The more
things change, the worse they get, it seems.
Yesterday I
wrote quite a long post about that incident involving an American Airlines
flight attendant who “went berserk” on the plane, ranting over the PA system
for 15 minutes about 9-11, the plane crashing, and other bizarre possibilities
(screaming, at one point, “I’ll kill them all”).
Yes, this was
an extreme case, but a few details have come out that I think are VERY strange.
The public are
understandably “concerned” (read: terrified) about the possibility of something like this
happening again. Flight attendants are supposed to keep everyone calm no matter
what the situation, so this hellish rant was more than disturbing.
But in the
aftermath, certain facts are emerging.
Alarmingly, it turns out that airlines do NOT screen flight attendants
for mental illness. Pilots, yes. But pilots have an important job. I think the
old idea that “stewardesses” are just there to keep everything jolly and mildly
sexy still hangs around.
So if this
woman is bipolar, as she claimed she was, she would not have been required to
disclose it in applying for the job. Even if the airline knew about it, it
would not have been grounds for letting her go.
I am all for
hiring people with mental illnesses, given the fact that the huge majority of
cases are manageable with medication and a regulated lifestyle. But how
regulated is the life of a flight attendant? Sleep deprivation, constant major
time zone shifts, meals coming sporadically if at all, meds accidentally left at home (and
where do you get lithium if you’ve forgotten it?) – and add to this the current
level of job uncertainty as American Airlines teeters on the verge of
bankruptcy – and you have a potential recipe for disaster.
But there are
no safeguards in place here. It seems to take a traumatic event like this one for
hiring practices to come to light. Failing to screen flight attendants for ANY
kind of medical disability is negligent and potentially dangerous. In this age of
lurking terrorism, the stakes are even higher. Flight attendants are, as the
airlines are now scrambling to tell us, “first responders”. To say the least, they need their wits about them at all times.
Whenever
anything weird and scary happens, other weirdness leaks out. Many of the
headlines for this international news item referred to the woman as a “stewardess”, a
term I haven’t heard in decades. The police report about this strange event said she was experiencing “mental lunacy”, a term that hasn’t been used for about 100
years!
Someone else
described her tirade as a “word salad”, a way of containing and distancing the
terror with an obscure, clinical term most people have never heard of.
Then we have
this bestselling author, Heather Poole, a veteran flight attendant who just
happens to have written a book called Cruising Attitude, popping up and
saying, “It could have happened to any of us.”
Oh, really?
So any
“stewardess”, at random, just picked out of the crowd, could have gone
completely berserk and screamed for 15 minutes while on the job? Any flight
attendant, perhaps stressed by job uncertainty, could have flipped out into a state
of “mental lunacy”, needing to be carried off the plane in restraints?
We still have
a deep dread and horror of mental illness, a put-them-in-shackles mentality.
This buried unconscious reflex is what causes us to lapse into language
that is shockingly obsolete. On the one hand, bipolar disorder has been
sanitized as a kind of diabetes of the mind – and in the vast majority of
cases, it is something like that. On the other, we see people who are
experiencing a serious episode as “demonic” and “possessed”: attitudes that go
back to when humankind was preverbal and terrified of any behaviour that
threatened the safety of the band.
Back in the
day, “stewardesses” traditionally took care of men’s needs, all the way up to (or
down to) sexual release. Thus, the “Fly Me” advertising slogan that was popular 50 years
ago. On the (best ever!) TV series Mad Men, a retro look at Madison
Avenue in the ‘60s, Don Draper is practically accosted on a plane by a “stew”
taking an aggressive sexual stance. They were all there for the picking, it
seems. Even the title of that book, Cruising Attitude, has a suggestive
tone: cruising for what, exactly?
And will this
bizarre episode help Heather Poole’s sales? I can’t see how it could hurt. She
just lucked out, I guess.
I believe all airlines
should change their policy immediately and begin to rigorously screen
flight attendants for mental illnesses, especially major ones like bipolar. I
don’t think this is discriminatory, and in fact I believe it would ultimately protect applicants from getting into situations like this that they cannot
control. It’s unlikely this woman will ever work again in her chosen career. If
the airline knew about her condition but turned a blind eye, what does that say
about them? Did they pretend it wasn’t there? Did they think not hiring her
would violate her civil rights? Do her civil rights trump public safety?
Why are
pilots so rigorously screened, when (according to the airlines) flight attendants also carry huge
responsibility for safety? I think it’s the remnants of the “Fly Me” attitude.
“Stews” just squeeze up and down the aisles in tight skirts, serving cocktails
with a smile. They’re really not very important, subservient to the real crew,
the guys who fly the plane.
You say that’s
not true? That things have changed? Then where does this “mental lunacy” label come
from? Will we now begin to call mentally challenged people “idiots” and “imbeciles”?
This woman did
not “flip out” because of “job stress” and “economic uncertainty”. What happened to her
could NOT “happen to anyone”. It could only happen to someone who is either
extremely high on drugs, or seriously mentally ill. If it’s the kind of illness
that requires regulation with medication, and the medication is cut off, we
have a problem.
We have a
problem that could have crashed that plane. Had it already taken off, had she
been armed, had she been packed with explosives like a terrorist (and do you
think it couldn’t happen? How carefully are flight attendants screened, if
their mental health problems are being routinely ignored?), we would have had a
disaster on an almost unimagineable scale.
Will there be
a response to this obvious weakness in the system? I don’t think so. I think
the policy will stay the same, because we don’t like to look at mental illness.
We look away at the first opportunity, as if it isn’t really happening.
It’s lunacy,
after all, a term that reverberates with an ancient and even primal terror.
Cruising
Attitude by Heather
Poole (hot off the presses, girls!)
This
synopsis/blurb appeared on the Amazon.com web site.
Flying the
not-so-friendly skies...
In her more than
fifteen years as an airline flight attendant, Heather Poole has seen it all.
She's witnessed all manner of bad behavior at 35,000 feet and knows what it takes for a traveler to
become the most hated passenger onboard. She's slept in flight attendant
crashpads in "Crew Gardens," Queens—sharing small bedrooms crammed
with bunk beds with a parade of attractive women who come and go at all hours,
prompting suspicious neighbors to jump to the very worst conclusions. She's
watched passengers and coworkers alike escorted off the planes by police. She
can tell you why it's a bad idea to fall for a pilot but can be a very good one
(in her case) to date a business-class passenger. Heather knows everything
about flying in a post-9/11 world—and she knows what goes on behind the scenes,
things the passengers would never dream.
Heather's true
stories in Cruising Attitude are surprising, hilarious, sometimes
outrageously incredible—the very juiciest of "galley gossip"
delightfully intermingled with the eye-opening, unforgettable chronicle of her
fascinating life in the sky.
