There are those who question the safety of flying in a giant metal tube spanned with wings at 30,000 feet above the ground. For those of you who suffer with those insecurities, this is not for you…
Growing up I always wanted to be Flight Attendant. From the youngest days I can recollect I would fly to and from Alaska. Those were the days with no inflight movies, fairly decent airplane food and the only “competitive” edge one airline had over the other was, no, not price, service! An unheard word in today's industry. Due to airline regulation, all flights cost about the same to any given destination.
Thus, if you wanted to woo customer's, you have to show them how much you cared about their business by being customer service oriented. Thus, the Flight Attendant's on board would allow me to practice being a Flight Attendant. At the tender age of eight or nine I would assist the inflight personnel with such pleasant tasks as collecting the passenger garbage. But to me, it helped pass the time and also gave me a break from playing with the cards or reading the magazines (provided by the airline, of course). My career began in those early years and I was able to pick up where I left off upon graduation.
My life as a flight attendant in the early 1980's was always eventful. It started shortly after deregulation hit the industry and flight personnel were only governed under what we termed FAR's. Prior to that most airlines had union contracts that protected them from lengthy days and being away from home too much.
Having grown up in a very strong mining area with unions that owned most of the town, I didn't feel unions served much purpose other than to protect the lazy and drive wages sky high. Of course if wages went sky high, prices obediently followed. Who wins there? And even though prices have never come back down - wages sure did and this was evident in the days of my flying career.
I started flying in 1984 with an airline who was currently in their first of many bankruptcies and whose union personnel were on strike. Yes, I was a scab! That alone kept each day adventurous. I braved the six weeks of training while living in a hotel. When graduation day finally arrived I wanted to leave the hotel to run a brief errand to the dry cleaners. It was a drizzly day as I ventured out and started my 15 minute trip to town. Within seconds the weather turned and I was driving in what seemed to me to be a hurricane. (Coming from the dry arid desert of the mountains, more than a couple inches of rain would qualify as hurricane weather to me.) Never having experienced such a phenomena, I continued to the dry cleaner. I picked up my clothes, raced to the car and continued back to the hotel. I had plenty of time before the ceremony started so I wasn't too put off by this somewhat seemingly minor delay. The traffic was moving slower and slower as the water inched higher and higher. Soon the traffic stopped altogether. I couldn't figure it out. There didn't seem to be a wreck or anything significant that would prevent our moving forward. But as minutes turned into hours, I sat, watching water gather on the road. Soon it was rising high enough to seep into my car. This was really bizarre. I had no idea what to do. I was trapped and couldn't move and all I could do was sit and watch my feet get engulfed with water while situated on the car brake pedal. The rain subsided some time later - but my car was not going anywhere. We didn't have cell phones in those days and I was in a city far from home, knew no one and had no recourse but to start pushing my car to the nearest gas station. They helped me dry the car out as best as they could and sent me on my way. Yes, I missed graduation. This was certainly an omen of what was yet to come.
When I got back to the hotel, which was on airport property, many of us “graduates” were called upon to fly trips that night as so many regular flight attendants were unable to get to the airport, due to rain. We had observed many flights and were only suppose to be one of the crew members on the flight. We were not to be “the crew”. Thus, four of us “greenies” got on board a 727 flight bound for Tampa Bay, Florida. Having very little clue what to do, we fumbled through the galley, set up the drink cart and started our in flight service, after running the appropriate safety checks, boarding the plane and taking off. We left the food to warm in the oven for the second round of drinks. Things seem to be going okay when all of the sudden we heard the pilot's voice over the sound system saying that we had begun our initial decent into Tampa Bay. Whoa! We were not even done with our dinner service. A mad scramble began to get the flight ready to land and to secure all the equipment. In flight personnel who were passengers on the flight jumped up to help us and with the aide of our pilot's circling over the Tampa Bay area we finally were able to secure the cabin, strap into our jump seats and prepare for landing. We realized then how much we needed to learn before crewing a plane again.
