“Twenty years ago, with my life at a serious crossroads, I applied to every single airline, and a few months later I was officially a flight attendant. I loved my new job, and it came with a completely new and exciting life.
But I didn’t sign up for what travel is like this summer.
The pandemic has changed flying more than any event I have experienced in my career. If 9/11 changed how we board planes and enter airports, Covid-19 changed the experience on the airplane all together. It created a strain and made everyone nervous. It brought politics into a realm that shouldn’t be political.
In the initial days of the pandemic, the airlines tried to save as much money as they could. They allowed early retirements and furloughed many employees; on top of that, many other employees quit to be with their families. Now we have an employee shortage. Once the mask mandate was dropped, passenger counts started to grow faster than airlines could handle. Now we are short-staffed and overworked. Not just pilots and flight attendants, but also ground crews. You may not think about ground crews, but without them there is no one to park the planes, drive the jet bridges so you can board and get off, load your bags and retrieve them, or scan boarding passes.”