will ever mesh with the reality of dealing with actual people in the actual sky. In an entire week of observing classes, I never once hear the word “crash.” Instead, a strange semantic code seems to be in place. Several times I hear the term “crispy critter,” which, apparently, is what the flight attendants will be if they can’t maneuver a clear path through fire. “If you do not go through the protected area and there’s a fire,” chirps
an instructor at seven-fifteen one morning, “who’s the crispy critter? You!”
Though American may have earned its “Sky Nazi” wings by maintaining a somewhat overzealous tone when it comes to corporate culture, their personnel bear little resemblance to the “coffee, tea, or me” drones of the past. Recruiters say that they work hard to hire crews that will reflect the demographic makeup of the passengers and from the looks of things, they’re succeeding. The class I observed had several men and women over forty and a number of people of color, including a thirty-six-year-old former North Carolina highway patrolman with two children who said he just always wanted to fly. “The times that I’ve felt down about being here, I just go to the airport and watch the planes take off and land,” he says in a group interview that’s been set up for me by company supervisors.
That’s a poetic sentiment, and American Airlines doesn’t mind that kind of sound bite. But the theme music they really want played is all about “customer service,” a term that the company repeats like a mantra, much like the Boy Scouts’ “Be Prepared.” Things get tricky, however, when it becomes clear just how difficult it is to uphold Ritz-Carlton-like service philosophies in an arena that is accessible to almost all walks of life. Customer service may be the gospel here, but it isn’t necessarily the law. “Our company no longer holds fast to the policy that the customer is always right,” says Sara Ponte, a flight attendant recruiting supervisor. “If a passenger consistently causes a disturbance, then that’s not a passenger we want on our airline.” Although no one at American will confirm or deny any rumors, company myths have it that a few celebrities, including Kim Basinger and Charlie Sheen, have been banned from the airline because of in-flight misconduct. Basinger’s tantrum was allegedly sparked after she was refused ice cubes made from Evian water.