The Passengers Flight Attendants Never Forget

It’s no surprise that people who write about their experiences as a flight attendant write, quite often, about the bad passengers they’ve encountered. Why? Simply because that’s what people like to hear about.

Whether they’re funny or shocking, who doesn’t like such stories? They’re fun, yes, but they’re usually just that — superficial snippets of people that breezed through a single day of work and were never, in any serious way, thought about again.

These stories shouldn’t give you the impression that we don’t have extraordinary passengers of the good kind, too, or that we don’t we don’t sometimes connect with passengers on a level that’s meaningful and definitely more than a party-anecdote.

Every flight attendant has passengers who have really left a mark on them. Here are my top three.

 

The Lunch Kid

In my first year of flying (this was pre-9/11) I had a family who had ordered a Kids Meal for their 4-year-old son. I don’t remember exactly what the complaint was, I think the boy just didn’t like it, but in some stroke of New Hire over-sweet exuberance I offered to share my own lunch. From home.

The parents readily accepted my offer and took everything I had without looking back, not even to say “thank you”. The cold lack of appreciation — or even acknowledgement that I had gone well above and beyond for them — left me stunned and kind of bummed out.

It’s ok, I reassured myself, They’re just distracted. I’m sure I’ll get a good letter.

That letter never came.

Some element of that innocent, wide-eye New Hire spirit died that day, but that’s okay — it needed to. This isn’t a story about them being terrible, it’s about how I learned an important lesson about boundaries on the job. I’m still a nice girl, but that girl would’ve been eaten alive before long.

The Broken-Heart

We were on our way to Paris on a Boeing 777 in June, packed to the gills. We had one cute college couple squished in the center of Coach, but they were happy as they could be because they were gong to Europe for the first time. Together! In love! For the whole summer! Birds were chirping over their heads. They were to spend the first month on the farm of a French exchange-student friend. They were adorable.

About halfway through the flight, I entered the back galley to find the girl huddled in a corner, face buried in the crevice between two jumpseats. Within moments she was sobbing into my neck.

Several of us flight attendants spent the next couple of hours with her in our arms as she hyperventilated her story. The boyfriend had chosen this moment to tell her that he’d been cheating on her with the French girl they were going to stay with. He hadn’t told her before because he didn’t want her to miss out on Europe, and she should still stay on the farm with them because, according to him, “It would all be cool.”

She wanted to turn around and go straight home upon landing. We told her not to, to instead demand the bulk of the travel money they’d saved up together so she could afford to continue her planned travel solo and not be trapped at the farm with them. We understood she was both devastated and nervous about traveling alone, but she should absolutely let his jerk move ruin this opportunity for her. It was one she might never get again. We spent the rest of the flight advising on alternative European travel plans and giving the jerk side-eye.

I still wonder what she decided to do, and hope that she took the money and had a surprisingly amazing summer. If you see this, Crying Girl, get in touch. I’d truly love to know what happened with your summer. I hope it’s the really great story I’ve long imagined for you!

The Refugees

Hands down, my favorite group of passengers to have is the refugees. Always.

We go through spurts where we’ll have them often, maybe 10 to 20 a week on certain routes, headed to the U.S. for resettlement. It’s been a long while for me, but I hope I have them again.

I am not a person to take what I have for granted, so the effect of these passengers cannot be summed up in a platitude about being blessed. But if you ever get (or have had) the opportunity to speak with people who have been living in a refugee camp for years, who are both thrilled and terrified to be headed towards a new life in the exotic city of, say, Boise, Idaho, who might be a 30-year-old who had to leave everyone else behind, or a 12-year-old steeped in anxiety because he feels it’s now his responsibility to take care of his mother and siblings in this strange new country, who is too nervous and unsure of whether our food might make him ill to eat or drink anything but water… you’ll understand.

There is so much at stake for these passengers, and you so deeply wish you could do something more than smile and be kind and hope that they find a good life in America.*

 

Normally, the fact that passengers are in and out of our day and rarely seen again is a good thing in our job. It’s refreshingly uncomplicated. However, there are some days when we meet passengers we’ll truly never forget. Encountering such passengers might not always be fun, but they leave an important impression. Sometimes, they even leave us feeling lucky we got to meet them at all.

* If you’re interested, you can find more information about the refugee program here. Less officially, I might recommend the excellent movie, The Good Lie.

[Photo: iStock]