![]() I mean, I can’t say that it was actually happening, but she had her cat to her breast. “The weirdest would definitely be the woman in first class who appeared to be breastfeeding her cat. Hood has seen her fair share of bizarre things on board. Hood left the job in 1986 to focus on her writing career. He was sitting in 47F – and I dated him for five years.” But in 1982, I met a guy on a flight from San Francisco to New York. “I did date passengers, but that was mostly disastrous. I can’t say what they were doing, but it looked suspicious.”Īs for passengers flirting or asking flight attendants out, it was also common. “International flights usually weren’t as full as they are now, so in those middle sections of five seats on a 747 you could see a couple put the armrests up, take a blanket and disappear under it. ![]() “It didn’t happen on every flight, but you saw it. ![]() What about the Mile High Club? “It wasn’t uncommon on international flights to see a man go into the bathroom and a minute later his seatmate join him, or some version of that,” says Hood. The front rows of each section were deemed non-smoking, but the whole plane was filled with smoke because you couldn’t keep it from going backwards, it was ridiculous.” “If you went on a five-day trip, which wasn’t uncommon, you had to pack a separate whole uniform because you just would smell so much like smoke,” Hood says. Why we're actually in love with airplane food Smoking on board was widespread, and for flight attendants it was a nightmare. Nothing was plastic and coach was super nice,” says Hood, who remembers donning her Ralph Lauren-designed uniform and carving chateaubriand cooked to taste for first class passengers, who also had a choice of Russian caviar and lobster bisque to go with their Dom Perignon. I can only compare it to being in a fine hotel, or maybe on a cruise ship. “People dressed up to fly and remembered the food in a good way. Nobody was unhappy on that plane.”įlying was still glamorous at the time, she says. It was a very approachable, workable widebody plane with a lovely setup of two seats on each side and then four seats in the middle, so everybody could get out easily. “Domestically, only Eastern Airlines and TWA flew it. She says her favorite plane to work on was the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar. Christopher Deahr/Moment Editorial/Flickr Vision/Getty Images Hood's favorite plane was a Lockheed L-1-11 TriStar. The stereotype of stewardesses in miniskirts flirting with male passengers still endured, popularized by books like “Coffee, tea, or me? The uninhibited memoirs of two airline stewardesses” – published as factual in 1967, but later revealed to have been written by Donald Bain, an American Airlines PR executive. “Flight attendant” was a newly minted term, a gender neutral upgrade from “hostesses” and “stewardesses,” and deregulation of the airline industry was around the corner, ready to shake things up.īut for the most part, flying was still glamorous and sophisticated and flight attendants were still “beautiful and sexy ornaments,” as Hood puts it, although they were already fighting for women’s rights and against discrimination. It was kind of a confusing time for young women.” “I think 1978 was a really interesting year, because many of the women I went to college with had one foot in old ideas and stereotypes, and the other foot in the future. When she graduated from college, in 1978, Hood started sending job applications to airlines. “Although it was sexist as hell, it enticed me because it talked about having a job that allowed you to see the world and I thought, well, that might work.” “I came of age when the jet age came of age,” says Ann Hood, an American novelist and New York Times best-selling author, whose latest book “Fly Girl” is a memoir of her adventurous years as a TWA flight attendant, right at the end of the Golden Age of air travel.Īs a child, growing up in Virginia, she witnessed the first flight of the Boeing 707 – which ushered in the era of passenger jet travel – and watched Dulles airport being built.Īt the age of 11, after she moved back to her native Rhode Island with her family, she read a 1964 book titled “How to become an airline stewardess,” and her mind was made up.
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