If you think that’s confusing, you can get a sense of what Georgia and I were going through, learning the ins and outs of an unusual job that practically has its own language, a language that is nearly impossible to explain to family and friends who will never understand it, regardless of how many times we try. Life sucked. And it had only just begun.
“Oh shoot!” cried Georgia when the phone rang. It was day 4 in New York and we were officially on reserve. Neither one of us moved. We just sat on our beds staring at each other all big-eyed listening to it ring.
“Pick it up!” she demanded.
I gulped. Then reluctantly I did as I was told. “Hello?”
The monotone voice on the other end said exactly what I’d been dreading all day. “Crew schedule calling for flight attendant Poole.”
The next morning I stepped out of an old white Kew Gardens minivan in front of LaGuardia Airport feeling like a million bucks. I was dressed in sensible navy heels, JCPenney stockings in the shade of “airline” and a navy pencil skirt, hemmed a perfect half inch above the knee. I’d given myself an extra hour to get ready in order to properly pin my hair back into a sophisticated French twist the way they’d shown us at the flight training academy. (Somehow I wound up with a chic side-of-the-neck bun instead.) My white button-down blouse had been starched and ironed to crisp perfection. It hid under a fitted navy blue blazer with two silver stripes around the wrist. To keep warm, I wore a long blue trench coat. And, fluttering in the chilly breeze, a red silk scarf was tied loosely around my neck. I couldn’t get over how a small piece of fabric made me feel so elegant and feminine compared to the crisscross, snap-on Nathan’s neck tie I’d worn at Sun Jet. As I waited for my driver to get my bags out of the trunk, I couldn’t help but notice that a small group of travelers waiting in line to curb-check their bags were looking at me. I don’t know what it is about a uniform, but it does make people take notice. Smiling, I waved at a toddler. My flight instructors would have been proud.
I attached my black tote to my matching rolling bag, took a deep breath and thought to myself, Show time! Two seconds later, I sailed through the automatic doors armed with a couple of pens, $20 in singles in case I needed to make change in flight, and a little black tube of M·A·C Viva Glam lipstick inside my blazer pocket. I passed through the food court, where vendors doled out powdered eggs and bricks of sausage to their first customers in line, and made my way to flight operations. I was a nervous wreck. In a little less than an hour and a half I’d be working my first of three legs today, a flight to Chicago that continued on to Dallas and then Austin. Thank God I’d been assigned the “extra position.” At least in coach I kind of knew what I was doing.
“The extra” or “the add” is just that, an extra flight attendant that has been added to the crew at the last minute. The FAA requires airlines to staff flights with one flight attendant per fifty passenger seats. This is called minimum crew. Extras are used in all kinds of situations, for example, on full flights with short flying times and long hauls offering elaborate services. Take, for instance, the New York–Chicago route. The average flying time is an hour and a half. Flying time does not include taxiing to or from the gate. There’s no way a minimum crew can serve and pick up that many drinks and meals in coach before it’s time to prepare the cabin for landing. For the Dallas–Austin route, an extra ensures that we can complete a single beverage service for 140 passengers aboard a thirty-minute flight with only fifteen minutes of flying time between takeoff and descent. And passengers wonder why flight attendants get snippy when they can’t decide what they’d like to drink!
The great thing about being an extra is you have no responsibilities on the airplane in terms of checking aircraft equipment, setting up the galley, or briefing the exit rows. Basically all you do is walk on board, oversee the boarding process, perform a safety demo and float between cabins helping whoever needs it most. Because extras hop from one flight to another and work with a new crew each leg of their trip, they rarely get caught up in crew drama. Of course, that’s also the bad thing about being an extra. You’re pretty much on your own—on and off the flight. After a flight lands, a crew will stick together and work another flight or layover for the night, never to see the extra again. It’s not uncommon for an extra to work with several different flight crews in a single day and then wind up at a hotel all alone. Many crews don’t even bother to learn the extra’s name. You’re simply referred to as “the extra,” as in, “Are you the extra?” “Where is the extra?” “Ask the extra to get some napkins from first class.”
When the extra (me) stepped aboard the airplane and counted five flight attendants sitting in first class, I thought nothing of it. I figured someone must have been “deadheading.” A deadhead is a crew member being repositioned to work another trip in a different city. Because it is a work assignment, deadheads are high on the priority list and are even paid to occupy a passenger seat throughout a flight. When I introduced myself as the extra to the crew, one of the flight attendants smirked at me.
“You’re not on this trip anymore,” he said. Before I could assure him that I was on the trip, he informed me that he’d been called out on reserve at the last minute to fill in for someone who never showed up.
Without another word, I ran back to the gate to use the computer and pull up my flight itinerary. Quickly I scanned the list of crew names and sure enough, Poole had been replaced with Edwards. Confused, I called crew tracking. When prompted, I punched in my employee number and then entered my three-letter base code. After a short beep a voice said, “Flight attendant Poole, you’ve been assigned a missed trip.”
“A missed trip? But why? I’m here. At the gate!”
“You never signed in.” My heart dropped. This was not good at all, not while I was on probation, not for my very first trip.
At my airline, a missed trip, a sick call, or even a late sign-in equates to one point on your record. Three points and you get a warning. Three warnings and company action is taken. But for me, a new hire on probation without union representation, a single point could easily get me fired, no questions asked. Horrified and embarrassed, I couldn’t imagine what I would tell my family and friends. How do you explain losing your job before it even began?
Ignoring a couple of passengers who had mistaken me for the gate agent since they were all lining up in front of the counter, I told the scheduler what had happened, how I’d gotten to the airport half an hour early just so I wouldn’t be late, and how I spent a majority of that time playing around on the computer seeing what I could pull up using as many different flight codes as I could remember from training. Well, every code, that is, except for the one to sign in, the most important one of all!
I did what any other new hire on probation who was about to lose her job would do. I begged and pleaded to be put back on the trip, apologizing profusely for screwing up, asking if there was anything I could do to make up for it until I realized I was probably only making it worse.
“I’m in big trouble, aren’t I?” I held my breath.
Eventually, the voice sighed and then said, “Sit tight. Stay at the airport in case we need you later.”
“Thank you so much! You have no idea how much I appreciate this.” Stockholm syndrome had set in. “So . . . am I on, like, standby duty now?”
“You’re, like, sitting at the airport in case we need you later.” Click.
Okay. That didn’t make sense. On standby duty I was officially on the clock. If I just sat around waiting, how would I get paid? I had to remind myself that that didn’t matter. Money was not important—at least not at the moment. The important thing, I told myself, was that I still had a job. At least, I was pretty sure I still had a job. I wouldn’t know for sure until later that night when I called in to see if I had an assignment for tomorrow. Curious, I typed in the flight code to bring up my record. There it was spelled out in white letters on a blue screen—MISSED TRIP. Head hung low, I walked to flight operations, and
sat there for hours. All day, actually. Until finally it was so late that I figured there couldn’t be any more flights departing LaGuardia. After working up a little courage, I called crew schedule.
“Hi, this is flight attendant Poole. Can I be released?”
I could hear someone clicking away on the computer. “Released from what?”
“Oh. Umm. Nothing. Sorry,” I heard myself say as my mind screamed Hang up already! Instead I added, “Thank you,” just to be nice.
Why I wasn’t fired right then and there, I don’t know, but I thank God for it every day. Others had lost their jobs for doing less. Rumor had it that one new hire got canned for calling in sick when she actually was sick! Another had been asked to leave for wearing a non-company-issued backpack through the airport terminal. Of course, that same flight attendant had also gotten a slap on the wrist a week prior for wearing the uniform sweater around her waist, so really she should have known better. Then there was the girl who pretended to be deadheading on a flight just so she could go home. Maybe she did deserve to be let go. But did the guy who got busted for falling asleep on his jump seat on a red-eye flight deserve the same fate? Luckily for us, things would drastically change in six months’ time. I knew this because as I sat there in Ops waiting around for crew schedule to call, I saw quite a few things I could not believe, like flight attendants wearing their hair down, with buckles on their shoes, chewing gum in front of supervisors! Everything we’d been taught we couldn’t do. But until I officially joined their ranks, I’d just have to make sure I did everything else perfectly. Starting with remembering to sign in next time.
While I was not officially sitting standby, Georgia was called out to cover a trip to Kansas City. Upon discovering that the entire crew was on reserve, and from our training class, she almost had a heart attack. As soon as she hung up with the scheduler, she dialed me.
Like most new hires, Georgia wasn’t concerned about an emergency situation—we had that part down pat. What worried her the most was the service. “How are we gonna know if we’re doin’ it right?”
“You’ll be fine,” I lied. Because I was sitting in the middle of flight operations and didn’t want to alert anyone, I whispered, “Just make sure you have your flight manual out and ready to go in case you need it.”
That first week on the job, right before making the dreaded call to find out what I’d been assigned to work the following day, I’d pray for four things to not happen.
1. I did not want to work on a wide-body aircraft. The 767, DC10, A300, and MD11 were all so big and scary compared to what I had worked in the past. And the flight attendants who could hold trips on this type of equipment were even scarier. They were super senior, very cliquey, and totally set in their ways. The last thing I needed on probation was to piss off some senior mama who would write me up for not doing something a certain way.
2. I did not want to work the galley position. Why would I when all I’d done at Sun Jet was throw a couple of sodas and a bucket of ice onto a cart? At training, sure, we pretended to serve beverages to classmates on mock airplanes, but we didn’t even have real food to use! And the galleys we practiced in were not lifelike. In all our time in training, we’d discussed the different services in great detail, but we never actually set up a galley for one!
3. I did not want a trip departing out of Newark Airport. The airport was located in another state—two and half hours from my crash pad in Queens. In order to get there I’d have to walk a couple of blocks to the Long Island Railroad Station to take the train to Manhattan to catch the bus to Newark—a $30 round-trip fare, which is a lot when you can barely afford to eat. Not to mention that the four-hour travel time to and from the airport is not calculated into our twelve-hour legal rest time.
4. I did not want to work a morning sign-in. One reason I became a flight attendant was to take advantage of the flexible schedule, preferably the night flying. I just don’t do mornings well. I’d take a red-eye flight any day over a departure leaving at the crack of dawn.
Somehow all my wishes came true that week. Three trips in a row I got called out to work a narrow-body turn. I surprised myself by feeling right at home. The airplanes were all so clean and nice and the passengers always smiled and said hello, but in addition, it was work as usual—minus the delays, duct-taped armrests, and overflowing blue water leaking out of the lav, just a few of the things I’d grown accustomed to with my previous employer. The two big things that did stand out more from my old airline those first few days on the job were the quiet cockpits and all the short hemlines.
I’ll never forget sitting on the first-class galley jump seat during my first descent, my back against the cockpit wall, hearing nothing but absolute silence. It made me a little nervous. Okay, fine, really nervous! Long ago I’d learned to trust my instincts, and I just knew something had to be wrong. Why couldn’t I hear the computerized voice in the cockpit talking? Concerned, I looked at the flight attendant in charge who sat beside me, a senior gal who’d seen it all and then some based on the number of medical emergencies she’d told me she’d handled over the years. But she seemed as calm as could be, looking out the porthole window at the ground down below. Even so, I couldn’t let it go. I mean, what the heck was going on in the cockpit? Were the pilots dead? At Sun Jet we could always hear a computer voice yelling out commands from behind the locked door just before touchdown, things like, “Pull up, pull up—terrain, terrain!” After growing accustomed to that, the silence felt like a scream. If the seasoned flight attendant sitting beside me had not been there, I might have picked up the phone in a panic and broken sterile cockpit to find out. That would have had me fired for sure. Flight attendants are not allowed to contact the cockpit during sterile cockpit so that pilots can focus on what’s important—landing the plane. This was one thing I got used to pretty quickly!
As for the hemlines, this was the mid-1990s and everyone, passengers and flight attendants alike, wore skirts and dresses as short as Heather Locklear on the original Melrose Place television series. Compared to the majority of my passengers and colleagues, I looked like an Amish woman who’d gotten lost and stumbled onto an airplane. My uniform quickly began to embarrass me. It was like being a freshman nerd surrounded by cool senior cheerleaders. Forget the silver wings—gold wings at my airline are only worn by flight attendants with at least five years seniority—one glance at my dress and everyone knew I was on probation. Even frequent fliers seemed to get off on letting me know that they knew I was new. One first-class passenger decided to get up and help us in the galley as soon as he realized there were a couple of newbies working his cabin. At first we were annoyed by his know-it-all presence, but when we realized we might land with a couple of trays still out in the cabin, suddenly we were thankful for his assistance in not only collecting glassware that needed to be locked in the galley before landing, but also for helping us hand back sixteen first-class coats. In the aisle, before buckling into his seat, he took a bow. The passengers gave him a round of applause. We, the crew, slid him a bottle of wine.
The hemline had an effect on pilots, too. One look and they knew they could ask for food items they’d never in a million years get from a more seasoned flight attendant. When I told one such pilot we only had enough mixed nuts for first-class passengers, he suggested I take one or two nuts, whatever I felt comfortable with, from each passenger’s bowl. “It’ll be our little secret,” he added.
Even worse were pilots known to prey on flight attendants right out of training. Because we were young and dumb and unaware of the reputation some of these guys had, most of us found it flattering to be at the receiving end of their attention. In fact, one of my roommates, a “Cockpit Connie,” enjoyed it so much that when she finally got off probation she didn’t run straight to a tailor like the majority of us did. She left her hemline as long as possible so she could entice even more pilots into her layover hotel room late at night. On the flip side, there were the pilots who would see our long
skirts and immediately go into father mode, trying to protect us from anything that could possibly go wrong in flight.
“If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to ask, and if the passengers give you a hard time, let me know and I’ll have them taken off the flight. I don’t care what the company says, I don’t put up with that kind of bull,” one told me. Those pilots were, and still are, my favorite kind, and I’d like to thank each and every one of them for giving us the support we don’t always get.
My worst flight attendant nightmare came true during my second week on the job: I got called out to work what we affectionately call the Death Cruiser 10. The DC10 was a monster of an airplane. It held more than 250 passengers and a crew of fifteen. Thirty passengers sat in first class, with fifty in business class. I’d been assigned the extra position, but things went from bad to worse real quick when I got to the airport. The flight attendant working the galley position called in sick. Because we already had an extra (me!) and it was too late to call out another reserve, scheduling told us to work it out. And so, one by one, in order of seniority, each flight attendant picked a position. Since I was the most junior flight attendant on the crew, I didn’t even have to wait until it was my turn to figure out that the lower lobe would be all mine. I offered fifty bucks I didn’t have to anyone willing to switch positions. No one took the bait. I upped it to seventy-five. They all laughed at me.
“Sweetie,” said a senior flight attendant with a beehive bun. “I haven’t worked a galley in twenty years. None of us have. You’re on your own.” Everyone nodded in agreement.
It must have been the sick look on my face that caused another flight attendant to pipe up with, “Just do the best you can. The passengers will survive.”
Cruising Attitude Page 8
