Heather Robinson

Yesterday I got the opportunity to interview a 15-year veteran flight attendant and get her reaction to now-famed flight attendant Steven Slater’s “take-this-job-and-shove-it”-style rant.

(I had just posted a piece on The Huffington Post reporting on my experiences as a passenger on Jet Blue flight #1052  from Pittsburgh to JFK - the scene of Slater’s rant - and his escape down the plane’s emergency chute).

Naturally I was interested in what another flight attendant might think about the whole incident.

“I love it!” the flight attendant, who I’ll call Andie, gushed when I asked for her take on Slater’s rant-and-escape (She asked to remain anonymous out of concern her employer would not want her to speak to the media).

Returning my call between flights, she noted that she understands the need for some punishment due to Slater’s releasing of the emergency chute, which she said costs the airline many “thousands of dollars to put back.”

However she noted she and fellow flight attendants, who were dishing about the incident yesterday, have fantasized about quitting in some similarly flamboyant way.

“We were like, ‘Who wouldn’t want to have done that?’ We’re constantly joking about how we’d quit. Everybody, all the flight attendants” she knows “think he’s a hero and we feel sorry for him because he does not have union representation.”

(Jet Blue airlines, according to Andie, is not a union shop).

Andie explained that, much as  the job has certain benefits (job security “if you are union” as well as some free and inexpensive travel - a plus for singles like herself who like to jet-set), dealing with customers who dole out degradation can be a major downer.

“Most people are really nice,” Andie said. “But every once in a while there’s someone who takes advantage of the fact that we can’t say anything back” during an altercation.

Most altercations between flight attendants and passengers occur when flight attendants are doing their jobs, trying to minimize safety risk to passengers, Andie stressed.

“Most of the arguments happen for things that are for their own safety,” she said. “Sometimes pilots hit the brakes hard and people go flying. [In aviation history] passengers have, like, hit ceilings and broken their necks during severe turbulence.  That’s one of the reasons for the seat belts. Most of the time people get mad over stuff that’s for their own good.”

She empathizes with Slater, she says, because “it’s hard to get treated like s— every day.”

In her career, the worst abuse she’s experienced happened recently.

“I was slapped across the face by a lady,” Andie said.  “The captain said stay seated. I told her, ‘Please just have a seat.’ She was drunk. She got arrested but nothing really happened to her. I inquired but … my airline just told me not to worry about it.”

She says other shoddy passenger behavior includes fliers who, rather than drop their trash into the bags flight attendants are carrying through the aisles, simply toss trash onto the floor so that flight attendants have to pick it up off the ground.

Following September 11th,  she says she noticed an improvement in fliers’ attitudes towards flight attendants - for a while.

“Then it goes back to normal,” she sighed.

“Every day–some of the stuff people do to us. Training cannot prepare you. No one can train you for–’Omigod this woman just slapped me’ or in that guy’s case, ‘This woman just bonked me on the head with the bin door and won’t even say she’s sorry.’ There’s no manual for what some crazy passenger’s going to do to you today.”

For instance, one day recently “two brothers got in a fistfight in first class and all the flight attendants were women. So what do we do? It’s always something.”

She says she would actually appreciate some professional development training in dealing with interpersonal conflict situations.

Asked if there is anything she would like the flying public to be aware of, Andie said, “It could be our third, fourth flight [in a row]. We’re tired. You have to have a lot of endurance to do this job.”