Crewed Talk: Winter Came & It Sucks for Everyone, Including Flight Attendants

“Hot mess express.”

That is the only way I know how to describe what working on an airplane is like right now. It’s a snarl of delays and cancellations, a description that doesn’t even do justice to what so many have dealt with this winter.

Sometimes I don’t know which season is tougher. Summer flying is all about the in-flight hassles; flights are rammed and everyone is on top of each other, hot-blooded and excitable. But winter… Winter is the season where sometimes it would seem like a miracle if you could even get in flight. For us, outright cancellations are a relative blessing; anything beats the creeping delays and diversions.

This winter my Facebook feed seems permanently clogged with horror stories from colleagues. Everyone is stuck in random cities thanks to diversions and trip sequences that fell apart, standing around at airports without hotel rooms, and on hold with Crew Tracking, Crew Scheduling and the Hotel Desk for hours on end. These hotline departments sometimes get overwhelmed with calls, and many of the crew members who manage to get through to a representative are given two options:

A) Work an additional flight (even though their shifts are over and they’re contractually “illegal” to work longer) with the promise of hotel rooms at the destination.

B) Sleep at the airport.

Other colleagues are in the middle of creeping delays like (though hopefully not as bad as) this one. It seriously sounds like the zombie apocalypse out there. I recently had a creeping delay which I measured throughout the evening by how long I’d been in my high heels (since I wear them on the ground, aka “when I’m not being paid”). Final count:

Let me put it this way: I had high heels in for 15.5 hrs yesterday, before I even started getting paid. #crewlife (Ok, now, g'night!)

— Sarah Steegar (@FATravelWriter) February 12, 2015

To be fair, that count includes a commute from Georgia by flight. Four of those hours were spent on the aircraft waiting for word that the flight was going ahead and the passengers were coming down the jetbridge. Just to set the scene: At one point we were so bored we turned on the entertainment system and watched a movie in 15 minute increments (when we’d pause and ask for updates, which consistently consisted of shrugs) in Business Class.

Another two of those 15.5 hours were spent with the passengers onboard (by which point we were practically afraid of them, because we knew they were frustrated, too!) while some faceless department played whack-a-mole with problems, determined not to cancel the flight, and we assured travelers that we were still going to takeoff, privately noting we were creeping towards the hour when the pilots would go illegal.

Over and over I looked at my high heels and wondered, “Did we just spend all day together for nothing?”

Did you know that when a trip cancels, the crew just loses those hours? There are exceptions, but as a general rule everyone just has to scramble to find more trips to make up the time. Of course I understand the cost burden on a company to pay people when the work falls through, but it can be pretty hard on the ol’ bill paying. I know people that lost half of their hours in January and February, and March looks like it will be trouble, too.

Occasionally, there is an alternative “solution” to lost hours. You could get snagged to work a last-minute/made-up trip formed from the loose end flights of other doomed trips that fell apart. Some hours for you (yay!) but the hastily designed new trip might not even make sense, with an overlooked conflict that leaves you stranded goodness-knows-where and could very well bump you off your next trip. In this situations, you might as well have just cancelled.

That’s the thing. The longer a delay creeps, the more likely it is the whole thing will turn into cancellation and a totally wasted day, or some crazy mess with an extended domino effect. (Did you notice the missing Crewed Talk a couple weeks back? That’s why!) Given those forces, I’m not sure at what point in a creeping delay a flight attendant goes from, “Please don’t cancel. I need the hours!” to “Please cancel and be done with it!” More than two hours, but perhaps less than four?

When winter comes our way, our most dependable hope is that the company will go back and excuse any trips missed due to inability to drive/fly to work. Trust me, even in terrible circumstances we tried our best to get there – which is why winter sees memes going around like this one from Sassy Stew:

What am I saying? I’m saying it’s a rotten mess out there this winter, and I’m sorry for anyone — travelers and crews alike — who finds themselves caught in it! You have my feverish sympathies. I hope everyone finds a warm, soft place to sleep, gets home soon and finds enough work to pay for their surely-exorbitant heating bills.

Just remember, only a few more weeks until we can leave winter flying behind and gear up for… Spring Break and then summer! Yay?

[Photos: iStock; Sassy Stew]