My Life as a Flight Attendant

This is a part of my life I rarely talk about. Unless somebody directly asks me about it, I usually keep it to myself. My biggest regret in life is not giving flying more time. While I will explain all of that, I will say that I learned a lot about myself during the months I lived by myself and spent a lot of time alone. If anyone really knows me, I am not a person who likes to be alone. Especially hundreds of miles away from everyone I know.

My life as a Flight Attendant starts when I was very young. When I was in 5th grade, my Mom and Bad Papa took us to Memphis Tennessee. As stated before my Mom is an Elvis fanatic, so she decided to take us to Graceland. This was our 1st time flying and our 1st real family vacation. I remember being so excited to fly. Now, anyone who knows my Mother well, knows she is deathly afraid of heights. She also is the worst person in the world to fly with. She drugs herself up on nausea medication which normally knocks her out. Then she proceeds to fall asleep on the plane with her mouth wide open!! She is very embarrassing to fly with. So anyway, I remember the feeling of taking off and how I loved it so much. Right then and there I wanted to be a Flight Attendant. I wanted to keep flying. I wanted that excitement everyday.

When it came time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I longed to get a job with an airline. I knew it was very hard to get a job with one of the major airlines. So I decided to go to Lake State for a year, and I hated it! So the summer of 95, I decided to leave the Soo behind and head to Pittsburgh, PA. I was going to be attending The Boyd School of Travel and Tourism. I signed up for the 18 month program where you left with a degree in Travel and Tourism.

During the last few weeks before my graduation, Delta Airlines came to the school for the job fair. They interviewed over 200 of us. They only offered 2 of us a job and I was one of them. I was so excited. I could hardly wait! This meant that I would be spending 6 weeks in Atlanta, GA by myself for training. Larry and I discussed it and it was the best possible outcome for me. So, on a Fall day in 1995, Larry dropped me off at the airport.

Now the training was intense. I remember so much of it. I remember learning how to crawl into smoking plane and find the fire and put it out. I remember learning how to jump out of a plane into a pool for a crash landing course. We had drills upon drills, we had CPR training, service training, book work like you would not believe, emergency landing training, maintenance training. 6 weeks of hard core 10 hour days. It was exhausting. You had to get at least a 90% to be officially hired. I believe I left with a 98%, and I was hired.

During my time in Atlanta, Larry had applied and got a job in Cincinnati, OH. This was a major hub for Delta. Now there was no guarantee I was going to get placed there, but I could request it. So I did and I was placed in New York City. But anyway, one thing I will never forget is when I was in Atlanta, we got every other weekend off. Well, I could not afford to go home, so I would stay. There would be a few girls around, but not many. Anyway, I remember being so lonely. During this time, Courtney was pregnant for Presley and I knitted her an entire blanket that pretty much took up all of my spare time. While I was alone, knitting away, Princess Diana was killed. I will never forget this as long as I live. I watched the tv in horror as I heard the story. It was one of those moments where you can picture where you were when something happened...


Anyway, I got my orders to live I NYC. Larry had moved to Cincinnati and I had put in for a transfer when a spot became available..Now living in NYC is something else I am pretty closed mouthed about. It was the loneliest period of my life. I missed my family, I missed Larry and I had moved into a two bedroom apartment in Queens with 7 other Flight attendants. Now, none of us were all home at the same time because when you are first hired in, you are on call for the first few years. So we had 9 days off a month and the rest were up for grabs by Delta. We had to purchase pagers and if we were on call, they could page us at any moment. I hated my time in NYC! Because of being on call, we could never explore the city and plus I was a small town girl living in a crazy city. It was wild and not for me. Finally, after 2 months in NYC, I got my transfer.

Just a word about flying itself. I still loved it but it was during the Alnino season (sorry, my spelling is terrible) anyway, I had some pretty hairy flights. Flights where the coffee is splashing out on to the table. Where the bins are shaking uncontrollably, and where the captain says seat belts must be on and the ignorant passengers ignore him and do what they want. Even though the conditions are horrible, they still want to walk around. But the hardest part was not the conditions, or being away from my family, or the loneliness. The hardest part for me was the passengers. They had no respect for you. I got to the point where I would walk down the middle of the plane and look straight ahead because I did not want anyone to talk to me. Half the time they treat you like crap, or the gross men would hit on you! I had one incident where we where circling in Florida because the run way lights were out. We did this for a while and we landed in Orlando (not where we were supposed to go). While on the tarmack, a lady called me over and asked when we would be going to Key West. I said the lights were still out and we can not land in those conditions. She freaked out on me and I said "
Mam, we are all inconvenienced here". She looked at me and pointed her chubby finger at me and said "you are the Flight Attendant, it is your job to be inconvenienced, not mine!". Like I could control Key West's runway lights! Well, we ended up back in Atlanta and that women had fire coming out of her nose!!!!

Another hard thing for me was always being alone. You could never really make friends because you would fly with a crew for 3 days and then never see them again. The time I spent by myself was staggering. You would fly for 6-8 legs a day, go to your hotel and collapse in exhaustion, just to get up extremely early to do it all over again. I lived alone in hotels and was to tired to see the sites of any town I had a layover in!

So while I was with Delta, Larry and I got married. I was given 1 week off from flying. We went on a beautiful honeymoon and the whole time I was dreading going back. We were married one week when I was told I had to go to Seattle. I couldn't do it. I physically could not do it. I knew right then that I was not cut out to be away so much. I wanted stability. I decided to leave and go back to college for Elementary Education.

It was a crazy time for me. But I know one thing, I may regret not giving it more time. I may regret not having the cool job I once had. But I know for a fact, that my 4 children would either not be here, or they would not have the attentive mother they have now. You can not raise a family effectively when you are a Flight Attendant. I could never be the Mother and wife I am today if I had stayed. So, you see, like with everything else, life is a series of choices and I chose to live mine for my husband and children.

Please excuse any spelling errors or typo's. I am not on my computer and I can't get back in to make corrections!