by Meghan Daum
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Herein lies the central conflict of flight attendant training, and it is the conflict that factors most heavily into the larger identity crisis of airborne life. Cabin crews are supposed to maintain an aura of exclusivity by making passengers feel special. But how can this be done when the very customers they’re trying to please are anything but exclusive? By definition, the public is not private, nor are flight attendants high-priced personal assistants who consider the maintenance of freshly starched shirts a higher priority than feeding 173 people in under one hour or, for that matter, being able to evacuate 173 people in less than ninety seconds. That airlines continue to advertise themselves as luxury watering holes that, it so happens, will get you across the country in five hours is both a disservice to the flight attendant and one more way that the passenger is distanced from the actual concept of flying. Singapore Airlines, which is considered to have the highest level of customer service of any carrier in the world, has long touted their flight attendants as their major selling point. In the 1980s, the airline’s slogan was “Singapore Girl, You’re a Great Way to Fly.” While it’s doubtful than any United States carrier could get away with this kind of ad copy, all flight attendants carry the burden of this kind of public image. They are expected to represent the sex in their airline while remaining utterly nonthreatening. They are symbols of technology and symbols of flesh, and this is where their religion and their rules begin to come unglued.
When new hires are asked to leave American Airline’s training program, they always disappear instantly. Students can be eating lunch together only to find a classmate gone permanently an hour later. In this class of sixty, seven left early, some for reasons no one quite understands. When I try to talk to the students, they happily accommodate my questions until they realize that everything they say will be within earshot of my escort from corporate communications. A woman waiting to practice a drill tells me that she was forced by the company salon to cut her hair and now feels bad about it. Back in the classroom, half an hour later, she clams up on me. When I press her, she finally slips me a note that reads “I can’t really talk now.”
Though I cannot be sure, I have inklings that my escort from corporate communications is keeping an eye on me when I visit the ladies’ room. We eat lunch together every day. We walk down every corridor together. As I throw questions at anyone I can find she lingers next to me, reducing every flight attendant to the bland politeness of the first-class cabin. Though my escort has offered to pick me up at my hotel and drive me to the training center every morning, I have a rental car and assure her that I can find my way on my own. One afternoon, after parting ways in the parking lot, we get separated by a few cars as we pull onto the road that leads to the freeway. As I drive along I notice that she’s pulled over to the shoulder so I can catch up. “How nice,” I think to myself. “She’s making sure I don’t get lost.” Hours later it occurs to me that she might have been making sure I didn’t sneak back to the training center to interview people without her. I had indeed considered staying behind by myself, only to discard the idea for fear I’d be sent home.
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Back on our US Airways flight to San Francisco, I learn that Carl and Jim have a penchant, during mid-flight seat belt checks, for taking note of male passengers who have fallen asleep and developed erections. They then go into the galley and whisper something in the neighborhood of “Check out 26C” and send other flight attendants, one by one, to do the old corner-of-the-eye glance while moseying on by. This is considered a necessary distraction and an entirely acceptable way to wile away the hours. They also play a game called “Thirty-Second Review,” wherein they have thirty seconds to walk through the cabin and make a note of the seat number of the passenger they would most like to have sex with.
As I research this story, I am told about flight attendants who work as prostitutes on the side, flight attendants who give mid-flight blow jobs to pilots, flight attendants who are transsexuals, and flight attendants who carry separate business cards for their drag queen personae. A friend of mine can tell a story about a flight attendant who gave him a hand job in the business-class section of a 747 during her half-hour break on a flight from New York to São Paulo. A cab driver who took me home from the airport a few months ago described meeting a flight attendant on the way to Orlando and shacking up with her for a week at a hotel near Disney World. “Of course, I had to pay for everything,” he said to me as we careened over the Triborough Bridge. “She had it all figured out.”
None of these actions or examples, weighed on their own, register enough scandal to send the airlines into collapse. As sensational as some of them are, these are the exceptions that prove the rule that most flight attendants are regular people with regular aspirations, many of which do not require business cards at all. But the fact that such tales are recounted so readily, both by people outside of the job and by flight attendants themselves, reveals a trait that is shared by just about everyone who works in the air. As the remoteness of the sky threatens to render them something less than human, they have no choice but to make themselves almost exaggeratedly human, hyperreal characters who rely on wild behavior and raunchy mythologies in order to outsmart the numbing effects of the airplane.
These stories, apocryphal or not, serve to sustain humanity inside the artificiality of the tube. A particularly dark plotline involves the widely held belief that the so-called Patient Zero, to whom over forty of the first AIDS cases were traced back, was an Air Canada flight attendant named Gaeten Dugas. More common are ambitious passengers seeking membership into the Mile High Club. Carl recalls a couple from Dayton who sheepishly offered him $20 to allow them to enter the lavatory together (he waived the fee). An American Airlines flight attendant recounts what he swears is a “true rumor” about identical twins who worked as flight attendants for Eastern Airlines in the 1980s. The sisters worked together on wide-body aircrafts like the DC-10 and L10-11 that had lower level galleys accessible from small elevators, which could, in effect, be locked by keeping the door open downstairs. Together they would solicit a male passenger and take him down into the galley for clandestine three-way sex. Afterwards, they would serve him champagne.
Such rituals have been in place since the inception of commercial air travel. Pan Am stewardesses regularly taped centerfolds to the backs of safety cards when flying United States troops on military-contracted flights to Vietnam. Even into the late 1970s, flight attendants on Pacific South Airlines wore uniforms that featured miniskirts and go-go boots. The difference today is that these rituals are played out on the sly. As airlines fight harassment and discrimination lawsuits, keeping strict watch over potentially solicitous pilots or questionable behavior on layovers, these antics are mind games more than parlor games. There is considerably more talk than action going on. The influence of gay male culture cannot be ignored either. It is perhaps no accident that stereotypically gay male styles of social behavior seem custom-made for the flight attendant lifestyle. “For a lot of the gay guys it’s been a wonderful ride,” says Carl, who came out the same year he began flying. “The airlines have been a friendly atmosphere for being ourselves. But it’s more social than sexual.”
Jim, who is also gay, is quick to jokingly add that there is no better job for him because he is gay. This is a valid point, but not in the way that probably first comes to mind. While there are plenty of male flight attendants who are not gay, the cabin is dominated by an unquestionably campy sensibility; the boys help the girls with new hair styles, the girls loudly evaluate the boys’ asses. It’s a vibe that points toward the tolerance on which flight attendants pride themselves. But it also scratches the itch of their central contradiction. They are at once erotic figures and cartoon characters, raunchy talkers who wouldn’t be out of place in the cast of Up With People. Their penis jokes have the ring of a junior high school cafeteria; words like “meat” or “fruit” cannot be spoken without some degree of sophomoric innuendo. Flight at
tendants live in a state of permanent chaos, and thrive on it. Unlike their passengers, whose systems are still adjusting to the transient new world, the flight attendant has successfully adapted to surroundings that are neither here nor there. For better or worse, she represents the nervous system of the future.
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Kew Gardens, Queens, near JFK and LaGuardia airports in New York City, is the sometime-home to approximately two thousand flight attendants and pilots. I visit an apartment complex that houses two hundred of them in dorm-like apartments that are cleanly furnished with drab sofas, Formica dinette sets, and the perfunctory $24 halogen torch lamp. The building’s landlord actively seeks out airline personnel, who each pay a monthly rent of $150 for their maximum stays of seven days. Each unit has two or three bedrooms that hold two sets of bunk beds with the exception of the errant, single-occupancy pilot’s room, one of which is elaborately outfitted with stereo equipment, a computer, and a wall-mounted, large-screen television affixed with a Post-it that reads “Seinfeld 11:00.” A lot of pilots, however, drift in and out of a nearby place nicknamed Animal House, which is considered a prime spot for crew parties and fraternity-style debauchery.
But things are pretty calm tonight in unit C-2, where several flight attendants, many of whom have just returned from places where today is still yesterday, are gathered in the common room watching The Weather Channel. Janet is thirty-eight, divorced, and worked on the ground for Delta until she got a company transfer and began flying in 1993. She commutes to this crash pad from her home in Atlanta, and, like many of her colleagues, admits that her transient lifestyle can get in the way of her personal life. A typically prepubescent maxim in aviation goes like this: “What does AIDS stand for? Airline Induced Divorce Syndrome.” For every crew member who relishes the personal space inherent in her job, there is another who feels her relationships have been sabotaged by it.
“A lot of the girls from my class are divorced now,” she says, finding herself unable to keep from getting up to refill my drink before I even finish it. “Guys you meet think it’s kind of fascinating, the whole mystique of being a flight attendant. I dated a guy who I swear wanted me to wear my uniform when we went out. But they don’t really want to have a relationship with someone who is gone so much. They’ll come home at five o’clock and you’re not there.”
Later we go across the street to Airline Night at the local dive bar. There are hundreds of flight attendants and a few scattered pilots ordering two-for-one drinks and rubbing each other’s shoulders. Even out of uniform, there is something about the crowd that is unmistakably airliney. With their clean fingernails and neat hair, they seem like they come from nowhere, as if they’re extras in a made-for-TV movie. Like people in an airport, they are a smorgasbord of regional accents and styles. Though most will fly together only rarely, they tend to touch each other a lot, giving bear hugs and wet kisses and pulling familiar figures aside saying, “I remember you from the seven-two, a couple years ago.”
Not unlike the main cabin of an airplane, this bar is jammed with representatives from every town in every state. Hired to assist and identify with the country’s disenfranchised, disoriented air travelers, the primary job requirement seems less about handling an emergency than diffusing the side effects of hours spent in the hothouse that is the plane. Very few say they fear an accident, and most maintain a Zen-like philosophy about the possibility of crashing. “I figure when it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go,” a 32-year-old flight attendant named Len says. Of all the flight attendants I spoke with, about half had experienced incidents like engine explosions or faulty indicator lights that required returning to the airport. Within that group, only a tiny fraction had ever evacuated their plane. Britt Marie Swartz says that early in her Pan Am career she was scheduled for a trip that she had to cancel at the last minute. “The plane crashed. After that I was never afraid. I figure my time will come when it comes.”
* * *
No one is allowed to die on an airplane. The worst thing you can do to a flight attendant is try to die on her. It won’t work. She’ll have to give you CPR no matter how evident your passing may be. Upon making an emergency landing, after they cart you away, the plane will be impounded. There will be the inevitable lawsuits.
“We are told unofficially that no one is allowed to die on the airplane,” a Delta flight attendant in Kew Gardens told me. “Maybe they died on the jetway, but not on the airplane.” Flight attendants are not allowed to declare death, and doctors, if there are any on board, are often reluctant to speak up when called for because of liability issues. In 1997, Lufthansa lost a one-million-dollar lawsuit against the family of a man who had died of a heart attack on the plane.
There is an unparalleled creepiness about airplane deaths, perhaps because we most often associate them with the gothic horror of news footage when there is a crash. But while air crashes occupy a far larger place in the popular imagination than they do in realistic odds, medical emergencies are relatively common. Every flight attendant in this story described situations which were sometimes harrowing enough to rival an episode of ER—strokes, seizures, childbirth, psychotic reactions to drugs, broken bones, a catheter that needed to be changed in heavy turbulence.
In the sky, denial is not just human instinct, it’s a job requirement. A flight attendant for Canadian Airlines remembers an elderly man who, unbeknownst to his wife, died in his sleep. “I put a blanket on him,” she says. “His wife was right beside him and I let her believe he was asleep until we landed. It was the best thing to do given the situation.”
“A colleague of mine said that last week a woman traveling with her husband knew he had died twenty minutes into the flight,” says Shannon Veedock, a Chicago-based American Airlines flight attendant. “They had made a stop in Dallas, stayed on the plane, and continued on to New York. She kept telling the crew he was asleep. She’d even called her son from the plane and told him what was going on. She was determined to get him home.”
Here again lies the contradiction of flying, smatterings of the grotesque on a sublime canvas, heroism one minute and Beavis and Butt-Head behavior the next. A flight attendant with a major airline explains to me how she and her co-workers spent two hours and forty-five minutes giving CPR to a passenger who was vomiting on them and saved his life. Five minutes later in our conversation she recalls a particularly nasty passenger who demanded an extra lime for her gin and tonic. “She’d been snapping her fingers at other crew members, snapping her fingers at me, and so I took her glass into the galley, got two pieces of lime and shoved them up my nostrils and wiggled them around. Then I plopped them back in the glass and cheerfully brought it back to her.”
The night I am flying home from my turnaround with the US Airways crew, I find myself overtaken with an uncontrollable urge to become a flight attendant, to join the living up here among the sleeping, to wear the uniform. It’s the uniform that gets me where I live, that hideous, dazzling, itchy ensemble of unnatural fibers, that homage to country and corporation. It embodies all the contradictions of airplane life, contradictions which, in the end, make more evident the crisis of national identity: the need to be free versus the need to be sewn inside an organized structure. With their insignia and their rebellion, I can’t help but think that flight attendants are, in a sense, quintessential Americans. They are at once rootless souls and permanent fixtures, vagabonds who can’t stay anywhere too long and plain folks trying to restore equilibrium to a crowded, light-headed world.
This 757 is a tube of intersecting lives, a pressurized cross section of the entire population, a flying nation. In a few hours we will land at an airport that looks like a shopping mall. We will stay in a hotel that gives no clue as to what city we’re in. In a world whose pace and legroom is controlled by the speed of technology, a glance down this length of darkened cabin gives a pretty fair indication of the shape we’re in. One hundred ninety-four passengers are curled up asleep in what little space they have, their
coats tucked under their heads, their knees tucked under their chins. Laptop computer screens are glowing. The air smells of coffee and peanuts and bodies. It’s such a specific aroma, bottled in its giant container, sponged off the skins of 194 people who think it must be coming from the person sitting next to them. But this is what an airplane always smells like. It is the scent of the house where the entire world lives.
TOY CHILDREN
Though I had a stuffed-animal collection that rivaled the inventory of a Toys “R” Us, I was a child who hated dolls. By “hate,” I’m not talking about a cool indifference. I’m talking about a palpable loathing, a dislike so intense that my salient memory of doll ownership concerns a plastic baby whose duty among my playthings consisted solely of being thrown against the wall repeatedly and then smudged with a combination of red lipstick, purple Crayola, and, when available, spaghetti sauce. This was done in an effort to simulate severe injury, possibly even internal bleeding, and this doll, who, if I recall correctly, had eyes that opened and shut and therefore had come preassigned with the name Baby Drowsy, spent most of her time in a shoe box in my closet. This was the intensive care unit, the place where, when I could no longer stand the sight of Baby Drowsy’s fat, contusion-ridden face, I would Scotch-tape a folded Kleenex to her forehead and announce to my mother that Baby Drowsy had been in yet another massive car wreck. I would then proceed to tend with painstaking care to my thirty-plus animals, all of whom I had personally christened with names like Excellent Eagle, Mr. Nice, and Soft Koala, and who, I was entirely certain, could communicate with both myself and each other through a complex telepathy. I say complex because, even at five, I had the ability to convey my thoughts to individual animals and then conference-in others should the discussion be relevant. They could do the same when they talked amongst themselves. Eyeore could discuss the events of the day with Squiffy. Peter Panda could alert Bunny Rabbit that he had fallen behind the bed. Everyone knew about Baby Drowsy’s frequent mishaps. And none of us really cared. In the social hierarchy of my bedroom, animals ranked highest. Dolls were somewhere between dust balls and cockroaches. They were uninvited guests that gathered in the corners, something to be stomped on.
