CABIN FEVER
What really goes down at 35,000ft (Our advice: read before you fly)
‘They were three glasses of champagne down before we’d even taken off. By the time we’d done the safety presentation and given them a snack, they were hammered. First Class is usually the least rowdy cabin – but this couple were so drunk they took all their clothes off and ran down the aisles naked.” This, according to Mandy Smith, an ex-Virgin Airways flight attendant with 10 years in the air under her belt, is pretty standard for a long-haul flight. Just another day in the office, in fact.
You see, as you sit there, idly mulling over where to jet off to for this year’s summer break, entire casts of flight attendants are currently pointing out the emergency exits to those passengers who haven’t nodded off yet. And here’s the twist: not only are they judging you as much as you’re judging your fellow passengers, but they really have seen it all.
Because it’s not just our dietary willpower that goes out of the window the minute the cabin doors close – it’s apparently our inhibitions, and, on occasion, natural human decency, too. Women (and men) like Smith (pictured throughout), who wrote a whistle-blowing book about her time in the air (it’s called Cabin Fever, and should go straight to the top of your holiday reading list), get to see some hilarious, and sometimes horrific, things in the line of duty. And you don’t just have to take their word for it. Perhaps it’s the heady mixture of confined space, pressurised cabin air and the mere vicinity of so many miniature bottles of gin in one place that does it, but an emerging body of research now suggests that flying can do strange things to our minds, alter our moods and change how our senses work. Some studies even show that relatively mild levels of hypoxia (aka the deficiency in oxygen that we can experience on flights) can alter our ability to think clearly.
And that doesn’t just go for the passengers – it goes for the crew, too. Ever wanted to know what really goes on behind that little navy curtain? Ever been irked by your flight attendant’s rigidly forced smile? There’s almost certainly a reason for it. Read on and you might just find out what.
You know those urban flight myths about how dressing up for the check-in desk can help you get an upgrade? Categorically not true. You can be as smart as you like, but those that work for airlines can spot you coming a mile off. The major giveaway? Your jewellery and watch. “I can usually tell what class someone will be sitting in just by looking at them,” says Smith. “Style is something money certainly can’t buy, but I find diamonds are always the giveaway for women, and a gentleman’s watch can tell you how wealthy they are, even when they have their sleep suit on.” Frequent Business flyers, she says, are usually the easiest to deal with. “They’ve had treatments and food in the club lounge and just want to come on board and sleep in their fully flat beds. But you can spot an UpperClass first-timer a mile off, ordering everything off the menu and staying up all night at the bar.”
There’s a particular breed of passenger, however, that some attendants just dread serving .“Premium Economy passengers are by far the worst,” says Smith. “Upper Class just get on quietly and go to sleep, but the Premiums get hammered. We call them ‘the gin and tonic brigade,’ because they just expect free booze and think their slightly more expensive seat buys them the right to be rude.”
As infuriating as it is when they will only give you one teeny bottle of Grey Goose at a time, or when they wake you up from a nap to tell you to put your seat in the upright position, it’s almost certainly best to keep your flight attendant on side. Acts of rudeness by passengers rarely go unpunished .“Midway through one of my flights, a Business-Class passenger was incredibly rude to the staff, speaking in a belittling way and being really difficult,” says Hayley Loft*, 32, who works for a well-known national airline. “So when it came to breakfast, my flight manager prepared this guest’s food, but made sure he rubbed the omelette around the waste water outlet [a sort of liquid bin down which we would tip all leftover alcohol, soft food and coffee]. He then served it up to him with a smile.”
Sometimes, this rudeness can escalate to something more physical. “I’ve had staff who’ve been dragged from one end of the cabin to the other by passengers,” says Smith. And again, it’s often not those in the cheap seats at the back that are the worst offenders. “It’s inevitably because they’ve had too much to drink – wine is the most lethal – and mostly it’s down to a mixture of sleeping tablets and alcohol. It sends people off the rails. A colleague was once head-butted by an old lady; the mum of a very famous Hollywood actor. She was restraining her from behind and she lashed back and bust her nose open. We had to pin her to the floor and handcuff her.”
This incident, however, is a bit of an anomaly, as most of the time, you’d never be aware there was a bona-fide A-lister just a couple of metres away. Celebrities will often be escorted door-to-door in private shuttles, attended to at private check-ins and escorted onto the aircraft either very early or very late. Cabin crew are instructed to play it
“Passenger rudeness rarely goes unpunished”
cool, even with the most famous of passengers – but it doesn’t always work out like that.“On one flight to LA, my colleague, Laura, and I heard a coat cupboard rattling,” says Smith. “She was puzzled as she’d locked it a while ago. So she strode over and gave it a push; it burst open and out stomped Austin Powers star Verne Troyer, clutching a leather jacket angrily in his fist. She’d only gone and locked him in! Thankfully, we saw him five minutes later, laughing and regaling other First-Class passengers with the story at the bar.”
While most First-Class passengers just drink their champagne quietly and catch up on their beauty sleep (well, aside from those frisky on-board streakers), celebrities can sometimes be the exceptions that prove the rule.“On my friend’s flight, a famous girl-band member got utterly wasted, and one of the crew had to unlock the toilet from outside, haul her off the floor, pull her undies back up and carry her back to her seat,” says Loft. “It was the talk of the galleys for ages.”
★ If the antics ★ of the passengers are bad, the stuff the crew get up to (yes, while casually asking if you want chicken or fish) is almost sybaritic in comparison. “Our male flight attendants were like a rugby team and had a points system for shagging different staff members, says Smith.“They’d get a red tag for shagging a junior, a white tag for sleeping with an in-flight beauty therapist and a brown tag if they’d had anal sex with anyone.” On-board sex was rife, too. “God, yeah, crew often popped into the Premium-Economy loos for a quickie,” says Smith. “It’s the most spacious toilet on an Airbus A340, with a handy fold-down babychanging table to rest your bum on.”
According to Jenny Cole*, a 28-yearold flight attendant for a Europebased airline, this sort of thing isn’t limited to the loos.“I know a couple who are both flight attendants,” she says.“They ended up playing drinking games with their team at a stop-over, and were given a dare that had to be carried out on the plane the next day. She had to give him a blow job before passengers started to board, then keep a mouthful of semen and walk up and down the plane as people were taking their seat. Things like that are more common than you might think.”
And it’s not just the crew that are at it. “Passengers definitely do stuff under the free blankets,” says Smith. “I saw a chap ‘entertaining himself’ under his once. He thought we couldn’t see him because it was dark, but remember: our eyes are more adjusted than most, so my friend walked up and left a box of tissues beside him – just so he knew we were aware of what he was doing.” Cole agrees.“We find so much dodgy stuff left on board after our flights,” she says.“Used condom wrappers in food boxes, sticky patches on the free blankets, it’s disgusting – especially when you consider that the planes don’t really get cleaned thoroughly, if at all, between flights.”
Debauchery and dodgy dealings aside, there is a more serious side to life in the air, and, in the rush to watch that entire series of Big Little Lies in one sitting, it’s easy to forget that your crew are also the only things standing between you and a life-and-death situation.“On one of my flights, during a particularly rough patch of turbulence over the Atlantic, the
“Crew often popped into the loos for a quickie”
toilet alarm bell sounded,” says Smith. “In training we’re told this means someone is in difficulty, but we’d got used to just finding a pervert with his trousers round his ankles. But that day we heard a crying sound and when we pushed open the door, we saw a woman in her late-twenties perched on the toilet, covered in blood. She was rocking back and forth and whimpering like an injured animal. There were bloody handprints on the cubicle walls and mirrors. She’d had a miscarriage. To this date, it’s still one of the most shocking things I’ve seen in the air.”
Then, of course, there are those who simply don’t make it off the plane.“If a passenger dies in the air, there’s not actually much we can do,” says Samantha Frank*, 25, who works for a domestic airline.“The procedure is to place the body in an empty row with a seat belt on. But if that’s not available, they just remain in their seat – we’re not allowed to cover them with a blanket as it would draw more attention. We’re told to make it look like they’re sleeping. A passenger can’t technically die in the air, or be pronounced dead by a flight attendant either – they’ll still legally be ‘alive’ until we hit the ground and a doctor comes on board.”
That, believe it or not, isn’t even the worst thing that can happen in the air.“The worst thing that could happen on a plane is a fire, which happened on one of my flights to Miami, when an engine caught alight,” says Smith. “I knew something was seriously up when the flight service manager came up and asked us to ‘assemble in galley two’ – that’s always code for a massive problem.”
There’s also something fairly important you should be paying attention to in the safety videos. “If your oxygen mask drops down from above your passenger seat, put it on IMMEDIATELY,” says Frank.“Although the oxygen lasts about 15 minutes, plenty of time to reach a safe altitude, you only have roughly 30 seconds to put the oxygen mask on before losing consciousness – when they say you should help yourself before helping others, you should definitely listen.”
So next time you put in your headphones before you’ve even done up your seat belt, realise that the couple from row E have been gone for a suspiciously long time or, hell, notice your omelette tastes slightly… odd – remember: there’s much more going on on-board than meets the eye.