Source: NY Times
Author: Micheline Maynard

Jer'i Conway was the envy of her friends in 1969 when she became a flight attendant at United Airlines. She planned to stay about 18 months and then thought she would leave to be married, but the perks of free travel and other benefits kept her silver wings firmly on her uniform through the industry's best and leanest years.

For all her years of experience, though, she said she was not prepared for the news of the latest terror threat as she awoke last Thursday morning. "It was just like I'd been sucker punched," said Ms. Conway, 56, who is based in San Francisco. "It was 9/11 all over again. I started to cry."

Flight attendants, whose profession was once considered glamorous, may have one of the toughest jobs in the airline industry these days.

Even before last week's terror threat came to light, they were contending with doing more with less, and for less: planes are packed fuller than they have been in decades, there are fewer perks to provide comfort and distraction for passengers, and flight attendants have seen their pay and benefits cut at many airlines.

And now travelers are increasingly confused and agitated about the new restrictions and the long lines to get through security.

"It's one more level of stress on top of several years of pretty severe stress," said Patricia A. Friend, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, which represents more than 55,000 attendants at 20 airlines.

The security threats, and warnings that other plots may be in the works, have given many flight attendants a new fear of flying.

Ms. Conway said calls to the employee assistance hot line run by her union spiked after Thursday with calls from attendants who are worried about their own safety even as they provide reassuring words to passengers.

"People are reaching out and saying, 'I can't do this. I can't get on a plane today,' " Ms. Friend said.

But virtually all made it to work, where they found new reminders of how their role inside the passenger cabin had changed.

Once their job description focused on providing "whatever the passenger wanted," said Laura Sheridan, a Northwest flight attendant since 1986. "Now it's all about telling them what they can and can't do."

Ms. Sheridan lives in Boston, where Ms. Friend says calls to the assistance hot line have been particularly frequent in the last week (on Sept. 11, 2001, two of the doomed jets took off from Boston). Now, Ms. Sheridan said, protecting the cockpit from unruly — or worse — passengers has risen to the top of her mind.

"You're the first line of defense," she said.

"We've lost our innocence," added Diane Young, a flight attendant at Continental Airlines who has been flying for 42 years. "We think about things we didn't used to have to think about."

Stress aside, however, many do not want to give up a job that has taken them to all parts of the globe, the primary reason most flight attendants sign on.

It certainly is not the pay, which is below $20,000 a year for beginning flight attendants and goes to $40,000 a year and up for veterans. (Pay varies by routes flown and by the health of the airline; carriers like Southwest and JetBlue pay annual bonuses that can add thousands of dollars a year to a flight attendant's salary.)

While air travelers seemed more civilized in the days after the 9/11 attacks, the elimination of perks like hot meals, pillows and blankets on some airlines, with tight legroom, has made some passengers grumpy.

"In our country, people forget," said Cyndi Dahl, 56, a flight attendant with Continental Airlines, who was interviewed at Newark Airport. "They have short-term memories. People are very fast-triggered now."

Dayna Karen Lechtenberger, who has spent 11 years as a United flight attendant, said, "Everything's a lot more crowded. Tempers easily flare up."

Passengers do not understand why airlines have had to cut back in the face of sustained high oil prices, she said in an interview in Los Angeles International Airport.

"People expect to have more for what they're paying for, when — with the price of fuel — their ticket doesn't even cover costs," she said.

Ms. Conway, the United Airlines attendant, said she missed the era when she sized up passengers as they boarded based on what she thought their needs and wants would be during the flight, including whether they would be asleep or awake for the meal service.

In the 1960's and 1970's, "I was thinking, 'Who could I give dinner and a drink?' Now I think, 'Who can help me and who will give me trouble?' " Ms. Conway said.

Last week's increased security did have a couple of benefits inside the passenger cabin, many flight attendants said.

Rather than surrender their toothpaste, shampoo and other liquids that they can no longer bring on board, many passengers are checking their carry-on bags. That has meant less of a scramble to find space in overhead bins.

"It helped us without those bags," said Maureen Noone, 47, a Continental flight attendant. "It's easier for everybody, even the passengers."

Another benefit of the new security measures, Ms. Conway said, is the audience's interest when she and her colleagues give their routine security briefings. "I guarantee, people are paying attention again," she said.

Because of all the disruptions caused by the tighter regulations, the flight attendants' union decided to hold off on its threat of a work slowdown at Northwest this week. Northwest has pushed flight attendants to grant deep wage and benefit cuts as part of its cost-cutting to help it emerge from bankruptcy protection.

The union instead may begin its activities next week. Northwest contends a slowdown would be illegal.

"We need to call a little timeout here and deal with this when heads are a little more level," said Ms. Friend, the union's president.

But she does not expect air travel to ever be as calm as it once was. The London terror plot was a reminder that "this is our new world," Ms. Friend said.

Where flight attendants once were trained to deal with emergency landings, and later with the threat of hijackings, they now must be ready to cope with things like passengers who try to bring down a plane by setting their shoes on fire or those who might concoct lethal cocktails meant to blow a hole in a fuselage.

"This just has to be factored into our work life now," Ms. Friend said. She hopes the current situation will remind passengers how important flight attendants are. But she is not optimistic.

"I don't think the average traveler considers the real role of the flight attendant, unless they need that person to act in that role," she said. "They just don't think about it."

Nick Bunkley, in Romulus, Mich.; Cindy Chang, in Los Angeles; and Sarah Garland, in Newark, contributed reporting for this article.