Cruising Attitude (18 page)

Why I Want to Say No When the Answer Is Yes, Yes, Yes!

I
’D
NEVER
DATE
a pilot. They’re way too geeky!” said one of my favorite pilots, right after I mentioned I had dated one back before I’d become a flight attendant. Then, with a mischievous grin, he added, “But I’ve dated flight attendants from every single airline.” I did not doubt it for a second.

Pilots are type A personalities. They’re logical thinkers who must remain calm, cool, and in control as they command the aircraft. There’s no room for emotion when faced with a decision like the one Captain Sully had to make when he ditched an aircraft into the Hudson River. Flight attendants, on the other hand, are nurturing and caring. The issues we deal with are rarely black and white. So if opposites attract, it only makes sense that pilots and flight attendants would wind up together. And maybe it isn’t a surprise to learn that pilots often marry nurses and teachers, while flight attendants get involved with police officers and firemen.

There’s a saying in the airline industry that you’re not a real airline pilot unless you’ve been furloughed, gone on strike, and been divorced. I can’t help but wonder how many pilots have flight attendants as ex-wives, since so many of them are brazen enough to try juggling more than one of us at the same time. It’s not pretty when a pilot gets caught—and they almost always do. This is because flight attendants have a tendency to talk—a lot—and invariably we wind up talking about them. One lucky guy became the subject of jump-seat conversation when his wife and mistress were paired together to work a trip. Imagine how he must have felt when he pulled up that list of crew names! While his wife raved about her amazing husband, the girlfriend shared intimate details of her hot new man. Surrounded by passengers, a midflight fight broke out between the pissed-off mother of two and the young hot mistress who had no idea her perfect boyfriend wasn’t so perfect after all. A different mile-high love triangle went down a little more peacefully when, instead of coming to blows, two flight attendants agreed to confront the wandering groin at the airport. They stood, side by side, arms crossed, at the top of the jet bridge just waiting for the bastard to walk off his flight. I wasn’t there to see the end of it, but I’m sure the passengers seated in the surrounding gate area went home with quite an interesting story to share that day.

While not all pilots end up with flight attendants, many do tend to marry often. There are a few horror stories of embittered pilots who have made the galley gossip rounds. Take, for instance, the San Francisco–based pilot (I hear he’s now deceased) who refused to speak to flight attendants at the end of his career. He made the first officer do all the talking for him. Later he went on to write about “gold-diggers” and the “lopsided” court system in a book,
The Predatory Female: A Field Guide to Dating and the Marriage-Divorce Industry
, after he wound up paying millions to a few “undeserving” ex-wives. I can’t help but wonder how he may have died. Predatory female or pissed-off flight attendant? Or a combination of both? Then there’s the story about a captain everyone hated from Eastern Airlines who got poisoned in flight and ended up in a hospital on his layover. The crew got called in for questioning upon returning back to base. As the story goes, he had recently divorced a flight attendant and was vocal about his hatred of all women. A friend of mine was working as purser on that flight and swore it wasn’t her—she always passed off the job of feeding pilots to the most junior flight attendant on board.

Pilots and flight attendants usually love or hate each other—maybe a little too much since there’s rarely an in-between. It’s usually the latter for our more senior flight attendants who’ve been there, done that more times than they’ll ever admit. They make it a point to take new hires under their wings and school them in the ways of pilots. One such flight attendant went so far as to write down a few tips in case I forgot:

Tip 1: Don’t do it.

Tip 2: Don’t do it.

Tip 3: Don’t do it.

Tip 4: If you do mess up and do it, don’t do it more than once.

A flight attendant who dates more than her fair share of pilots is referred to as a “Cockpit Connie,” unless she’s someone you really dislike, in which case she’s an “air mattress.” One can assume this kind of flight attendant is familiar with “touch and go.” Pilots, on the other hand, get stereotyped as three things: womanizers, cheap bastards, and horrible dressers. Unfortunately, stereotypes come from a seed of truth and, because I ignored all four points on the list, I’ve dated them all, starting with Gary.

I met him at LaGuardia Airport back when I was still working for the watch company. My fourth flight ever was a trip to New York. A girlfriend at work had scored super cheap tickets to visit her family over the weekend and invited me to come along with her. It was a quick three-day trip that landed late at night on day 1 and departed back to Dallas late in the afternoon on day 3, about two hours shy of the firework show over the city. While we were waiting for our return flight to board I thought it might be fun to ask a pilot to take a photograph with me. I would frame it and give it to my mother as a sort of gag gift for her birthday—she had a thing for men in uniform, which is one of the reasons she married my father, a retired lieutenant commander in the navy.

I had my camera out and ready to go when I locked eyes on three gray-haired pilots heading my way. With my girlfriend egging me on, I was just about to ask, but at the last minute I chickened out. They were too involved in a serious conversation to bother with my silly request. How could I have possibly known they were probably just discussing filing with the IRS after a third failed marriage? Right behind them, walking all alone, I spotted another one, and this one was young and cute and looking right at me.
Gulp.

His name, it turned out, was Gary, and I’m pretty sure I saw him blush when I told him what I had in mind. Now if I had known my mother was going to react the way she did after she unwrapped the gold-framed photo on her birthday, I would never have stopped him to ask if he’d pose in a picture with me. And I certainly wouldn’t have given him my phone number if I had thought my little joke would take on a life of its own, making its way into the homes of my grandparents, who displayed the photograph of a smiling tall, dark, and handsome pilot standing beside me with my big hair and exposed midriff on a bookshelf in the family room for all to see.

I knew nothing about the airline business at the time, so I paid no attention to the three gold stripes circling the wrists of Gary’s uniform blazer. What I didn’t know was that these signaled that he was a first officer, not a captain. Captains sit on the left-hand side, wear four stripes, and get first dibs on a choice of crew meal, almost always passing the vegetarian entrée off to the first officer. Pilots are never catered the same thing to eat on board a flight as a precaution against food poisoning. My colleagues and I were taught a lot of things in flight attendant training, but landing an aircraft wasn’t one of them. This is why we aren’t allowed to swap out cockpit meals for passenger meals if we run out of choices and a passenger doesn’t get what he wants. If you go to use the first-class lav and catch a flight attendant eating what you think should have been your meal, don’t get upset! Chances are that one of the pilots decided not to eat at the last minute.

Seniority for pilots works pretty much the same as it does for flight attendants. The big difference between pilots and flight attendants is a pilot can move up in rank. You can always tell how senior a pilot is based on the aircraft he’s flying. The heavier the airplane, the bigger the paycheck, with the captain making substantially more per hour than a first officer. When there’s an opening, the most senior first officer or captain will “move up.” When a captain on a smaller plane is upgraded, the most senior first officer has a shot at becoming a captain. From time to time you’ll find the first officer has more seniority than the captain. In these cases, the first officer has chosen quality of life over pay (a life off reserve). Now, if I had worked for an airline the day I met Gary, I would have known immediately that he was pretty low on the employee totem pole—he had three stripes and was working a flight that departed late in the afternoon on the Fourth of July.

When Gary walked away after our picture that day, I thought that was that, end of story. He lived in Florida and I lived in Texas. Where could it possibly go? I figured I’d never see him again, which is why I’d had the nerve to ask him for the photo in the first place! The last thing on my mind was to hook up.

But then I boarded my flight, plopped down into my seat, glanced out the window, and saw a familiar-looking pilot looking up at the wing. “Oh no, he’s our pilot.”

“Wave!” my girlfriend exclaimed, leaning into me. I grabbed her hands and held them firmly down.

“Oh shit!” I exclaimed, sliding way down in my seat when he looked up.

An hour into the flight, just when I was starting to relax, a flight attendant holding a tray of food stopped at my row. “Gary asked me to bring you this. It’s his crew meal,” she said.

“How sweet!” my girlfriend squealed. Stunned, I just sat there. I’d really thought Gary hadn’t seen my shocked face framed in the airplane window. My friend unlocked my tray and the flight attendant placed the first-class cheese lasagna on my table. It looked delicious.

“Umm . . . tell Gary I said thank you.”

When I myself became a flight attendant, I reflected back on this moment many times and wondered what the heck Gary was thinking by sending the first-class flight attendant back to coach to serve me, a passenger he barely knew, a passenger wearing
a crop top on a plane
, a crew meal that should have been the flight attendants’ by default.

I’m not sure which was more embarrassing, Gary’s big-ball move or me ringing the call light after I finished eating so a flight attendant could take away the tray. Because unless it’s an emergency or the seat belt sign is on or you’re stuck by the window next to a sleeping passenger, you really shouldn’t ring the call light. Flight attendants use a chime system to signal different emergency situations, and when we hear it, we assume it’s an emergency. If we get a series of passengers who start using it to order drink refills, there’s a cabin full of flight attendants wondering if they should grab a serving tray or a bottle of oxygen. If you can, it’s always best to get up, stretch your legs, and walk to the back to say hi to the crew. Or just wait for a flight attendant to pass by—we’re each required to walk through the cabin at least once every fifteen minutes. As for that flight attendant who came back to pick up the meal Gary had sent back after I did what I now would never do (
ding!)
she never once made me feel anything other than special. She handled it like a professional. Even so I’m positive I was galley gossip for the remainder of the flight.

Even though we’d exchanged numbers and I’d promised to mail him a copy of the photo after I got home, I was still pretty surprised when he called, and even more shocked when he asked me out. He had a layover in Dallas and wanted to know if I’d like to meet for a drink, since it’d probably be too late for dinner. But if I wanted dinner, he’d love to take me out, he quickly added. I’d never dated someone like Gary before. At the age of twenty-three I was only used to dating guys who had recently graduated from college, most of whom were still unsure of what they were going to do with their lives, not men in charge of aircrafts. I felt totally unworthy of his attention. I spent my days deciding which lugs went with which dials, mixing and matching different leather straps, while he spent his days flying passengers to their destinations. Handsome, smart, and sweet, he was a total catch. Too bad for my mother, he wasn’t my type. At the time, you see, my type had a tendency to suck.

In hindsight, I realize the problem with Gary was that there was no problem with Gary. The man was perfect in every sense of the word. But I was twenty-three, and at that time in my life, there was one thing that I really couldn’t handle. What bugged me wasn’t that he had a four-year-old son or an ex-wife who lived not too far from his parents’ house. Where he lived. No, what disturbed me were his clothes. I almost died when he showed up for our first date basically wearing his uniform. Because I knew he was on a layover, I let it slide—the first time. No doubt about it, Gary looked handsome standing in front of a cockpit door greeting passengers, but the uniform belt and uniform pants paired with a bright yellow T-shirt just didn’t cut it on the dance floor.

It’s an interesting topic, pilots and fashion. I’m not sure I can even use the two words in the same sentence since they go as well together as orange juice and toothpaste. Ask any group of flight attendants if they can spot a pilot in civilian “layover clothes” and they will emphatically say yes. Don’t believe me? Next time you’re at the airport look for the guy wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses. If he’s also sporting pleated khakis with a powder blue golf shirt underneath a Members Only jacket, nine times out of ten his name is at the bottom of the non-rev standby list. Despite the reality, for so many women the word “pilot” conjures up images of dashing men in uniform. Think Richard Gere (
Officer and a Gentleman
), Tom Cruise (
Top Gun
), Leonardo DiCaprio (
The Aviator
), Andy Garcia (
When a Man Loves a Woman
), John Travolta (he owns a 707), and Jake Pavelka—ya know, Jake, the pilot from that television show
The Bachelor
who later went on to shake his groove thing on
Dancing with the Stars
. While he looked oh so dreamy dressed in a tux, I couldn’t help but wonder as I watched the women fawning in their desperate quest for a rose if they would have even given him the time of day if they’d seen him in real life—say, passing through the lobby of a hotel in his layover clothes, holding a passenger’s discarded day-old newspaper while sipping a discounted cup of coffee? Somehow I doubt it.