If you ever thought that being a flight attendant is the coolest job in the world, I invite you to read this great article of Michelle Higgins, a travel columnist for the New York Times.

Michele spent two days as a flight attendant with American Airlines to write her article titled “Flying the unfriendly skies”

She reported that unruly passengers, crying children, long working hours, and relative low salaries make flight attendant jobs very hard. Gone are the days where stewards would fly for 4 hours, then hit the beach on an exotic destination to wait for her fly home the following morning.

Among the most interesting facts she found about flight attendant jobs are::

• Flight attendants make an average of $35,000 a year.
• They only get pay for the actual flight time (if the flight is delayed or if they have to spend the night over they only get $1.50 an hour flat rate)
• Flight attendants earn between 7 and 20 percent less today than before 9/11
• Though the benefits, like free flights for your entire family, still exist on paper, they are hard to claim as airlines continue to pack planes full of paying

The article was an eye opening for me, and I really recommend you read it if you are thinking on changing careers.





There was a time, when the flight attendants’ job was to take care of passenger’s needs and make your flight as pleasant as possible. As soon as you would push that call button, one of them would rush to your seat and asked you how they could be helpful. They would greed you when you came in, and say good bay when you left the airplane. They used to help you with your carry on luggage, guide you to your seat and a be nice in general. That is the case no more. To my horror, I discovered that flight attendants have become sales people, trying to sell you every thing, from overprices sodas and peanuts to credit card enrollments.

I have flown at least 6 times in the last 3 months with two different airlines. Delta and Spirit Air. It had been a while since my last flight (more than 3 years) so I was in shock to see how much the job of a flight attendant had changed.

Delta:

I flew Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta, GA on Delta Airlines. The seatbelt sign was still on when one of the flight attendant announced over the PA system that they would begin distributing Master Card applications to all the passengers who wanted to apply for the credit card. She went on to give a long list of “benefits” if you were to apply: from bonus frequent flyers miles to cash rebates. She went on for several minutes, really trying to convince the passengers to complete the application. For a moment I felt like I was attending one of those time share sales presentation.
Several minutes later, all three flight attendants starting walking the aisles asking every single passengers if they wanted to apply for the credit card. During the whole flight they repeated the same sales pitch over the PA at least 3 other times.
Later on, they collected all the applications from those passengers who felt compelled to apply for a credit card 30,000 feet in the air.
During the flight they also announced several times that they had all kind of drinks and other items from the Sky Mall catalog for sale.





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