Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer (11 page)

I
was working a full flight on a L1011—and I mean completely full. I was serving beverages in the aisle when a passenger, who seemed upset, tapped me on the shoulder. He was distinguished looking and spoke with grace and aplomb. “Excuse me,” he said, “do you have any empty seats? The woman next to me is, well, it would be best if I could relocate.”

“We don’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I always feel bad when someone pays what is comparable to a down payment on a new car to fly somewhere, only to find that the person in the
next seat is rude or smells or is a talker. I didn’t know what the woman next to him was like, but the truth was that every seat was full—we had left ticketed passengers standing at the gate.

About ten minutes later, the same man approached me again. Although still reserved and very polite, he was obviously becoming desperate.

“The woman next to me,” he said, motioning to his section of the aircraft. “She’s a bit difficult. Do you have
any
empty seats?”

“No, I’m sorry, we don’t.”

It wasn’t until the third time the man returned that I realized the gravity of the situation.

“Excuse me,” he said. “She bit me.”

“What?”

“She bit me, yes. Here on the arm.”

He held up his arm and showed a fresh imprint of a set of teeth. I looked up at the other flight attendant who had heard the whole thing. And then we went into action. We called the cockpit. The second officer came out and subdued the woman using a rope of headset cords tied together to secure her arms to her side, and we removed all passengers within teeth range.

We had to double up people in seats, and we immediately diverted the aircraft to land at the closest available airport. The cockpit called ahead for someone to meet the flight. So when we landed police were at the door and stormed onto the airplane
while all the passengers who had been instructed to stay seated did so.

The biter was escorted off the flight, and the bitten received a free beverage.

In an update later in the day, we heard the biter was a former mental patient who had simply forgotten to take her medicine.

When we took off again this time, we did have one empty seat.

T
he year was 1986, and I was working the dreaded Los Angeles to Las Vegas turns: six flights a day, up and down, racing through the cabin with drinks during the thirty-seven-minute trip.

Now, in those days, the airline allowed smoking on board. And smoking mixed with all the drinking that went on during the Las Vegas runs was a dangerous combination.

That’s why when the woman sitting in the last row of First
Class, seat 3A, called me over and pointed below the window and said with slurred speech, “I’ve dropped my cigarette, and it’s stuck on the wall,” I went into action. I leaned over the man sitting next to her and saw that her cigarette was indeed stuck in the carpeting on the wall. Smoke drifted up as the cigarette’s embers burned the carpet fibers.

As I was trained to do, I grabbed the water off the woman’s tray and poured it over the side toward the cigarette. The water bounced off the curve in the wall and missed the fire altogether.

I notified another crew member to alert the cockpit. Then I took a fire extinguisher and asked the other two people in First Class to leave their seats while I tried to extinguish the flame from the cabin. That way no one in Coach would see what I was doing and be alarmed. But it didn’t work. I needed a different angle.

So, holding the extinguisher down near my knees—which I hoped was out of sight of most people—I quickly stepped beyond the curtain into Coach. I said, “Excuse me,” to the people in A, B, and C seats as I knelt. Having a clear shot at the tiny fire along the side wall under the windows, I sprayed the extinguisher until it was empty. It completely eliminated any hint of flame. Sweat had formed on my forehead from the pressure, and I was standing up to go back to First Class when I heard a call bell.

I looked up to see the woman sitting one row back in the
aisle seat motioning me over. She had apparently been watching everything I did, and now she had a comment. She was, it turned out, quite disgusted with my behavior. She tapped large red nails on the tray table.

“Yes?” I said. “Can I help you?”

“I don’t think now is a good time to spray for bugs,” she said, waving a finger at me.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t think now is a good time to spray for bugs! I can see you’re trying to hide that, and you’re not fooling me one bit.” She pointed at the cylinder I tried to hide behind my legs.

A couple of seconds passed while I thought about her statement. Then I said, “You’re absolutely right. I’m going to put this away right now.”

And I did.

Sometimes it’s best to go down the path with those who think they know where you are going.

S
he was a young flight attendant—
young
meaning just twenty-two years old. I was someone who had been working for twenty years and felt a hundred years old. It was an all-night turnaround. Atlanta to Los Angeles and back again. The flight attendants would have no break between flights. It was board, take off, deplane, clean plane, reboard, and take off again.

By around 4:45 a.m. on the way back to Atlanta, the entire plane was sleeping, except for the flight attendants, who were mostly going about their duties quietly. Except for the young one, Suzy New Hire. She was spinning out of control with
excitement about the job and her life and her new boyfriend and her old boyfriend and where she was going on vacation and what she was going to fix for dinner when she got back home. Just listening to the speed with which words tumbled out of her mouth made me tired.

I realized that Suzy New Hire had been getting progressively more talkative after midnight. As I looked at her in my exhausted state, she reminded me of a helicopter with the blades spinning at full speed.

I, on the other hand, felt like an old jet with my wings drooping near the ground.

But suddenly I realized she was saying something I wanted to remember. So I wrote it down.

She was talking with another flight attendant and stopped midsentence. “Ew,” she said. “Ewww. That was so just, like, you know, Taj Mahal.”

“What?” said the other flight attendant.

“Taj Mahal.” That was
Ewww. Taj Mal.

Then she paused and said, “Or is that
déjà vu?
”

I
never stay in touch with passengers after a flight. Despite the fact that during a flight we may bond and they may share some of their deepest secrets with me—as passengers are wont to do because they know they will never see me again. And despite the fact that I may tell them I love them (by which, I mean, the passenger is my new best friend at the moment), I basically know I’ll never see most of them or hear from most of them again.

Frankly, one of the joys of my job is the love ’em and leave
’em factor. Hopefully, I leave ’em laughing, but once the flight is over, so is the relationship.

The need for this “leave ’em for good” approach is simply logistics. On a busy day, I might come in contact with a thousand people a day. Five flights, two hundred people each flight. If I were to work just two and a half days a week, that’s ten thousand people a month. Keeping tabs on every relationship I form would be impossible.

But there was one little passenger I will never forget. In fact, I dedicated my first book to her. Her name is Hannah Gray. A lot of people who read that dedication ask me questions about Hannah. Here are the answers to those questions:

• I met Hannah when she was ten years old. We talked on the flight and then stayed in touch via e-mail for years. In the beginning of our e-mailing, Hannah’s mother wrote to me and (understandably) asked,
  Why are you e-mailing my daughter?
  I wrote back to her mother and invited her to read every e-mail I sent to Hannah. I wrote,
  I am e-mailing your daughter because she is delightful and creative and funny and I see in her what I dream of one day having in a child of my own
  .
  

• When she was thirteen or fourteen, Hannah e-mailed me about what it was like when kids at school thought she was retarded because of her cerebral palsy. And
  later she wrote of potential boyfriends and career dreams and new best friends.
  

• Hannah heard that Tom and I prayed for a baby, and I told her, “If I ever have a daughter, I want her to be just like you.”
  

• When our daughter, Mandy, was finally born, I would have named her Hannah, but most of our friends used that name, and I didn’t want six Hannahs in our neighborhood.
  

• When Hannah Gray got word of Mandy’s birth, she sent us a present. It was a gift she had made in woodshop—a wooden name-tag for Mandy’s door with each letter of her name carved out—no small feat for a person with cerebral palsy. Mandy recently turned eight years old. We still have Hannah’s gift. We still cherish it.
  

• How many years did I stay in touch with Hannah Gray? I lost count, but I met her when she was ten, and when we e-mailed last, she was in college.
  

• Did Hannah ever read my first book? Yes, I sent her the book when it came out, and she wrote back via e-mail and said she liked the stories.
  

• Did I ever see Hannah again after that first flight? No. I just dedicated my first book to her, e-mailed her, and
  one day want to tell my daughter about her courage and grace.
  

• Have I communicated further with Hannah’s parents? Yes, I once sent her mother a couple of e-mails telling her she had a wonderful daughter. And when Hannah was a teenager and entered a hospital to essentially have her legs cut off and sewn back on so she could walk without the aid of a walker or wheelchair, I sent flowers and a note to her in the hospital. For the first time, I heard from her father. He wrote, “Thank you. Thank you for being so nice to my daughter.”
  

• Do I still think of Hannah? Yes, of course. You can’t forget someone like Hannah Gray. My family still has the first picture Hannah ever sent us. It’s of her as a ten-year-old, and it holds the highest place of honor in our home. It is displayed on our refrigerator door.
  

Hannah falls into the category of rare people you meet for a moment who affect your life forever.