Authors: Heather Poole
A familiar scratchy voice answered the phone. “Kew Gardens!”
After I mentioned my name and address, the voice burst out laughing. “What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Did Miss Louisiana sleep well last night?”
It was him, the crazy old driver who was not just a driver but in fact a dispatcher who had grabbed a set of keys because there weren’t enough drivers on the road last night. His name was Eddie. I knew right away that Eddie and I weren’t going to get along. Being from Texas, I wasn’t accustomed to people who weren’t polite, who said what they meant and meant what they said. Then again I wasn’t accustomed to much of anything about life in New York, which Eddie was quick to point out.
“Just send a car!” I yelled, hanging up on him before he could hang up on me.
Wide-eyed Georgia said, “Listen to you, Miss New York.”
I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Only time would tell.
R
ESERVE FLIGHT ATTENDANTS
have no life. None. Zero. Zilch. We sit around in our pajamas half the day waiting for crew schedule to call, and complaining about being on reserve to anyone who will listen. The other half of the day is spent explaining that we are in fact working, even though we are not actually on an airplane, since we’re stuck at home and unable to do what we’d really like to do. This explains why the sock and underwear drawer get a complete makeover—twice—each reserve month. And nothing goes better with reserve than the Weather Channel. We’re always tuned in. When there’s bad weather, crews go illegal, and when crews are unable to fly, reserve flight attendants get called out to cover their trips. The only thing good about being on reserve is we might get to work a trip we would otherwise never fly in a million years. Senior flight attendants hold the best trips, but when they call in sick, flight attendants on reserve fill in.
Here’s how reserve works. Bidding is the act of requesting a line. A line is a sequence of trips in consecutive order flight attendants (well, those not on reserve) are offered to work each month. At my airline we are offered more than two hundred lines. Each line has anywhere from three to ten positions to work, depending on the aircraft type. Lines are awarded by company seniority. This is why the best trips, flights to Asia and Europe, are always staffed with the most senior crew, and why the ground staff in Honolulu have been known to ask if the wheelchairs meeting the flight are for passengers or flight attendants. If a flight attendant has a seniority number of 200, that flight attendant should bid for at least two hundred positions to make sure she doesn’t get a “miss bid” and be awarded a line she didn’t want.
While nonreserve flight attendants choose from lines of trips, reserve flight attendants choose from lines of days off. Line holders can get ten to twenty days off a month, depending on their seniority. Reserve flight attendants on average only get ten days off. Days off are grouped together in three or four blocks per month, and each block can range anywhere from one to five days. When you’re on reserve, the airline can (and will) assign a trip at any time of day or night. Sleep, something most people take for granted, becomes a guessing game since you never know when you’ll have to fly next—crack of dawn or all night long.
When crew schedule, also known just as scheduling, contacts a flight attendant, the flight attendant has fifteen minutes to return the call and accept the trip. Otherwise she is assigned a “missed trip.” Missing an assignment more than once can result in company action. If you’re on probation like Georgia and I were, it can lead directly to termination. After flight attendants are assigned a trip, they have at least two hours to get to the airport and sign in on a computer in flight operations. Sign-in must occur an hour before the flight departs. If it doesn’t, a reserve flight attendant working airport standby will be sent to cover the trip. Standby flight attendants spend hours sitting at the airport waiting around in case a flight attendant, even another reserve flight attendant, doesn’t make sign-in on time. Being paid to hang out might sound like fun, but it can be draining, especially after sitting standby for five hours and then getting called out to work a five-hour trip ten minutes before you thought you’d be heading home. And since flight attendants on standby (or reserve) never know where they’re going or how long they’ll be gone, packing is always difficult. Standby flight attendants are only used in emergency situations, such as keeping flights staffed with what the FAA calls “minimum crew.” In other words, there must be a certain ratio of flight attendants to passengers on board each flight, as well as enough flight attendants to operate the door exits in case of an emergency evacuation.
Reserve is a lot like being an on-call doctor—we must be ready for duty at all times. There are no late nights, absolutely no alcohol, and no going outside a manageable radius of our base (ours included three airports: John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark). We have to be packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice. This is why some flight attendants who use Laundromats are reluctant to wash their clothes. No one wants to get the dreaded call during the middle of a wash cycle! Or even worse, during a shower. (Don’t worry—we still shower. We just do it quickly.) It’s not uncommon to order a pizza and then get a call to cover a late-night trip to London and be out the door and on our way to the airport before the food even arrives. There’s no warning, no lead time, and no excuses.
Each day at a certain time, reserve flight attendants call in to see if they’ve been assigned a trip, also known as a sequence, for the following day. If we do not have a sequence on our schedule, we queue up with a number. This number is based on the hours already flown during the month. The flight attendant with the least amount of hours is assigned the lowest number and will most likely be called out to work first. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. This is where reserve gets confusing. Because the person with the lowest number may not be “legal” to work. This is why flight attendants on reserve are always on edge. A high number on the reserve list is always a relief to those looking forward to a full night of rest, but it does not mean a flight attendant can relax. Reserve is like Russian roulette. You never know who will be called out next.
What can make a flight attendant illegal to work a trip? Usually it has to do with hours, number of days on duty, and aircraft equipment. A flight attendant can remain on duty without a layover from fourteen to sixteen hours, depending on the airline and whether or not it’s a domestic or an international trip. A flight attendant needs eleven hours off between the end of one trip and the beginning of another. Reserve flight attendants get twelve hours. The minimum number of hours a flight attendant has “behind the door” at a layover hotel is eight, and the maximum number of days a flight attendant can work or remain on call is six. When flight attendants go illegal—exceed one of these numbers—a reservist is called in to cover the trip. If this happens “down line” (at an airport that does not have a flight attendant base), flights are either delayed or canceled if FAA minimum crew cannot be met.
These very same legalities affect reserve flight attendants, as they determine who will get called out to work next. Say I’m first on the reserve list and a three-day trip pops up. It departs at 8:00 a.m. Because my trip the day before landed at 10:00 p.m., I am not legal for the trip. Since I cannot sign in until 10:00 a.m., I cannot work a trip that departs before 11:00 a.m. The trip is then passed to the second flight attendant on reserve. But that person is only good for two days before entering a block of days off. The three-day trip is then assigned to the third person. Number 3 has worked more than four days in a row, so he is unable to take the trip since it would total seven days in a row of being on duty. The fourth person isn’t qualified on the aircraft equipment, so the fifth person gets the trip. But she has the same problem I have. And so on and so on and so on until the fifteenth person on the list gets woken up by crew schedule at four in the morning to work a three-day trip.
If you think that’s confusing, you can get a sense of what Georgia and I were going through, learning the ins and outs of an unusual job that practically has its own language, a language that is nearly impossible to explain to family and friends who will never understand it, regardless of how many times we try. Life sucked. And it had only just begun.
“Oh shoot!” cried Georgia when the phone rang. It was day 4 in New York and we were officially on reserve. Neither one of us moved. We just sat on our beds staring at each other all big-eyed listening to it ring.
“Pick it up!” she demanded.
I gulped. Then reluctantly I did as I was told. “Hello?”
The monotone voice on the other end said exactly what I’d been dreading all day. “Crew schedule calling for flight attendant Poole.”
The next morning I stepped out of an old white Kew Gardens minivan in front of LaGuardia Airport feeling like a million bucks. I was dressed in sensible navy heels, JCPenney stockings in the shade of “airline” and a navy pencil skirt, hemmed a perfect half inch above the knee. I’d given myself an extra hour to get ready in order to properly pin my hair back into a sophisticated French twist the way they’d shown us at the flight training academy. (Somehow I wound up with a chic side-of-the-neck bun instead.) My white button-down blouse had been starched and ironed to crisp perfection. It hid under a fitted navy blue blazer with two silver stripes around the wrist. To keep warm, I wore a long blue trench coat. And, fluttering in the chilly breeze, a red silk scarf was tied loosely around my neck. I couldn’t get over how a small piece of fabric made me feel so elegant and feminine compared to the crisscross, snap-on Nathan’s neck tie I’d worn at Sun Jet. As I waited for my driver to get my bags out of the trunk, I couldn’t help but notice that a small group of travelers waiting in line to curb-check their bags were looking at me. I don’t know what it is about a uniform, but it does make people take notice. Smiling, I waved at a toddler. My flight instructors would have been proud.
I attached my black tote to my matching rolling bag, took a deep breath and thought to myself,
Show time!
Two seconds later, I sailed through the automatic doors armed with a couple of pens, $20 in singles in case I needed to make change in flight, and a little black tube of M·A·C Viva Glam lipstick inside my blazer pocket. I passed through the food court, where vendors doled out powdered eggs and bricks of sausage to their first customers in line, and made my way to flight operations. I was a nervous wreck. In a little less than an hour and a half I’d be working my first of three legs today, a flight to Chicago that continued on to Dallas and then Austin. Thank God I’d been assigned the “extra position.” At least in coach I kind of knew what I was doing.
“The extra” or “the add” is just that, an extra flight attendant that has been added to the crew at the last minute. The FAA requires airlines to staff flights with one flight attendant per fifty passenger seats. This is called minimum crew. Extras are used in all kinds of situations, for example, on full flights with short flying times and long hauls offering elaborate services. Take, for instance, the New York–Chicago route. The average flying time is an hour and a half. Flying time does not include taxiing to or from the gate. There’s no way a minimum crew can serve and pick up that many drinks and meals in coach before it’s time to prepare the cabin for landing. For the Dallas–Austin route, an extra ensures that we can complete a single beverage service for 140 passengers aboard a thirty-minute flight with only fifteen minutes of flying time between takeoff and descent. And passengers wonder why flight attendants get snippy when they can’t decide what they’d like to drink!
The great thing about being an extra is you have no responsibilities on the airplane in terms of checking aircraft equipment, setting up the galley, or briefing the exit rows. Basically all you do is walk on board, oversee the boarding process, perform a safety demo and float between cabins helping whoever needs it most. Because extras hop from one flight to another and work with a new crew each leg of their trip, they rarely get caught up in crew drama. Of course, that’s also the bad thing about being an extra. You’re pretty much on your own—on and off the flight. After a flight lands, a crew will stick together and work another flight or layover for the night, never to see the extra again. It’s not uncommon for an extra to work with several different flight crews in a single day and then wind up at a hotel all alone. Many crews don’t even bother to learn the extra’s name. You’re simply referred to as “the extra,” as in, “Are you the extra?” “Where is the extra?” “Ask the extra to get some napkins from first class.”
When the extra (me) stepped aboard the airplane and counted five flight attendants sitting in first class, I thought nothing of it. I figured someone must have been “deadheading.” A deadhead is a crew member being repositioned to work another trip in a different city. Because it is a work assignment, deadheads are high on the priority list and are even paid to occupy a passenger seat throughout a flight. When I introduced myself as the extra to the crew, one of the flight attendants smirked at me.
“You’re not on this trip anymore,” he said. Before I could assure him that I was on the trip, he informed me that he’d been called out on reserve at the last minute to fill in for someone who never showed up.
Without another word, I ran back to the gate to use the computer and pull up my flight itinerary. Quickly I scanned the list of crew names and sure enough, Poole had been replaced with Edwards. Confused, I called crew tracking. When prompted, I punched in my employee number and then entered my three-letter base code. After a short beep a voice said, “Flight attendant Poole, you’ve been assigned a missed trip.”
“A missed trip? But why? I’m here. At the gate!”
“You never signed in.” My heart dropped. This was not good at all, not while I was on probation, not for my very first trip.
At my airline, a missed trip, a sick call, or even a late sign-in equates to one point on your record. Three points and you get a warning. Three warnings and company action is taken. But for me, a new hire on probation without union representation, a single point could easily get me fired, no questions asked. Horrified and embarrassed, I couldn’t imagine what I would tell my family and friends. How do you explain losing your job before it even began?
Ignoring a couple of passengers who had mistaken me for the gate agent since they were all lining up in front of the counter, I told the scheduler what had happened, how I’d gotten to the airport half an hour early just so I
wouldn’t
be late, and how I spent a majority of that time playing around on the computer seeing what I could pull up using as many different flight codes as I could remember from training. Well, every code, that is, except for the one to sign in, the most important one of all!