More Confessions of a Hostie (19 page)

The man was not cuffed, but as soon as the aircraft landed, he was handed over to airport security. However, the man's conduct toward the security personnel was so inappropriate that he was subsequently handcuffed at the aerobridge. Not only was the man restrained, he was also manhandled – and, according to Danny, manhandled quite zealously.

Danny joked about the incident, ‘I must say that it is better to be pissed off than to be pissed on.'

The Indonesian woman who threw-up on me sleeps until we are about to carry out our preparation for landing. She has not thanked me nor has communicated in any way that she's grateful for Dean's and my efforts to save her life. We have organised a wheelchair for the ground-staff to take the woman through customs, but she has improved sufficiently that further medical treatment is not required.

After we land, and after I have assisted the passengers to disembark (including carrying the ‘Indonesian Princess's bags and helping her to the wheelchair), I meet up with Dean at the duty-free shop. As crew we get a discount on most duty-free items, so I suggest that if Dean wants anything then he should come through the cashier area with me. Dean offers to buy me a present as a thank you for the trip. I decline his generous offer, but do use the time while he is shopping to do what I do best – shop. I find a beautiful watch. It has been years since I have bought myself a good watch. As I notice the number of scratches there are on my current watch, the price tag of this shiny new watch fades into insignificance.

Dean insists on buying the watch in spite of my protests. As we are about to queue before a cashier, I am surprised to see that the Indonesian Princess is at the duty-free shop as well. She has left the wheelchair, while the less-than-impressed ground-staffer has wheeled the chair to the other side of the cashier area. The woman who, only a few hours ago, was lying on the ground semi-conscious and vomiting is now running around the duty-free area like a healthy teenager, her arms laden with bottles of alcohol. Just as Dean and I walk up to the cashier, she pushes her way to the front of our queue. She does not acknowledge us of course, which comes as no surprise to us.

Both Dean and I say nothing to her. Sometimes disgust is best expressed in silence.

there is no such thing as a silly question, just silly people

Two days at home, and I am off again. I contemplate replacing my apartment's front door with a revolving door. I check the time (on my new watch) as I sit in my car, stuck in traffic. I hate running late, but on this occasion I am stuck in peak hour, caught in heavy rain and heavier traffic.

There is nothing worse than preparing to work a long day and arriving at work already stressed and soaked with rainwater and sweat, dragging a wheelie-bag through puddles in the rain. I dash into crew briefing with only seconds to spare and promise the onboard manager that I will dry my hair and be back to my glamorous self as soon as time permits. Grooming is such an important part of this job, and there are extremely strict grooming guidelines. I am respectful of those rules.

I know there needs to be guidelines, but nitpicking the shape of a pair of earrings or the shade of someone's nail-polish is overdoing it. I was once pulled aside by an excessively finicky female manager and told that my name badge should be moved a little more to the left. The distance indicated was negligible. I rarely let such small things bug me, but I asked the said manager if there had been a passenger complaint made about the positioning of my name badge. She said no.

‘Have there been any complaints regarding my work ethics?' I then asked.

She shook her head and replied, ‘Where are you going with this?'

I could have spelt out what I was trying to imply and made her aware that in all many years of flying, I've always worn the name badge in the same position and no one had pulled me aside and talked to me as if I were in kindergarten, but I chose to bite my tongue and adjust the name badge that tiniest of amounts.

Thankfully, managers like that are quite rare. They are also the most despised. ‘The Pothole' (a woman so nicknamed because everyone tries to avoid her) is one such person who upsets everyone she works with. I empathise with managers who have to deal with legitimate breeches of company policy, but treating adults like children is not the way to get the best out of someone. Fortunately, trips with the likes of such managers are few and far between. Today's manager couldn't care less that I have a few (wet) hairs out of place. He is empathetic that most of the crew have had to deal with such appalling weather conditions and apologetic that we had to walk/sprint in the rain to get here.

‘Now that's how you handle crew,' I think to myself. He knows that I need only two or three minutes in front of a mirror to become my usual, glamorous, international-hostie self once again.

We are off to Singapore. It is daylight all the way, which means we will be flat out. The flight is also full. No surprises there.

Another factor to consider for this flight is the weather. It has deteriorated even more. The captain phones the crew during the boarding process to let us know that due to the strong and changing wind directions there will be a change of runway – and consequently a delay. There is no lightning, but even so the captain is unsure of how long the delay will be. I am reminded again of that silly question I was asked by a passenger on an earlier flight, about how long the lightning would last. I have dealt with thousands and thousands of passengers over the years, and the vast majority of them have been smart. However, occasionally, they are not.

My fellow hosties and I have been asked some pretty silly questions over the years.

On a flight to China, one of the passengers had just listened to a P.A. informing everyone onboard to make sure they have their travel documentation ready, including their passports and visa.

A passenger asked, ‘I don't carry Visa, but would American Express be OK?'

On another flight, a passenger complained to Damien that he was trying to sleep but the engine noise of the aircraft was a little loud. Was it possible for it to be turned down a tad, the passenger wondered.

Damien replied in his most condescending tone, ‘Sure, I'll ask the captain if he can turn them off for a while. Perhaps we can glide for a bit and then turn the engine back on after you fall asleep?'

On descent into London's Heathrow airport, a crew member was asked by a female passenger about a castle we were about to fly over. The hostie said, ‘That is Windsor Castle, one of the most historically famous castles in all of England.' As the flight attendant left to take her seat for landing, she overheard the woman tell her husband, ‘It looks like a nice castle and all, but why would they build it so close to an airport?'

On a flight to Sydney, Australia, I was asked by a non-Australian if I knew at what age do Australians learn English? This passenger was travelling to Australia for holidays, and as he was from the northern hemisphere he was also unaware that the seasons were opposite in the southern hemisphere. He had organised a tour to the centre of Australia in what he thought was the middle of winter, but was actually scorching summer. I hope he packed a hat, some sunscreen, insect repellent and some extra IQ points.

Another crew, when asking to lower window shades on a daylight flight over the Pacific, joked that there would be nothing to see anyway and that even the International Dateline would not be visible because of cloud cover. The passenger thought the hostie was being serious and lamented, ‘I can't see anything, but a wing outside my god damn window anyway.'

Speaking of wings, I had someone tell me on a night flight that a light had been following us since we had taken off. The passenger seriously did not realise there is a light at the end the airplane's wing and it was this light at which they had been looking.

Yet another passenger once remarked, ‘We have been flying over the same barren land for the last 30 minutes. Where are we?'

The flight attendant replied, ‘We are over Arizona. However, you are looking at the wing.'

Such acts of stupidity are hilarious, as long as they do not affect other people. One of the major differences between someone like Damien and someone like me in such situations is that Damien will roll his eyes and be patronising, but I will try and ascertain more information from the person. I do this so I can find out if the question-asker is genuinely devoid of intelligence or if they have simply asked a question without thought. I am not cruel, just curious.

One of the questions I am asked frequently, particularly after a long flight is, ‘Do you turn around and fly back home now?'

Damien would roll those wicked eyes and say, ‘Sure, we have just worked for sixteen-hour day, so why not work a thirty-two hour one.'

I am more diplomatic and explain that we have already worked several hours before we took off, so we will go to a hotel and rest before enduring the long working day back to our home base. Nine times out of 10 the passenger realises how absurd their question was. Other times, the person will come back with an equally ridiculous question.

‘So, do you have to find the hotel yourself?'

Or ‘Do you stay at the airport?'

Or ‘Are you allowed to leave the hotel?'

As curious as I might be, I rarely give these people the opportunity to ask a third question.

We are delayed on the ground for nearly an hour. Sadly when one aircraft is affected by weather conditions as we are, all aircrafts are affected. When we are cleared for taking off, it is not a simple case of turning on the engines and flying off. There were aircrafts adjusted in a holding pattern while the winds were changing and the resultant change of runways was being decided. Those aircrafts now need to land, while the backlog of planes queued for take-off has grown exponentially. Even when everything is running smoothly, the operational systems involved in running an airport and flight schedules is a logistical nightmare. The problems are now compounded.

We spend another two hours on the ground before we even begin to move. Passengers are already concerned and irritable about connecting flights and rescheduling. Again, we don't have any answers and any complaints should not be made to the company, but addressed directly to God.

Most passengers understand. Flying an aircraft is dependent on a lot of factors. Some of these factors are human, some mechanical and some are out of everybody's control. If any one of those factors has an issue, you don't fly anywhere. That's just the way it is. You can bitch and complain all you want, but that's not going to change things.

Over the years I have chatted with many pilots about aircrafts. I don't profess to know much about them (‘them' refers to planes, but I know just as little about techies anyway) but I do know that an aircraft is an extremely reliable piece of machinery. It needs to be. Planes generally have plenty of back-up systems. On this aircraft, a Boeing 747, there are four engines, and from what I have been told the aircraft could fly and subsequently land on just one operational engine if it had to. There have even been instances of commercial aircraft losing all engines and gliding safely and smoothly to the ground.

I was on a flight some years ago, again on a 747 with four engines, leaving LAX (Los Angeles) when we blew an engine on take-off. There was a loud ‘bang', and the crew and passengers could feel a minor and temporary deceleration of the aircraft. The plane continued its climb without incident. I am sure the pilot's workload would have increased, but in the cabin, apart from the ‘bang', everything seemed normal. Once the aircraft had reached altitude, we went into a holding pattern around the airport. The captain eventually made a P.A. explaining the situation. He reassured the passengers that the aircraft was more than capable of flying on three engines, however it was procedure and aviation authority rules to land as soon as possible. We would be making a routine landing back into LAX.

A businessman passenger stopped me in the cabin immediately after listening to the P.A. and asked, ‘If the plane is more than capable of flying on three engines, why don't we just keep going?' Our destination was about five hour's flight time away, and this man knew that too. This guy was dead serious.

I choose my words carefully: ‘Sir, if you were preparing to drive your car on a long journey, and you blew a tire as you drove out of your driveway, would you continue, particularly if it is illegal to do so? The car is more than capable of driving, but you would fix the problem before you continued, wouldn't you?'

If this man does run some sort of business, I am pleased that I don't have a stake in his company.

The pilots spend countless hours in flight simulators practicing this very procedure, and the landing went as per procedure. The aircraft was rendered U.S. (an airline term meaning ‘unserviceable') and was sent into the hanger to have a new or replacement engine fitted in, while the company managed to get another aircraft for our trip. We were delayed a few hours only, but I am a sure the flow-on effect for the airline when a plane is out of service for a period of time is complicated and extensive.

We will be facing similar disruptions and flow-on effects on this flight today, but for now at least we have pushed back from the aerobridge, and it appears we are underway.

However, a second wave of bad weather disrupts the whole airport yet again. This time we spend over an hour sitting on the runway waiting for clearance and our turn to take-off. What was meant to be an on-time departure is now on a different time zone all together.

As we are on the runway, the crew and passengers are unable to leave their seats. I am sitting opposite three passengers, and fortunately for me they are lovely. As crew we don't really get the opportunity to talk with passengers for extended periods. I love having a chat with these people and am as interested in their lives as they are in mine. Most of our initial discussions focus on the effects of the growing delay, and then we move on to more interesting topics.