Recently, I wrote a post about pilots, flight attendants, crew, and more airline industry folks sharing things that people should know (but oftentimes don't) about flying. Our BuzzFeed Community also came through with some spot-on examples of their own.
Here's what the BuzzFeed commenters and Redditors said:
1. "Regional flight attendants and pilots make pennies compared to mainline flight attendants. It’s still a great job, but they are very underpaid. My airline tops out at like $35/hour and that’s only at like 15+ years. The hourly rate sounds good on paper, but you could fly as little as 72 hours a MONTH. If you were on reserve and didn’t fly, you get paid for 72 hours a month. Yes, you’re essentially being paid for doing nothing, but it’s not enough to live on."
2. "It is also a lot harder than you would think to get a job on a major airline if you’re not beautiful. Experience also doesn’t help because every airline has to give you the same amount of training regardless of whether or not you have experience. The first round of interviews are a one-sided video interview. It’s really awkward and most of the time — a third party company makes the selection."
3. "It’s frustrating when passengers unload all their anger onto us flight attendants — 99% of the time, it’s not our fault. The stuff they’re complaining about is frequently beyond our control (weather, technical problems, understaffed ground personnel, etc.)."
4. "Airline worker here, Do not drink the coffee or tea. 'Potable water' is kind of a misnomer. They hardly clean the water tanks, if ever. So it’s just refilled over and over — it gets scuzzy."
5. "One thing to note is how safe flying in the USA is. It has been over 20 years since a wide-body jet crashed in the US."
6. "At one flight school I went to, the mechanics would sometimes put off making repairs until something significant happened."
7. "PLEASE don’t fly with a 'lap baby.' Purchase a seat and use the car seat on board the plane. Just because it’s allowed by the airline doesn’t mean it’s safe. Turbulence can be super dangerous for an unrestrained child. Literally everything — from people to bags to laptops to coffee pots — has to be secured for taxi, takeoff, and landing, when the risk of crashing is greatest (and happens like a car crash at much higher speeds). Absolutely everything must be secured EXCEPT children under two — it makes no sense!"
8. "No, we can’t call your flight to make sure it’s gonna wait for you. Stop booking extremely short connections 🙃."
9. "Your bag is more likely to break flying on a narrow body aircraft, especially 737s. They don’t have containers, so the ramp crew is most likely throwing your bags 30 feet underneath the plane. Every bag gets thrown. The sorting system isn’t soft. Containers get filled by thrown bags. Get a good bag and stop worrying."
10. "Don’t make jokes about the pilot drinking. 'Oh, didn’t I see you at the bar late last night hur hur hur.' We then — for safety and to make sure there is no doubt — will take a BAC test to show we are stone sober. It makes shit unnecessarily difficult."
11. "In most European airports, you can enter the business class security lane with any ticket, not just business. The code scans anyway."
12. "We don’t have 'routes.' Our schedule changes every month depending on what we bid for. We fly whatever is on our schedule. Also we rarely (it does happen, but not often, depending on the size of the airline and crew base) fly with the same crew."
13. "As a pilot, I don’t know where baggage claim is, I don’t know where your next flight is, I don’t know where the Starbucks is, and often I don’t know why the flight is delayed. I also don’t know what lake we are flying over."
