Them early hostie days

Howdy readers!

I know I said in my first entry that I was a flight attendant, so I thought I would expand on that a bit in this entry. Hopefully a few people are keen to hear about my job!

I’ve been flying since 2010, when I was just 23 years old. I’d had my whirlwind trip to Europe the year before and by 2010 knew not what on earth to do with the Bachelor of Arts degree I’d gained in 2008. I was qualified for nothing basically, except to continue to wait tables, bar tend and make coffees. But I’d been doing that since I left school in 2003. I didn’t want it to be my life!

Like a lot of people I suppose, I had always looked in awe at flight attendants when I was younger. They were so glam. Maybe I could do that?

Long story short, after probably half a year of applying to different airlines and going to recruitment days and interviews, I got a job at a charter airline. It was the start of something big for me. I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did. But I loved it from the very first day. And it sure beat washing dishes and making lattes.

The training was harder than year 12 and uni combined, but I thrived. I started flying the BAe146 type aircraft, a small plane of usually between 75ish and 100 seats. We flew to mine sites and outback towns where the sun was so strong on the tarmac that my high heels would sink into the bitumen. I ate in mess halls with the miners, ripped ticket stubs at the door of the terminal, hurled eskies full of catering out of the aircraft hold and crawled up and down the aisle of the plane on my hands and knees every morning checking to see that the life jackets were all accounted for. It was not glamourous at all, but it was still fantastic.

My first time on Barrow Island - oh the isolation of that place!

I knew no different of course since this job was my first flying job, but charter flying is grubby grunt work. Like I said, it wasn’t glamourous. We cleaned the planes ourselves, emptied the rubbish bins, spoke the safety demo (no video screens on a 146!) and endured many pre dawn starts. But the team was small and intimate at that base – there were probably only 100 or so cabin crew and maybe 50 or so pilots at a guess – and we operated usually as a team of two pilots with either two or three cabin crew. I knew all the pilots kids names, and when we had overnights in Karratha, a mining town at the top of Western Australia, we all drank together, ate dinner together, drove to and from the airport in the same car, even went sightseeing together (not that there is much to sight see in Karratha!). When someone was running late for sign on in the morning at the base we would sneakily sign on for her with her computer code, and if she was really late we would do her pre flight checks for her. It was a nice little group of people. I miss them. And looking back now I would never want to start my flying career any other way. It was such a fantastic foundation, getting my hands dirty the real way, whilst at the same time revelling in opportunities like getting to sit in the flight deck and having a Forrest Gump moment where before me the sky was such a brilliant array of blues and pinks and oranges that I couldn’t see where the ocean ended and the sky began. It took my breath away. Another time I was sitting in the flight deck jump seat landing into Karratha and the Captain pointed out how if we looked to our left we could see the sun setting and if we looked to our right we could see the moon rising at exactly the same time. It was magical, and only cemented my love for my beautiful home state even more.



My last ever flight on 'The Quiet One' VH-SBJ Dash 8 (note the red dirt!)

After a year of flying the 146 I did a conversion course to fly the Dash 8 aircraft. This was a teensy bit scary as I had to fly the Dash 8 solo. Just two pilots up in the flight deck and me all by myself in the cabin. The company I worked for had two Dash 8’s – one had the capacity for 50 passengers and two cabin crew, the other 30 passengers and one lonely cabin crew. My first day after training I was happy thinking I was heading off to the Brockman mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia with a good friend of mine as the second crew member. Then I got to sign on and discovered my flight had been downgraded to the smaller Dash 8 and I was doing my first ever trip without my inflight trainer as a single crew. Yep, I almost shat myself. Then I rushed out to the aircraft, my head swimming with all the things I needed to do – after all everything had to be done by me – all the emergency equipment and security checks, all the catering, all the preparation, and I had to do it all in time before it was time to board, which I also had to run back over to the terminal for to do myself. Phew! It was a crazy first day on that little plane, but in the end it all went according to plan. I quite liked crewing by myself after a while – I could do things all my own way and in my own time, and I felt so independent and capable.

I only flew on the Dash 8 – while at the same time still flying on the 146 – for about six months before I interviewed to jump ship to the airline services side of the company, which operated the Boeing 717’s for Qantaslink. It was the real flight attendant dream of mine coming to life – getting to wear that iconic boomerang dress.

Stay tuned next time for 717 adventures,

Jorgs

Another spectacular sunset off the Pilbara coast - I never get tired of seeing this beauty!

Cabin allllllll to myself!