9 Things people don't know about a flight attendant's role
Hint: It mostly has to do with safety
I remember exactly where I was when I heard the interview that changed my perception of flight attendants. It's one of those moments that on its own isn't very significant, but one you remember clearly because it informs some pivotal choice down the road.
I was driving east on Highway 2 in Washington, likely to meet up with friends and hang out in those rural parts. Fresh Air was playing on the radio in one of those rare occurrences in which what you actually want to listen to in that exact moment is playing on the radio. Dave Davies was interviewing the writer and former flight attendant T.J. Newman about her new book Falling, a thriller set on a plane that she wrote in part while working red eyes.
The book's plot revolves around a kidnapping situation, and Davies pointed out that most of the public doesn’t realize a flight attendant's duty is to keep everyone on board safe. That right there was my aha moment, a little late considering my mom worked in the professional when I was little and my aunt still flies.
The realization hit me then and likely led to me to pursuing the job, for better or worse.
Think about it. An aluminum fuselage hurling through the air at 30,000 feet, potentially full of hundreds of people. Someone's got to be in charge, and not just in case of a mechanical or weather related emergency. Someone needs to manage all of the personalities and needs and conflicts on board. It's not the pilots who diffuse tense situations in the air or take charge of medical emergencies. They decide if the plane needs to divert and of course helm the plane. But if an emergency happens it's the flight attendants who call the shots in the cabin. We're like adult babysitters in a really strange and niche environment.
There's a lot of uncertainty to do with this job. But here are some things I know to be true:
Our number one duty has to do with safety- think of us as the first responders in the air. I wrote about it in detail after a week of bad airline news here.
There's a surprising amount of admin involved. For a job where the main requirement is to keep people safe and be the face of an airline, we spend a lot of time updating our phone apps, bidding, swapping, trading, and keeping up with "e-learning" that seems to pile up in our inboxes every other week, full of slow-paced videos that don’t allow you to fast-forward, even though we could regurgitate the information in our sleep.
Our training is rigorous and only a fraction of it has to do with customer service. Mainline airlines in the U.S. (United, Delta and American) require six to seven weeks of training. The days are long, the information is jammed down your throat, and many of us are sleep deprived from the early starts and crazy roommates. They test on door drills, evacuation procedures, safety equipment and medical knowledge. Honestly, college seemed like a breeze compared to that experience.
The hiring process for mainline airlines involves many steps. Some of it is straight forward, like answering questions about basic customer service. The in-person interview for my airline involves STAR formatting, and took me twice to get right. Some people in my class applied ten times before they were hired on. There was a stat passed around the internet for a while that it’s harder to get a job with Delta Air Lines than get accepted into Harvard as far as acceptance rates go. That was true in 2018 before airlines began record hiring after the Covid pandemic.
Most flight attendants working for U.S. airlines work domestic flights most of the time, unless you're a foreign language speaker. Some airlines give you the opportunity to fly more international flights because they have more international routes, but if someone’s been flying for less than a decade and especially if their base is smaller, then the most exciting layovers they’ll be getting are N.Y.C and L.A., depending on your definition of exciting.
Flight attendants don't have to be outgoing and bubbly to do the job. Successful airlines recognize a diversity in backgrounds and personalities allows their employees to work well with a diversity of passengers. Hopefully by now most people realize the stereotypical flight attendant from the sixties no longer exists. If there's one thing I know about other flight attendants, it's that the only thing we have in common is that we can handle the public and that some of us like to travel.
We're in charge of evacuating the plane, not the pilots. Think about it: the pilots are up in the flight deck, hopefully landing the plane safely. Once on the ground, flight attendants may receive commands from the pilots, or they may make the call to evacuate depending on the conditions inside and/or outside the plane. The pilots can escape through the flight deck if it's unsafe to come out through the door connected to the cabin.
Where does that leave the flight attendants? By the exit doors, using our training to evacuate dozens to hundreds of passengers safely off the plane. If you read up on any plane crashes from decades ago to the recent one in Toronto, flight attendants are often the main reason anyone survived. The pilots can save themselves and leave the scene. (They are exceptions, like the pilot of the Japan Airlines flight, who was the last one to leave the plane before it went up in flames at the Haneda airport.)
In other words, they don't go down with the ship like a captain might.
We're only paid a full hourly wage for the time the boarding door is closed. Depending on the airline some flight attendants aren't even paid for their time during the boarding process. Wait?? What??!!! We know, it makes no sense, and likely has to do with the remnants of an industry caked in sexism that says it’s okay to not pay women for their time for no explainable reason.
Some airlines pay a partial hourly wage for the boarding process. The only time we're getting full, hourly pay is when the boarding door is closed. Not when we check in at the airport an hour before the flight departs, not between flights when we sit at the airport for 3 hours between flights, and not when a flight is delayed (unless it's delayed past a certain number of hours. That's hours, plural.)
This means we dislike delays as much as you do.
To address one of the most-asked questions- we don't really “fly the same routes.” Not anymore at least. Unless you have 10 years of seniority, most of the time we're constantly swapping and dropping our trips in order to get certain days off to avoid bad trips or to get the layovers we want. It's nice to have the flexibility. It also means that most of the time we're working with different people on our crews, and most people don't have a set schedule unless it's working every weekend. That we can count on for the first few years apparently.
It's fun to watch shows and read books to do with flight attendant life and see how pop culture depicts us. If only I could be Cassandra Bowden in the show The Flight Attendant, flitting from Rome to New York to Bangkok, with contacts in every city and enough pay to afford a studio apartment in a glitzy city.
Except for the part of the show that involves getting caught in an international murder plot. I don’t want that.
Stay fly,
Megan
P.S. What perceptions do you have about flight attendants that might not be true?
P.P.S. Hit the heart button if you liked reading, thanks!
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