The grim reality of life as an air stewardess

As public anger grows over British Airway's looming strike, Imogen Edwards-Jones says that it’s no wonder cabin crew have had enough — the old days of job satisfaction and glamour are long gone... article from Times Online

Sympathy for the British Airways staff proposing to go on strike is in short supply. Preventing hundreds of thousands of people from “going home for Christmas” does not exactly endear you to the public or do you many favours on the PR front. And what is there to grumble about anyway? Cabin crew have glamorous jobs with sexy uniforms, they get to travel and meet people and go to fabulous destinations. They should slap on their lip-liner, slip on their clicky high heels and just get on with it.

But we are mistaken. The airline industry has changed. Being an air hostess isn’t what it was. September 11 and 1p flights bought on the internet put paid to the glory days, the Leonardo DiCaprio Catch Me If You Can dream of martini-fuelled long-haul trips . Today’s air hostess works long hours for little pay and is far more likely to be swallowing Prozac than swigging the vodka miniatures that she used to pinch from her trolley.

Like the rest of us who have to endure the queues, the corralling and the ignominy of taking off our shoes, the stewardess now finds the whole travel experience completely miserable. The special atmosphere, the bonhomie and the teamwork have all but disappeared from a job that is now about quick turnarounds, short-term contracts and shoving black bin bags in the faces of passengers to collect the Cellophane wrappers from their in-flight meals.

During the year that I spent interviewing cabin crew members to write Air Babylon, my exposé of the airline industry, I found out just what a disenchanted lot they were. They complained that the romance and joy had gone out of the job.

For security reasons there are no cosy chats with the captain now that he is locked up in the flight deck. There is no filing your nails on a long-haul flight with a terribly dangerous metal emery board. In first class they now silver serve with plastic knives and forks.

Once air stewardesses used to aspire to marry handsome princes from Middle Eastern countries. Now they are nothing more than glorified waitresses in the sky. No wonder they are striking over pay — it’s the only thing they have left.

They work in an industry in which the air is filled with more germs than a doctor’s surgery. And what other job subjects its staff to the “touch toes test”, whereby the cabin services director checks to see if naked buttocks can been seen under the skirt — the VPL is the enemy of the well turned-out air hostess, so some of them simply ditch their underwear.

Even today, the grooming rules for trolley dollies can seem bizarre. Long hair must be tied back, only certain colours of certain brands of make-up are permitted and products must be plastered on because eyes and lips must be visible from six rows back. Jewellery is kept to a minimum and forearms have to be hairless, bleached or waxed at all times. Weight is watched and anyone chubbing up over the Atlantic is told discreetly to lose a few pounds (although no airline would admit to such a sexist, lookist policy).

There are many downsides to the job. The antisocial hours, permanent jet-lag and continual stress of being on stand-by can easily lead to depression, lack of home life and widespread abuse of temazepam and co-proxamol among cabin crew. The heavy drinking and all-night partying can render hostesses and stewards unfit to fly, so they manage to get through the flight only by sneaking blasts of fresh oxygen from canisters in the galley.

The increasingly unpleasant behaviour of passengers also affects the crew. Air rage is on the rise: The number of incidents on British jets has risen by 29 per cent since last year — and of the 3,485 cases reported recently, 37 per cent involved alcohol. People drink too much and start to fight — or to have sex in the toilets or, even less discreetly, under the blankets on their seats. One glass of wine in the air is said to be the equivalent of three on the ground — and on a long-haul flight things can get scary.

“Everyone likes to have a drink on their way to their holidays,” says Shazia Bibi, a 28-year-old flight attendant. “It happens quite a lot and you get male passengers being inappropriate and occasionally trying to touch you. You learn to deal with it: you brush it off, maybe give them a bit of aggro and they usually settle down.”

Yet the problems of bum-pinching and passionate passengers in the toilets pale into insignificance beside the trouble caused by having to deal with a corpse. The air hostesses to whom I spoke insisted that deaths in flight are not so unusual. In fact, they are such a regular occurrence that Singapore Airlines recently introduced a “corpse cupboard” on its new 17-hour non-stop flight from Singapore to Los Angeles, specifically to cope with the problem.

What if the plane is full and there is nowhere to store the body? Usually, if the heart attack victim (this is the most common cause of death in flight) is accompanied by a relative or colleague, the cabin crew will place a blanket around the body and an oxygen mask on the face, to make it appear as if the corpse is asleep. But if the traveller is alone, there is a worse problem. You can’t allow someone to fly next to the corpse of a total stranger — so often the body is upgraded if there is room or, in the worst-case scenario, it is placed on the galley floor while everyone continues to deal with serving meals and drinks. Or it is shoved in with the rubbish at the back of the plane, only to make its exit on top of a food or drinks trolley long after the passengers have disembarked.

It is not all doom and gloom, of course: there are still some upsides to life in the skies. There is the boozing, shopping and tanning lifestyle. Flying, I discovered, can be rather like an adult-orientated school trip. You are collected by bus, taken to the plane, retrieved from the plane and dispatched to a five-star hotel at a holiday destination without having had to think about anything. All your expenses are paid, you are given per diems (pocket money) and left to your own devices until you are needed back on the plane.

As one steward said to me: “You’re in a place for 12 to 24 hours, you’ve seen all that it has to offer 100 times before. What else are you going to do but play silly drinking games?”

There are plenty of those. After you have coiffed your “bus” cocktail (champagne, Cointreau, brandy and orange juice) on the airport bus, the real fun and games begin as soon as you hit the hotel: strip poker, group showers, group sex. As Henry Sutton, the author of Flying, once said: “If you’re not sex-mad before you join an airline, you will become so.”

And the main aim of the air hostess? It’s still to bag a pilot, of course. He has been locked in the cabin all flight, so their time is limited. If he is married it doesn’t appear to matter because what happens down route, stays down route. On that, everyone agrees.

About the future of flying, no one is certain. As air travel becomes cheaper, the appeal of the job is on the wane. In the old days “trolley dollies” may not have earned as much as the next woman but at least they had a certain swagger as they shimmied through the airport. They had poise, presence. They had persona. They wore heels on the ground and changed into flats in the air. These days, many of them are spotty teenagers in slip-ons who wear nylon bibs and shove cold rolls in your face.

What you see is what you get. There is no image, no front, no face. Put simply, flying is just no fun any more.

excerpt from Air Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous, Corgi, £5.99