Flight attendent "truths"
 

http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2013/0...mp=sem_outloud

Interesting but it doesn't sound entirely true.

Who in the author's opinion is the "most storie name in commercial aviation?"

Pan Am?

Fox News is the first tip- off of fluff piece

FAs have official duties of all kinds when the aircraft is at the gate. Difficult for me to believe the pay clock starts at wheels up

LOL on the children comment though......

At most airlines in the United States, crew is payed from the time the airplane "blocks out" until it "blocks in" -- i.e. from when the door is closed and brakes released until the brakes are set and the door is opened.

Google "tongue in cheek" @:-) .

i think this is the second or third "what an FA doesn't tell you thread". Maybe we should start a "what we really want to tell the FA" thread.

And, this sometimes leads to poor FA attitudes, especially around times of contact negotiations when the union reps are stirring up trouble. Sometimes you'll get attitude about pre-departure drinks, hanging up of coats, and the like, including a comment about "we're not even getting paid for this" since the door hasn't closed yet.

But the truth is that that's just a convenient way to measure time on the job, and the pre- and post-departure duties are taken into account when the hourly wage is set. Put another way, for those carriers that have a longer period of time that FA's are considered on the job, the hourly rate is less, all other things being equal.

I don't have any inside knowledge here, but I recognize flight attendants to be professionals, mainly based on their behavior. Even if this article is 100% factually correct, the "facts" here are simply a collection of statements uttered (perhaps casually, flippantly...) each by one flight attendant, then attributed to an entire profession. Hey, it sells "newspapers", eh? The value here is that it may make passengers think about their behavior: e.g., look over the drink list in the in-flight magazine and don't ask the flight attendant to recite it to you.

Nope.

Haha I got a real kick out of all the times mentioned in the article where the FA's would do a certain thing so they could do less work. :D Reminds me of a part time minimum wage job I had as a college student for awhile.

I worked golf course grounds maintenance for a time as a student and when working any manual labor job for low pay paid hourly you will naturally try to do the least amount of work possible. Hey, paid by the hour right? ^

I would regularly do things like in a golf cart, drive the long way around to where I needed to be instead of a quick straight line. I wouldn't load the beds of the maintenance carts fully with dirt, seed, shovels, etc just so I could make multiple trips back, taking the long way of course. Killing time bro, paid by the hour right?

Nice work ethic. I suppose you wouldn't tolerate this behavior if it was your money someone else was wasting.

In this case, Christopher Elliott was right.

From this quote it appears it is a non-domestic airline, currently flying. So I would guess maybe British Airways, or Cathay Pacific?

One of them recently retired after 20 years flying for the most storied name in commercial aviation, while others work for less glamorous domestic U.S. airlines.

A lot of them seem bogus. Especially the "wheels up" pay thing, inventing a problem to get more airtime pay, and "I'm as clueless as you are" on what you're flying over. If it's a FA's frequent route, they won't be clueless.

I'm assuming that if Fox News perceives any non-U.S. airline as the "most storied name in aviation" (which is hard to believe to begin with), it's British Airways.

If you asked me that question far from the scope of this Fox News article, I'm honestly not sure who I'd say. Maybe BA, maybe LH, or maybe a defunct carrier like Pan Am or TWA.

Like the hotel article, there's really nothing to see here. Fluff piece. Like the hotel article, a lot of it is simply "don't be an *ss." Nothing all that insider-ish about it... I guess the coffee thing is new to me: I would have bet that it was the other way around. (People asking for decaf but the airline just serving everybody the regular stuff because it's cheaper.)