A flight attendant’s lot
Right after a JetBlue flight attendant, Steven Slater, plunged down an emergency chute last week with beers in hand, Rene Foss started thinking about working the escapade into a song for the next edition of her musical revue, “Around the World in a Bad Mood.”
“Not a lot you can do with rhyming JetBlue. But chute, that has possibilities. Chute, cute, beaut,” she said appraisingly. “Beer is too easy. Slater? Well, how about, ‘See ya later?”‘ Foss has been a flight attendant for 26 years for a major airline. Her mother was also a flight attendant. Eight years ago, she wrote a humorous book about the travails of the job that bears the same title as the revue.
The book sprang from the show, which she has staged for 10 years in theatres around the nation during her time off. The shows are sometimes a one-woman performance and sometimes a musical revue with a cast of three, plus accompanist.
These days, a flight attendant’s career, once celebrated as glamorous, has become a very tough proposition. Over the last decade, salaries and pensions have been cut while air travel has become increasingly irritating to all.
As more people flew (769.6 million boarded domestic carriers in 2009, up from 629 million in 2000), airlines cut costs by eliminating jobs. This June, domestic airlines employed 462,977 full-time workers, compared with 607,387 in June 2000, the Transportation Department reports.
Like most flight attendants, Foss was riveted by the story of Slater, who gained international fame last week after a JetBlue flight reached the gate at John F. Kennedy International Airport. As the story is told, after announcing to passengers that he’d finally had it, Slater grabbed two cans of beer from the galley, activated the aircraft’s emergency inflatable slide, rode it down to the tarmac and ran off. He was arrested hours later on charges of criminal mischief and reckless endangerment that carry a penalty of up to seven years in jail.
Initially, news accounts depicted Slater as a heroic Everyman protesting the indignities of contemporary air travel. Soon, though, the story became less clear-cut after some passengers were said to have told the authorities that Slater had been acting aggressively and strangely throughout the flight. Slater suffered a facial cut at some point, perhaps as a result of an injury caused by that bane of flight attendants, a heavy bag tumbling from a jam-packed overhead bin.
At first, “he was absolutely a kind of hero, perhaps acting on things that many flight attendants may have felt at one time or another,” said Foss. She said stressed-out flight attendants began jokingly warning one another, “‘I’m about to pull a Slater!’ or ‘If this keeps up, I’m gonna go JetBlue!”‘
With planes now mostly full, the toll on flight attendants has been tremendous. But after the initial chuckles died down, many flight attendants assessed the Slater incident and worried about the perilous precedent set by a flight crewmember throwing a tantrum. “Blowing the slide,” as activating the emergency chute is called, is a very serious matter. Anyone on the tarmac below the plane who is hit by a slide can be seriously injured. “That’s one great big airbag, right smack in the kisser,” one pilot told me. On the plane, the potential for passenger panic is real.
“The poor guy was probably at his wit’s end,” Foss said. “He’s caring for an elderly mother, meaning he’s commuting all the way across the country. And then, beyond that, he apparently has a very bad day.” She added, “Fortunately, what Slater did didn’t hurt or kill somebody.”
Whatever other consequences it may have, the case highlights the rising tensions on airplanes, including those involving stowing carry-on bags in bin space that was never designed to handle the current volume. The overhead-bin wars have become the worst part of any flight attendant’s day and a very unpleasant part of most passengers’ journeys as well.
Meanwhile, Foss remains intrigued by Slater and hopes she can entice him into a guest appearance in the next performance of her revue. “Assuming he’s available,” she said. “But who knows? Maybe he’ll get a sitcom or a reality show. Or seven years.”
©2010 New York Times News Service
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