Hey, United Airlines. Wake up. I flew 8,000 miles with you last week and the "Friendly Skies" aren't that damn friendly. What's with the flight attendants? It's like they were all having a Bad Air Day. Constantly. An airline united
in unfriendlinessI'm not a troublesome flyer. I've probably flown a million miles. I see flying as a necessity, not a luxury. I don't think of airlines as cruise ships where the staff is there to cater to my every whim and shower me with wonderful food and drink. Wonderful food, in fact, has been on very few flights that I've taken.
And I understand that some flight attendants just have bad days. But the abuse and rudeness I witnessed by United flight attendants all through my trip suggested a systematic problem.
In recent years, I have sensed a change in attitude by many flight attendants. They seem to like everything about being a flight attendant except the actual work, which mainly consists of handing out trays and taking them back again.
This attitude was crystallized on my flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu when I asked a flight attendant from Hawaii for a 7-Up to split with my daughter and he chastised me for bothering him. "I'll only be your slave for another 30 minutes," he said.
I was dumbfounded. He then added sarcastically, "Have you ever given a party at your house for 250 people?" I said that at the prices we were paying, asking for a soda didn't seem outrageous. He snapped back, "You're not paying that much."
So there it was, all in a neat little bundle: the arrogance, the disdain for passengers, the insults. When he was no longer on slave duty, I walked back to get my own soda. Another attendant handed me a can and said, "We only have two left," as if I were somehow infringing on their program of hoarding sodas.
This was not an isolated case. On the flight from Washington, D.C., to Las Vegas, our flight attendant was routinely mean, causing my seat neighbor to ask "Have we done something wrong?" I would rather be ignored than harassed. At another point, Little Miss Sunshine came down the aisle with a torn up napkin on which she had written how much change she owed certain passengers who had bought drinks. (I had not.) The guy in front of me kind of chuckled as the attendant turned the little napkin every which way to decode her writing. She turned on him and thrust the napkin in his face. "Can you read this? Then what are you laughing at?" she said. And she wasn't kidding.
I think one problem is that flight attendants resent having to act as flying waiters and waitresses. They are much more than that. They are trained to handle emergencies that mere passengers can't handle. Except, that when we were flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, our plane flew into the jet wash of a 747 and we experienced the worst turbulence I've ever been through. We must have dropped a hundred feet and nearly turned over. A woman passenger shrieked Faye Wray-style at the top of her lungs. A flight attendant in the back was thrown against the wall and injured. But it was a civilian who came to the aid of the shrieking passenger who had begun to hyperventilate. A flight attendant from first class came to watch but then broke down in tears and was out for the count until landing. So much for handling emergencies. As we filed off the plane, medics came on to help the injured attendant while the other one sat in a first class seat with tears streaming down her face. That's real encouraging to passengers, believe me.
A few minutes later we were on the plane to Hawaii with Mr. (I'm not your slave) Aloha. Maybe United should change its slogan from "Fly the Friendly Skies" to "Fly the Freakin' Skies, Keep Your Mouth Shut and Don't Bother the Highly Trained Flight Attendants."