I just finished Plane Insanity and found it entertaining. It's a quick read and each chapter is a self-contained story so you can jump around the book to stuff that interests you.

Based on the author's description of his trips, I'm also voting for AA as his employer.

It would have to be American. There were too many references to things (in his talk) like flying to the Dominican Republic, certain Airbus aircraft, and other references that made me 99.9997% certain.

Thanks, guys, for "confirming" that it is American.

(From my blog www.knifetricks.blogspot.com. Yeah, the book is four years old, but we take it slow here in northern Thailand.)


Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendant's Tales of Sex, Rage and Queasiness at 30,000 Feet by Elliott Hester (St. Martin's Press 2002).


For sixteen years, Elliott Hester worked as a black, male, straight flight attendant. So he certainly has a unique perspective.

He can also write. His prose is light-weight, but it has the quality which the French call attention, you want to keep turning the page to see what he'll say next about his years in the sky.

He should have said more. The book Plane Insanity (titled In-flight Entertainment outside the United States) is a collection of Hester's columns for Salon.com, the on-line magazine that everyone used to read in the '90s but no one has read in years.

Hester plays all the greatest hits. He tells stories about puking kids, disgusting businessmen, arrogant pilots and mile-high-clubbing couples. He occasionally worked the infamous San Juan Special, a cheapo overnight flight from New York to Puerto Rico, where drunken fights were a norm and mothers routinely asked the cabin crew to fill baby bottles with cola. (Although Hester never reveals which airline he worked for, the routings and equipment make it fairly obvious he worked for American.)

Hester also describes some of the insider aspects of the job, like the fact that flight crews do not go to the bathroom in the last few hours of a flight because they need to be loaded for a potential random drug test upon landing. In one of the better columns, Hester tells of how a "crew room" in Caracas -- a hotel room rented by the airline to serve as an employee lounge -- descended into a bacchanalia, with pilots drinking belly shots of tequila from the navels of near-naked flight attendants.

The book contains a few tips for the frequent flyer. There is not enough room in the 757's overhead bins to accommodate every passenger's carry-on, while the 767 has more room than can normally be filled. The airlines will allow a "celebrity animal" to fly in its own seat, but a non-famous animal which happens to be with a celebrity must be kept caged. Check-in technology has made it almost impossible for a passenger to get on the wrong flight.

The anecdotes are funny, and enough anecdotes make a column, but they don't make a book. Hester never pulls back and gives you a bigger picture. He writes about funny things that people said and did during flight attendant training and during a three-day reassignment, but he never gives you an overview of "Charm School" or explains how a three-day reassignment actually works. What did Hester do during the course of a normal day? What is the flight attendant routine? How does an airline actually work? Hester never says, because he's busy telling the story of the business-class blow job, which is:

A flight attendant notices that a man in business class has a frozen expression of bliss on his face and that a blanket on his lap is making suspicious up-and-down movements. The flight attendant comes over and removes the blanket to reveal a woman in flagrante delicto.

"Ma'am, this type of behavior is not appropriate in business class," the flight attendant says.

The woman does not hear and proceeds apace.

"Ma'am," the flight attendant shouts, "this type of behavior is not appropriate in business class!"

The woman hears, interrupts her activity and asks, "Can we take a seat in coach?"

Good story. OK book. I'm sure there's better.