Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase

Everyone knows flight attendants have some of the wildest work stories in the world. If you’re looking for a light hearted read filled with hilarious flight attendant and pilot anecdotes - Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase is for you. Today we’re lucky to have “the” Betty with us…she is going to tell us about herself and share some of her funny experiences. Enjoy…

Welcome, Betty! Tell us about yourself.

I grew up in a small town near Pittsburgh the youngest of ten children, my family didn’t have a lot of money. I knew from a very young age that I wanted to travel and see the world.  In my humble surroundings becoming a flight attendant seemed like the only way I was ever going to get the chance to travel.  So in my twenties I got a job as a flight attendant for a major airline. This turned out to be the perfect job for me, I got to travel for work, meet really interesting people and actually have a lot of fun at work.  The ”non routine” of airline life really fits my personality.

In my early thirties I started traveling to far flung destinations, then I started traveling alone. When I discovered that I could actually travel to other counties alone I gained the strength  to make other big steps in my life.

Tell us about your book.

In 2005 I met a pilot who had a podcast called Fly With Me, I told stories on his podcast and it went really well.  I love to tell stories, and I love old fashioned radio so before you know it I had a podcast of my own.  My podcast Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase is full of flight attendants and pilots telling funny airline and travel stories.  To my surprise the podcast got really popular, and a listener told his wife (who happens to be in the publishing business) about my show and she contacted me about writing a book. This is when you could have knocked me over with a feather.  I was happy being a flight attendant who travels.  Then I’m a flight attendant with a popular podcast and a book deal!

The book is a natural extension of the podcast.  It is the best stories from the shows but in written form.  There have been many flight attendant books but they have usually been solely from flight attendant’s perspective.  My book has lots of pilot stories and is salted with cartoons and spiced with interesting facts about flying, giving the book a wide appeal.

My sister drew some of the cartoons for the book, but being a busy single mother she didn’t have time to draw more.  So most of the illustrations in the book I put together myself.  It’s funny how many jobs you can take on yourself in this new fangled world of “peer generated” entertainment!  If you told me just a few years ago that I would be a radio host, editor, producer, author and illustrator along with being a flight attendant I would have told you that your were out of your mind!

What do you love about your job?

Every flight attendant will tell you they took the job so they could travel, but the ironic twist that most people don’t know is that–a LOT of flight attendants don’t travel!  The reasons could be kids and families or that traveling just becomes synonymous with work.

But I am a traveling fool. Just last year I went to the Galapagos, Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Borneo and Mexico.  There is no way I could travel that often without my travel benefits.  But there are other reasons I still love my job.  I relish that my schedule is so flexible, I work with really fun people and I still get a kick out of all the crazy things the passengers do!  Just the other day a guy in his thirties called me over during boarding and said “Since when did you guys start wearing uniforms?”  I responded…”Oh , the days of the naked flight attendants are long gone”  all the other passengers started laughing.  I keep thinking I’ve heard it all…but people always surprise me!

What are some of your memorable flight attendant experiences?

My best experiences as a flight attendant were the CRAF flights. Civil Reserve Air Fleet is an agreement the airlines have with government, that in times of war, the airlines have to loan airplanes and flight personnel to deliver troops to and from war zones.

Airlines can not force employees to fly into a potentially dangerous area so these flights are maned on a volunteer basis.  I volunteered.  During the latest Iraq war we had to fly into Kuwait at night with the airplane lights off in case someone would be shooting at us (that is a surreal experience on a commercial aircraft!).  We had to be equipped with chemical war suits and learn how to give ourselves chemical warfare antidote injections in the event were were exposed to chemical weapons.

These are not things that I do in a typical day at work!  The flights when we were flying these young soldiers off to war were extremely emotional for me.  In route we would stop in Rome and there was a gate agent there that would sing over the PA system of the airplane. With the voice of an angel she would sing the star spangled banner with all the soldiers standing at attention and I would cry like a baby.

As hard as it was to fly them off to war, bringing them home was even more emotional!  We would decorate the airplane with flags and welcome home hero banners.  Our airline gave us cakes to cut in celebration.  Some flight attendants went to local schools and had kids write letters to the soldiers and we would tape them to  the walls of the airplane that would be delivering them home. I was thrilled to be the first smiling face on their flight home to safety, it was truly a remarkable experience!

As far as “most outrageous incidents” with passengers, well, my entire book is packed full of them! Here are three:

I was serving on a flight to L.A. and on that particular plane, the suction on the toilet in the lavatory was extremely strong. We served breakfast, and one lady passenger spilled something on her dress. It was a red silk wrap-around dress, and she went to the bathroom to clean it off. Apparently, she took off the dress in the lavatory, and when she was done cleaning it, she laid it next to the toilet, and then went to the bathroom. When she flushed, a piece of the dress was hanging close enough to the toilet so that it got sucked right in and flushed right down. So there she was, standing there wearing nothing but her underwear. She just stayed in the bathroom until we were ready to land, when we started knocking on the door and insisting that she come out and take her seat. She said, ‘I cannot come out!’ and when we asked why, she opened the door a tiny crack and said, ‘My dress got flushed down the toilet!’ So one of us loaned her an extra coat so she could come out. When we landed, we explained the situation to the agent and he said, ‘Well…do you want your dress back?’ and she said emphatically, ‘NO!’ I’m sure that by then her red silk dress was a pretty shade of blue.

Once on a long full flight to Honolulu, I was chatting with the captain and co-pilot in the cockpit when the co-pilot described something he’d seen flight attendants do to entertain themselves on the ground or on flights with no passengers. It involved tucking the tail end of a toilet paper roll down the lavatory, unwinding the toilet paper the length of the plane, then flushing. The powerful suction of the lav would suck the toilet paper down, like a kid slurping spaghetti. Well, the captain just had to see this in action, even though we had a completely full flight. He told me to go set everything up and call him when it was ready. I got one fellow flight attendant to guard the door to the lav in the back of the plane while I walked backwards up the aisle, unrolling toilet paper as I went. It must have looked outrageously insane to the passengers, but it was, after all, a long flight in the middle of the day to a vacation destination, so I figured everyone would be willing to play along. I just kept telling people, ‘It’s an experiment!’ and that piqued their interest. When the toilet paper was laid out the length of the plane, I called the captain, and when he stepped out of the cockpit, I gave the thumbs-up signal to my accomplice in the back, and she pushed the flush button. Well, that piece of toilet paper lifted into the air, waved like a noodle, and SCHWOOSH! went down the lav. The entire plane erupted into applause and cheers, and the captain said it was the neatest experiment he’d ever seen on a plane.

The word most often spoken by a flight attendant is not “hello” or “thank you” or “excuse me” or “I’m sorry”. The word most often spoken by a flight attendant is actually, “PUSH!” That’s because the lavatory door is a bi-fold door that opens like a telephone booth. People are always searching for a door knob to try to pull the door open, and they constantly grab the ash tray in the door thinking it must be a handle. So from one end of the flight to the other, the word most often repeated by every flight attendant in America is, “PUSH! Push it! Push the door!” because there is always a confused passenger standing in front of the bathroom door trying to figure out how to get in. I think the only professional who uses the word “push” more than flight attendants must be an obstetrician.

Thanks for the laughs, Betty. We enjoyed having you today. Happy travels!