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How Dare You?
ChrisCrossings · April 12, 2001

Q: I am a flight attendant for United Airlines. I have been flying for 13 years and I love my job and go out of my way to make our customers feel wanted and happy to have them with us. I resent your depiction of my profession as uncaring, resentful of my company and unconcerned! How dare you?

You are diminishing a profession that has long been taking care our people, saving lives, and putting our customers lives before our own. How dare you?

Who are you to say that we are uncaring, have our own agenda, and have no compassion? Have you ever been in a flight attendants jump seat? Have you ever been the subject of customer abuse? Have you ever been screamed at? Have you ever been stabbed? Have you ever had your arm broken or nose broken by a customer? I think not! You have no idea of what it is like to be a flight attendant in this world of incivility and arrogance in the air. How dare you even think you know what it is like to be a flight attendant?

Before you write about my profession I would think you would take a ride in our shoes. Come along for a long-haul flight and see what is going on before you belittle an honored profession.

-- John Fortune

A: I'm always a little disappointed when I get a letter like yours in response to one of my columns. Not because of your opinion - you're certainly entitled to that - but because the response suggests that you didn't bother to finish reading the story.

Why? Because you never addressed the question: What, exactly, is the role of a modern-day air host?

Instead, you asked two other questions: 1) How dare I depict flight attendants as uncaring, resentful of their company and unconcerned? And 2) How dare I write about being a flight attendant when I've never been one?

Let me answer your last question first. I have no misgivings writing about your business without actually having been a flight attendant. I'm often on the receiving end of indignant e-mails from travel agents who tell me it's impossible to cover their business without ever having been a travel planner, and from time to time, I'll get a note from a pilot who says I can't write about the airline industry without ever having flown a plane.

Of course, that's nonsense.

Do we demand that journalists covering the legislature hold public office before they're hired? Does not having been a senator or congressional representative disqualify them from writing about government?

What about reporters who cover the space program? Do they have to be astronauts themselves? And how about crime reporters - should they be convicted felons? I don't think so. Instead, we familiarize ourselves with the facts and write about the business from an informed perspective. We get as close to the story as possible.

I'm a little taken aback by your second question, too. I haven't depicted flight attendants as callous, underpaid crewmembers. Your passengers and co-workers have. All I've done is repeat the claims and comment about them, which is what a column like this is supposed to do.

The last thing I would ever want to do is to belittle your profession. Like you, I'd much rather see an improvement in working conditions and the elevation of a flight attendant's status to where it ought to be - not as the second-rate waiters that are used as punching bags by angry passengers, or as untrained cops making sure air travelers don't misbehave.

In order to do so, however, I think we need to agree on who's to blame for both the low crew morale and the passenger discontent. It is, without a doubt, a deregulated and rapidly consolidating airline industry that's at fault. You should be upset at the folks who sign your paycheck, not at the customers who are wedged into a substandard economy class seat as a result of their shortsighted avarice.

Instead of pointing the finger at one another, we should be looking for ways to fix a hopelessly broken airline industry.

Christopher Elliott's column appears on Thursdays. All e-mailed questions to ChrisCrossings become property of Ticked.com and may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. You may reach Elliott at chris@ticked.com. Or visit his home page at http://www.elliott.org.