More lingo and lessons on the wide body
You could call it planes by numbers
I write this as I'm sitting on a flight to London, typing the hours away. Thankfully, the gate agents put me in a seat near the front so I've got plenty of elbow room and free drinks while this Airbus beams towards the U.K. Six plus hours to go, 820 kilometers an hour at 37,000 feet.
You wouldn't think of working as a flight attendant would involve many numbers besides those designating the planes, but on my last rotation it was much to do about digits.
I knew the trip would be a good one. It involved working one leg from Seattle to Atlanta, one Atlanta to LAX flight and then a deadhead back to Seattle. An easy, one night trip. My friend from training messaged me that he'd be on the flight too- a familiar face at last.
I'm more the type that wings it and takes things day by day. So I hadn't realized until a few days before that the rotation would involve a wide body plane. To be exact, an Airbus 330 and a 350, the biggest in the fleet. Twice the number of aisles and twice the number of crew means twice the number of entertaining stories? Perhaps.
The crew mix involved some junior people (under a few years) and one senior papa.
Among them included an Atlanta-based French LOD (language of destination) crew member who taught me some essential vocabulary words I didn't know- in English.
"You've got your zip codes, your pin codes, your area codes, your country codes, and then you're just old."
It took me a minute to catch up with her references. We stood chatting in an aisle across from each other as passengers started to board the plane.
I fall under the category of zip codes with the seniority of a 27,000 something flight attendant. In other words, I'm the 27 thousands-and-X person to be hired. A.K.A, the most junior of the junior.
Someone who's a pin code has a four digit seniority, which means they've been flying for likely a decade or more.
And then the list descends to the people who are just… old. There’s likely more than one person working for the company who started working in the '60s, and she's still out there handing out drinks in the aisle. She just can't quit.
According to the French LOD, she wouldn't exactly trust many one-digits out there to lead an evacuation of 300 passengers.
She also filled me in (en francais so that passengers wouldn't overhear our conversation) that right after the rotation she planned to meet a friend turned love interest in the Canary Islands.
She told me she's been to Egypt, Norway, Sweden, South Africa and a list of other countries in her six years of working with the airline, besides serving as an LOD on the usual Paris flights at least four times a month.
We were on the same page about a lot of things, including how easy the job can be if you let it.
"I don't see how people could complain. I think with the complainers this is probably one of their first jobs and they don't know anything else. If you don't like it, there's the door," she said.
Then there was Toni, a Hawaiian dude who's married to another flight attendant. He flies Friday through Sunday and his wife flies Sunday through Tuesday. The rest of the time they make sure the kids are fed with pre-made meals because they end up alone at home a lot. Toni calls layover's "daddy time" and shuts himself in the room, no exploring to be had. You do you, Toni.
He spit out lingo on the shuttle ride and in the galley like a true pin code. He calls the company headquarters mecca. Junior flight attendants who trade their domestic trips into trips to China are part of the so-called 'Chinese mafia' of flight attendants, a network of friends and family.
Just a dash of nepotism allows the new hires to work their schedules until they resemble the same schedules as a pin code.
"Why else would they be getting Shanghai and Beijing every week?"
He may be onto something.
Oh, and wide bodies with a double decker design- one floor of seats on top and one underneath- are "airline killers," because if that plane goes down there's so much liability and so many people on board that it spells bankruptcy for the company.
In any industry there will be lingo, math and numbers that outsiders can’t relate to or don’t understand. Flight attendants and pilots take it to another level as a way of making sense of our strange lifestyles, and it’s endlessly entertaining.
Stay fly,
Megan
Heard on the runway
Second hand news from unverified sources
Two new members were added to the mile high club on a domestic flight according to one of my crew members. When the crew member told the man exiting the bathroom that that behavior wasn’t allowed on board, the man blurted out, “there wasn’t enough time!”
I say good for them, as long as it’s consensual and they leave the lavatory tidy.
A man filmed himself frying shrimp in a Delta Airlines lavatory. Apparently he has a death wish, as it seems safer to fry an egg on the pavement of a New York City sidewalk and eat it than consuming anything that comes out of an airplane bathroom.
The plans for Alaska Airlines to acquire Hawaiian Airlines forges ahead. This has some legacy airline flight attendants worried about getting to Hawaii as much as they’re accustomed to. There’s been lots of grumblings about the deal and how it could lead to less island flights for the rest of us.
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