What is one job you are certain you would be bad at? For me, the answer is easy: flight attendant. I don’t like to fly, I would look terrible in a uniform, and I have no idea how they stay so fresh looking over long hauls. Somehow I still associate glamour with the job, a holdover from the “just below Hollywood standards” days of Pan Am stewardesses that I have seen depicted in period dramas. I had never thought much about the mechanics of the job before I read Heather Poole’s Cruising Attitude.
First, some fun facts. Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu both married flight attendants. One large airplane, the DC10, has an elevator. (It leads to a galley.) And the length of a flight attendant’s skirt can indicate her seniority.
How does a person get to this place? Turns out it’s not so simple. Ninety-six percent of applicants never get a callback for a flight attendant job. In 2010, Delta received ten thousand applications for a thousand job openings. Those that do are sent to training (nicknamed the charm farm) where they learn how to be presentable. Their clothes, handbags, and rollerbags are all regulation and deducted from their first paychecks.
Poole recounts the class of sixty she trained with. Day after day, they received medical and weapons training, memorized the complex floor plans for different aircraft, and learned how to quickly serve food and beverages. This last one can be surprisingly stressful given the time constraints of short flights.
Once trained (many candidates are eliminated before graduation) the beginning class must navigate their reserve years, in which they are often called on with a moment’s notice to assist other cabin crews. Poole vividly depicts a crash pad in Queens shared by dozens of crew. Sleeping in bunk beds and showering in ten-minute shifts, they had to race off to find their flight with the aid of the local taxi service.
This entertaining memoir gave me a whole new appreciation for this job. The next time I fly, I will make a point to thank my crew. What I won’t do is address them by name. According to the author, this is always a telltale sign that the passenger wants a favor.
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