How Does It Feel? To Be a Flight Attendant In a Post-9/11 World Becky WoodBridge
From the magazine Vault How Does It Feel: To Walk on The Moon
“The surface of the moon is like exceptionally fine talcum powder ... If you scuff it, the particles shoot out in straight, little Newtonian trajectories.” —Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, January 2009
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delray beach magazine
flight attendant for more than 25 years With a major airline I had a flight to Paris about three years ago where the alarm went off in the bathroom. Those things don’t go off very easily—you can go in there and smoke a cigarette and it won’t go off. I smelled the smell, and my first assumption was: “We’re on fire.” We had to go into emergency mode until we found out the real source. We didn’t know if we were under attack or if the airline was testing us to see how fast we would “react.” [It turned out to be an 18-year-old passenger doing some kind of free-basing.] When I got to Paris, I was sick the whole layover. It was the adrenaline. I was sick from that rush of adrenaline. The one thing that most people don’t realize is that we are reminded of terrorism every time we go to our office. We are exposed to the fears and the concerns of something bad happening. Other people go to work and forget. We don’t. The industry has changed because of 9-11. And I think the airlines used that to re-create the way the industry is run.
All the airlines did it. They said, “Oh, 9-11. Oh, fuel costs. Oh, security. Oh, bankruptcy.” But it was business. They took so much from the passengers. So now passengers are upset [the minute they board]. They pay baggage fees that used to be part of the ticket. Security has removed their shampoo and makeup. A first-class passenger pays $2,000 for a ticket and wants chicken, and there’s no chicken. The chicken is big. It stands for something. People aren’t getting what they feel like they’re entitled to get. They have a reason to be upset because they feel jostled and rushed and deprived. This is why airline travel is brutal on flight attendants right now. We deal with 256 angry, defensive passengers in a confined tube. They can be mean. They can be rude. And they can be [unreasonable]. One passenger said to me, “I need a blanket for my daughter. She’s cold.” We were getting ready to land, and there [wasn’t an available blanket]. She said, “Then give me your sweater.” There were six of us, and we just stood there. We thought we’d heard it all. “No,” I finally said. “I don’t have anything on underneath this.”
march/april 2015