Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase: Hilarious Stories of Air Travel by the World's Favorite Flight Attendant (5 page)

Tower
: “Continental 635, cleared for takeoff behind Eastern 702. Did you copy that report from Eastern 702?”

Continental 635
: “Continental 635, cleared for takeoff, roger; and yes, we copied Eastern...We've already notified our caterers.”

JOKE

One day the pilot of a small Cherokee 180 was told by the tower to hold short of the active runway while a large DC-8 landed. The DC-8 landed, rolled out, turned around, and taxied back past the Cherokee. Some quick-witted comedian in the DC-8 crew got on the radio and said, “What a cute little plane. Did you build it all by yourself?” The Cherokee pilot, not about to let the insult go by, came back with a real zinger: “I made it out of DC-8 parts. Another landing like yours and I'll have enough parts for another one!”

Memorable Moments in Aviation History

1895
: “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.”
–Physicist Lord Kelvin.

1901
: “Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.”
–Simon Newcomb

1903
: The first successful flight by Orville and Wilbur Wright occurred at Kitty Hawk when Wilbur flew 852 feet (260 m). The Wright brothers were not the first to fly a plane. Seven years earlier, Samuel Pierpont Langley's 16-foot (4.9 m) plane traveled three quarters of a mile and stayed aloft for a minute and a half. The Wright's claim to fame was that they made the first flight that carried a human. Langley's plane was unmanned.

“I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years….Ever since, I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.”
–Wilbur Wright, 1908

1908
: The world's first fatal airplane crash occurred when a propeller broke, sending the aircraft plunging 150 feet (46 m) to earth. The pilot escaped with a broken leg, but the single passenger, Lt. Thomas Selfridge of the U.S. Signal Corps, was killed on impact. The pilot was Orville Wright.

1918
: President Wilson and other important officials gathered in May of 1918 to witness the takeoff of the first airmail flight. The plane was to carry mail from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia. After takeoff, the plane somehow went off course and landed in Waldorf, Maryland,— which is even farther away from Philadelphia than Washington. The mail was eventually delivered by train.

[Airmail was] an impractical sort of fad, and had no place in the serious job of postal transportation.”
—Col. Paul Henderson, U.S. 2nd Asst. Postmaster General, 1919

1927
: Charles Lindbergh was not the first person to fly across the Atlantic. Dozens of people did that before he did. Lindbergh was the first person to fly across the Atlantic solo. For the 33-hour flight, he took with him only several sandwiches to eat, saying, “If I make it to Paris, I won’t need any more; and if I don’t make it to Paris, I won’t need any more.” His flight won him a $25,000 prize for being the first to fly non-stop from New York to Paris.

“I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.”
–Charles Lindbergh in his autobiography The Spirit of St. Louis. He died in 1974 at the age of 72.

1938
: Howard Hughes filled a compartment on his airplane with ping-pong balls so that it would float if it went down over the ocean. He then proceeded to set the speed record for flying around the world.

1949
: A U.S. Superfortress bomber completed the first nonstop flight around the world. The plane traveled 23,452 miles (37,742 km) in 94 hours and 1 minute. It was refueled four times in flight.

1959
: John Cook and Bob Timm flew their Cessna 172 in the skies over Las Vegas for 65 days without stopping, setting a record that no one would ever want to break. They ‘airlifted’ fuel and supplies from a truck that drove down a long straight stretch of highway to match their speed. They covered a distance equal to six times around the world without ever leaving the air space over Vegas. “Next time I feel in the mood to fly endurance, I’m going to lock myself in our garbage can with the vacuum cleaner running. That is, until my psychiatrist opens up for business in the morning,” said Cook after the flight.

1986
: The Voyager was the first airplane to fly around the world without refueling. Cruising at a speed between 65 and 120 mph (105-193 km/hr) at an altitude of 8,000 to 10,000 feet (2,438-3,048 m), it took pilots Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds to travel 24,986 miles (40,211 km). The plane used just over 1,000 gallons (3,785 L) of fuel, which weighed nearly 10,000 pounds (4,535 kg). After they landed they found there were still 14 gallons (53 L) of fuel aboard the plane, enough to theoretically travel another 560 miles (901 km) at their regular mileage of 40 miles per gallon (17 km/L).

Random Factoids

•  What famous pilot flew for 43 years without a pilot's license? Orville Wright.

•  The wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the first flight the Wright Brothers took.

•  Who was the first president to fly while in office? Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who flew to Casablanca in a Boeing 314 in 1943.

Lavatory Laughs

The lavatory is “ripe” with entertainment value. Who could have guessed there would be so much to make fun of in an airline bathroom? I just hope these stories don’t all go down the toilet!

A flight attendant:

“I was serving on a flight to L.A. and on that particular plane, the suction on the toilet in the lavatory was extremely strong. We served breakfast, and one lady passenger spilled something on her dress. It was a red silk wrap-around dress, and she went to the bathroom to clean it off. Apparently, she took off the dress in the lavatory, and when she was done cleaning it, she laid it next to the toilet, and then went to the bathroom. When she flushed, a piece of the dress was hanging close enough to the toilet so that it got sucked right in and flushed right down. So there she was, standing there wearing nothing but her underwear. She just stayed in the bathroom until we were ready to land. We started knocking on the door and insisting that she come out and take her seat. She said, ‘I cannot come out!’ and when we asked why, she opened the door a tiny crack and said, ‘My dress got flushed down the toilet!’ So one of us loaned her an extra coat so she could come out. When we landed, we explained the situation to the agent and he said, ‘Well…do you want your dress back?’ and she said emphatically, ‘
No
!’ I’m sure that by then her red silk dress was a pretty shade of lavatory blue.”

A flight attendant:

“A male passenger was violently ill in the lav, and he threw up so hard his dentures fell out and got flushed down the toilet.
And he wanted them back
.”

Betty:

“The word spoken most often by a flight attendant is not ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’ or ‘excuse me’ or ‘I’m sorry.’ The word spoken most often is, ‘
Push
!’ That’s because the lavatory door is a bi-fold door that opens like a telephone booth. People are always searching for a door knob to try to pull the door open, and they constantly grab the ash tray in the door thinking it must be a handle. So from one end of the flight to the other, the word most often repeated by every flight attendant in America is, ‘Push! Push it! Push the door!’ because there is always a confused passenger standing in front of the bathroom door trying to figure out how to get in. I think the only professional who uses the word ‘push’ more than flight attendants must be an obstetrician.”

A pilot:

“On one of my flights, a flight attendant answered the call button that was rung from inside one of the lavatories. She responded to the bell and knocked on the bathroom door. A man opened the door. He was seated on the throne and said, ‘Could you please bring me a magazine?’”

A flight attendant:

“I was working a flight when the flight engineer stepped out of the cockpit to use the restroom. A lady was in the lavatory but she didn’t know how to lock the door, so she was sitting on the throne holding the door closed with her hand. The flight engineer tugged on the door to open it, and she tugged back. He pulled harder, thinking the door was just stuck, and she pulled harder back. Then he gave the door a really hard yank and she came flying out of the bathroom with her pants around her ankles and landed on the floor, right in the middle of the first class aisle!”

Betty:

“In many foreign countries, they don’t use the same sort of toilet that we are accustomed to in the U.S. Instead, often there is simply a hole in the ground, with an outline of two feet on either side of the hole. You place your feet on the footprints and squat. And just as we are not accustomed to their squat toilet, they are not used to our sitdown toilet. Sometimes in the lav, people will actually get up and stand on the toilet seat and squat. How do I know this? Two reasons. First, I’ve seen the footprints on the seat. Second, the same people who are unfamiliar with the use of a flush toilet are often unfamiliar with the way the locking mechanism works on a lavatory door. I’ve accidentally walked in on them upon occasion. And, upon occasion, other passengers have walked in on them too. They’ll rush to me with their eyes wide and say, ‘You won’t believe what I just saw in the bathroom!’ and I’ll reply, ‘someone was standing on the seat and squatting?’ and they say, ‘How did you know?!’ Well, I’ve seen it all!”

A flight attendant:

“Anyone who has flown on a regular basis knows those little lavatories don’t exactly stay as fresh as a daisy. In fact, especially on long flights, they can get downright rank. And the flight attendant’s jumpseats are very near the lavatories on almost every aircraft, so nobody knows better than us just how smelly those restrooms can get. That’s why many flight attendants tend to carry around some sort of air freshener. On one flight, I was serving with a flight attendant who carried a great big can of aerosol air freshener. When the smell started getting bad, she grabbed that can, opened the lavatory door a crack and sprayed the restroom thoroughly from top to bottom. A second later we heard someone coughing inside the restroom. There was a passenger in there who hadn’t locked the lavatory door. That passenger got thoroughly doused with a major amount of air freshener and probably smelled like lilacs clear across the country.”

Random Factoids

•  The first airplane toilets were simply a hole in the fuselage of the plane, through which one could see the countryside passing below.

•  There’s an average of one toilet for every 46 passengers in coach class, and one toilet for every 11 passengers in first class.

•  An average airline toilet uses about 8 ounces (.25 L) of water per flush.

A flight attendant:

“The lavs on a plane always smell bad, and one way we combat the odor is by clipping packets of coffee in the lav, so the place smells like coffee instead of…um….a lav. We always have these coffee packets on hand to brew coffee for the passengers, and we often just slip an extra one into a clip on the wall of the lav, and we try to remember to replace them after a few days with fresh ones, throwing the old ones away. Well, one of those coffee packets had been hanging on the wall a bit too long, I guess. A young lady went into the lav, wearing white hip-hugger pants and a white high-rise top. (I don’t know why people wear white when they’re traveling.) All of a sudden this packet of coffee disintegrated and coffee grounds rained down upon this woman in her white outfit. She burst out of the lav screeching in alarm because, when something brown rains down upon you in a bathroom, your first thought is not that it’s coffee. It took us quite a while to calm her down and clean her up. We had to work hard to convince her the reason we hang coffee in the lav is to help, and not to terrorize the passengers.”

Betty:

“There was a small boy traveling unaccompanied on one of my flights. He was a very young boy and very short—too short to reach up and latch the lock on the lavatory door which also turns on the light. So I told him I would lock the door from the outside, which would also turn on the light for him, and that I would wait outside the door until he was ready to come out again. Well, he’d been in there a few minutes when another flight attendant signaled me that she needed my help with something. So I walked to the front of the plane to help her, and then a passenger asked me for something, and then somebody else distracted me, and soon I had forgotten all about the little boy and went back to doing beverage service. A few minutes later, I heard something peculiar—a noise I couldn’t place. The noise kept getting louder, and all of a sudden my heart dropped through my socks as I realized it was the little boy, pounding on the door of the lavatory. I unlocked the door and he came out crying and upset, and I felt so bad that because of me, some kid was probably going to need years of therapy to overcome the trauma of being locked in the lavatory.”