Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase: Hilarious Stories of Air Travel by the World's Favorite Flight Attendant (14 page)

A flight attendant:

“Years ago, in the days before they invented jetways, we all hated the flight to Fairbanks, Alaska, in the winter because we had to stand by the open door of the plane on the runway and wait for the passengers to board. It wasn’t too bad for the male flight attendants, but the women flight attendants were wearing their regulation skirts, which were very cold in sub-zero temperatures, and their regulation shoes, which were pointy patent leather pumps. Their feet would be freezing by the time the passengers were aboard. So one day they decided to turn on the galley oven and warm up their shoes before boarding. Unfortunately, they either turned the temperature up too high, or left their shoes in there too long. When they went to take them out, the leather had shrunk and the toes of their shoes had curled up and back, so they looked exactly like genie shoes. They didn’t have any other shoes with them, so they ended up wearing genie shoes on the entire flight. At least their feet were warm.”

Fact

Bad Air Ads

* One airline targeting Hispanic customers designed an ad that boasted about the airline’s luxurious leather seats. Unfortunately, the translator didn’t quite hit the mark, using a term for ‘leather’ that also denoted a person’s hide. The ad came across as saying ‘fly in the nude’.

* In the 1970s, one airline decided to try out a new campaign called “Fly Your Wife Free” in which businessmen were encouraged to bring their wives along at no extra charge. The promotion was so successful that the airline decided to send letters of appreciation to the men who had availed themselves of the service. The letters were mailed directly to their home addresses, where they were opened by the wives. Soon the airline was inundated with letters of outrage from wives who had never heard of the promotion and had never accompanied their husbands on any kind of a free trip. Hundreds of women demanded to know the names of the women their husbands had flown with. The promotion ceased immediately.

* In 1992, sales of Hoover vacuums were lagging in England, so a new sales promotion was rolled out: Buy a vacuum for 100 pounds (approximately $150 at the time) and get two free round-trip tickets to a European destination. Well, customers quickly realized that vacuum cleaners were cheaper than plane tickets, and the vacuum cleaners “flew” off the shelves at a phenomenal rate. The factory had to manufacture vacuum cleaners seven days a week to keep up with the demand. So many people signed up for free plane tickets that Hoover had to charter flights to accommodate them all. The more vacuum cleaners they sold, the more they lost money. The promotion cost the company nearly $50 million.

Random Factoids

•     The average American business traveler makes 18.6 trips annually.

•     25% of business travelers take a spouse along.

•     The average number of people airborne over the U.S. at any moment is 61,000.

•     About 650 million people travel on U.S. airlines annually, and there are over 100,000 flight attendants to serve them.

•     Around 18 million people fly on American-based airlines every day. By comparison, the population of New York City (the most populous city in the U.S.) is 8.25 million.

•     In 1978 (at the beginning of airline deregulation), 17% of Americans had flown. By the year 2000, 84% of the American population had flown.

Cockpit Comedians

In general people easily accept colorful behavior from a flight attendant. But they have a different perception of an airline pilot. Our pilots are highly trained individuals, and they are truly the cream of the crop. I have the utmost confidence in their flying abilities, but people may be surprised to hear that pilots can also be colorful and zany. Every once in a while you run into a pilot who is slightly off the beaten runway. In this chapter we have cockpit competitiveness, a pretty-boy pilot, a lightning bolt strike and zany pilot announcements.

A flight attendant:

“Occasionally it will happen that the pilot will forget to turn off the microphone when he finishes making his announcements, and the entire plane full of passengers will overhear what’s going on in the cockpit until the mike is switched off. This happened once, and the passengers heard as the pilot turned to the co-pilot and said, ‘I could really go for a rare steak, a strong coffee, and a hot young woman!’ Mortified, a flight attendant went racing up the aisle to tell the pilot to turn off the mike. A passenger watched her rush by and called out,
‘Don’t forget the coffee!’”

A pilot:

“On a flight from Dallas to Honolulu, a flight attendant knocked on the cockpit door and handed the co-pilot a camcorder, saying, ‘I know you guys aren’t supposed to do this, but could you get some film of the islands as we’re on our way in?’ The co-pilot agreed, and he started filming the islands, naming them off and making a few comments about the flight. When he panned the camera around the cockpit, there was the pilot standing on his seat with his pants around his ankles, giving the camera a full moon. The co-pilot got a really nice long shot of the moon, and handed the camcorder back to the flight attendant when they landed without saying anything. That night over dinner and a few beers, the pilot and co-pilot had a lot of laughs over the incident, and then they started thinking up more things they could do with that camera. So the next day as they were flying out, heading back to Dallas, they asked the flight attendant if they could have her camcorder to do some more filming for her. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘That wasn’t my camera. That was a
passenger’s
camera!’”

A pilot:

“There’s always a kind of competitiveness between pilots regarding what kind of a plane you’re flying, what kind of equipment you’ve got, and who you’re flying with. At one time there was an F-16 pilot who came across a C-130 droning across the sky. So the F-16 pilot got on the same frequency as the C-130 and said, ‘Hey, watch
this
!’ Then he did a barrel roll and a couple of loops, and said to the C-130, ‘Top
that
!’ The C-130 pilot said, ‘Well, actually, I can do something that’s way better than that. Just you watch.’ And the C-130 just kept on chugging across the sky. After waiting about ten minutes, the F-16 pilot got back on the radio and said, ‘What are you going to do?’ and the C-130 pilot said, ‘I’ve already done it! I got up, went to the back of the plane, got my lunch, went to the bathroom, poured a cup of coffee, and came back to the flight deck!’”

Random Factoids

•  One of the largest planes is the Boeing 747. If set upright, it would rise as high as a 20-story building.

•  The Boeing 747 can weigh up to 875,000 pounds (396,893 kg) when fully loaded.

•  The 300 passengers and their luggage account for less than 10% of the total weight of a 747.

•  To fill the gas tank on a Boeing 747 requires 45,000 gallons (170,343 L) of fuel.

•  The two companies of Boeing and Airbus build around 99 percent of passenger jets.

•  The Boeing plant in Everett, Washington, is the world’s largest building, if measured by volume rather than area.

•  The Boeing factory is 1/3 of a mile wide, over 2/3 of a mile long, and 11 stories tall.

•  Disneyland could fit inside the Boeing plant, with plenty of room for the parking lots.

•  The Boeing plant in Everett, Washington, uses as much electricity as 32,000 homes.

•  A brand new Boeing 777 costs around $165 million.

A flight attendant:

“New hire flight attendants have six to eight weeks of training, and new hire pilots have eight to ten weeks of training. In the lunch room one day, I overheard an exchange between a new flight attendant and a pilot. The flight attendant said, ‘Well, if I had known that it was only two more weeks of training, I would have been a pilot!’”

A pilot:

“A friend of mine was a brand new flight attendant and she was still pretty nervous about the job and worried she’d screw up somehow. One day she was on a DC-9 when the pilot and co-pilot both asked her to bring them some coffee. She went and fixed two cups of coffee and then went back to the cockpit. Just as she opened the cockpit door and reached in to hand them their coffees, the plane hit some turbulence and both of the cups went flying out of her hand. There was coffee everywhere—running down the windshield, all over the instruments, dripping from the ceiling. The image that is forever burned into her memory is the co-pilot turning to face her with a single drip of coffee hanging off the end of his nose. She never lived it down.”

A passenger:

“A few years ago there was a flight approaching Glasgow airport in Scotland. The captain was on the speaker and the announcement went something like: ‘Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. We have just started our approach to Glasgow and will be landing in about 20 minutes and
OH, MY GOD
!!!’ The mike suddenly went dead. There was complete silence in the passenger cabin. A few minutes later the announcement continued: ‘Hello again, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry about that! Just as I was speaking to you, the stewardess was handing me a cup of coffee which spilled into my lap. You should see the front of my trousers!’ A voice piped up from one of the passengers: ‘That’s nothing! You should see the
back
of mine!’”

A co-pilot:

“I was working for a small regional airline. Because the cockpit tended to stay hot inside, it was outfitted with a small fan. The fan was not protected by a cage or anything, but the blades were made of rubber. If you accidentally stuck your hand in the fan when it was on, it would make a horrible noise, and the smack on your hands would be a terrible jolt. You’d jerk your hand back, thinking you’d certainly lost some fingers—but no damage would be done. One time I was flying with a pilot who obsessively ran his hands through his hair. He was constantly combing his hair with his fingers. When we leveled off, he said he was going to make an announcement to the passengers. He picked up the mike and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Captain speaking….’ and then he ran his hand through his hair, and his hand hit the fan and it made this terrible splatting noise. With the mike still keyed, he shouted all kinds of obscenities at the top of his lungs before he dropped the mike. There was a long moment of silence. Then the call light dinged and the flight attendant wanted to know what was going on. We explained it to her and she said, ‘Well, you better make an announcement right away because you’ve got a plane full of people who think we’re all about to die!’”

A first officer:

“A few years ago I was flying with a captain who was famous for being a character. We were getting ready to push back from the gate in London. At the time, the runway was undergoing repairs and there was a lot of construction going on as they worked to fix the pavement. So the captain got on the PA system and made an announcement, saying, ‘Folks, I want you to know that they’re doing a lot of work on the runway pavement, so we might have a little bit of a rough takeoff. I just want you to know that it’s not the pilot’s fault; it’s not the airplane’s fault; it’s the
asphalt
.’”

Random Factoids

•  There are more than 750,000 licensed pilots in the U.S.

•  A study of blinking found that pilots blink less often than co-pilots.

•  The captain and the first officer are required by regulation to eat different meals while flying, just in case some food item is tainted. That way, only one of them will get sick.

A flight engineer:

“I flew a regular route with a regular crew to Salt Lake City that always took us right over the top of the Grand Teton Mountains in Wyoming. The Captain would always point out the mountain range to the passengers as we flew over. One day the copilot told the Captain that next time we flew over the Tetons, he should tell the passengers where the name of the mountain range originated. The Captain said he wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole. I asked him why not, and he said it was far too risky. I said that was ridiculous, and it was nothing to be embarrassed about or ashamed of, so he invited me to make the announcement when we went over the Tetons. I picked up the mike and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are now passing over the Grand Teton Mountain range of Wyoming. These 14,000 foot-tall mountains were first explored by French fur trappers who gave them their name. They must have been lonely for female companionship, because ‘teton’ is the French word for ‘breast’, so Grand Tetons actually means ‘big breasts.’ However, it must have been quite a long while since they’d seen a woman, because, as you can see, there are
three
major peaks in the Teton range!’ I then hung up the mike. Within seconds, every single flight attendant was crowding the cockpit saying, ‘We can’t believe you just said that!’ I began to worry I’d get in trouble after all, and I asked if the passengers were offended. ‘Are you kidding?’ they said. ‘The plane is full of French Canadians!
They loved it!
’”