(The A.F.A., founded in 1945 by a group of United stewardesses, is the largest flight attendants’ union, representing workers at eighteen airlines.) At United, nearly all the flight attendants wore their union pins, and at the Boston base Nelson soon discovered that there was a “group of very, very senior flight attendants who were, I would say, quite militant.” In 1985, United pilots had gone on strike, and the flight attendants had struck in solidarity. It was also a union shop: United flight attendants are members of the Association of Flight Attendants. United employed some twenty-five thousand flight attendants at the time, but its base in Boston was relatively small-only about three hundred flight attendants. “I was just horrified by the idea of being an earthling,” she said. She got used to the life style, and whenever she thought about the possibility of one day having to work a different job she panicked. Even on her days off, Nelson spent time in the sky she could fly for free, and on one of her first vacations she flew to Honolulu. “When we get up there, we control the workspace.” Once the plane took off, she and her co-workers would “read the room,” and, if the passengers seemed to be in a “festive mood,” the flight attendants might hold a trivia contest, awarding a bottle of champagne to the winner. “We don’t have managers watching us,” she said. “If you went on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, the only other people on the beach were likely airline employees.”Īfter working at a restaurant, Nelson appreciated the autonomy that came with being a flight attendant. “We’d have all day where we could go to the beach,” she recalled. She’d pack her swimsuit, depart at 8:30 a.m., and land before noon Pacific time. She spent the first few months working on call, filling in whenever the airline was short a flight attendant, but soon she had enough seniority to get a monthly schedule, and eventually she was able to work the most desirable trips, like the non-stop flights to San Diego. United assigned her to its base in Boston, and she moved to the city that fall, living in an apartment with seven other rookie flight attendants. Nelson, who had taken German in college, was “barely conversational,” but somehow she passed, and, after enduring a physical and making it through six weeks of training, she was hired. She made it to the second round of interviews, at which point the airline administered a test to make sure that she could speak a second language-a desired qualification for flight attendants at the time. “They would start to talk about how much they wanted this job, and they would get emotional.” United called the event an open house, but there were so many people that Nelson referred to it as a “cattle call.” Later, when she arrived at the event, “there were applicants in line crying,” she said. She slid a mixtape into the deck-she loved Barbra Streisand-and sang loudly as she drove. Nelson gave away her restaurant shifts, then got in her car and began heading north. O.K., all right, I’ll check this out.” As it happened, United was holding a recruitment event the next day in Chicago, a five-hour drive from St. Louis. She recalled thinking, “I’m freezing my ass off, working four jobs, and life is hell. Now, on the phone, she went on and on about the job’s perks, which included layovers in warm locales, and Nelson wondered if she ought to apply. “The beach in Miami!” After graduating, Caviness had started working as a flight attendant for United Airlines. Then, one day in February, she got a call from Chloe Caviness, her best friend from college. A recent college graduate, she had a job lined up for the fall as a high-school English teacher, and in the meantime she was juggling three part-time gigs in addition to her restaurant job. Louis, and working as a waitress at a California Pizza Kitchen. Safety: Future of TSA | BA.At the beginning of 1996, Sara Nelson was twenty-two years old, living in St.
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