A Day in the Life of an International Flight Attendant – Part 1: The Commute

My flight attendant related posts seem to be proving popular if I go by the amount of views I’m getting, so I thought I would continue this trend and answer all the questions I get asked about my job and what it’s like day to day in two big blog posts.

I’m a little different from most international flight attendants in that I don’t live in my base city, and instead live in another city and then commute. For me home is Perth in Western Australia and my working base is Sydney, New South Wales, a stunning 4000km, or a 4 hour flight, apart. When I first started flying internationally I did live in Sydney, and logistically, it was infinitely easier, as I could be home from the airport after a trip and be in bed within 30 minutes. Ah…heaven. Now, I get on the terminal transfer bus with many of the passengers I have just served breakfast to only a few hours earlier, and wait for a plane home to Perth. I get ‘home’ hours after all my colleagues, but this is now the way I prefer it. Sure, it’s a pain in the ass travelling so far just for work – and no, my company does not pay for me to travel between Sydney and Perth and vice versa. It comes out of my own pocket – but living in Sydney proved too expensive for me, plus I missed my family and friends and my home town too much. So after almost 2 years living in Sydney I moved back to Perth and became a commuter.

Commuting to your home base is actually quite common for flight attendants in the US and UK. And it is now becoming a bit more common in Australia I think. I work with many crew who have shunned Sydney’s high rental and property prices for life with their families on the Gold Coast in Queensland or NSW’s Central Coast, going back to the suburbs they grew up in. Sydney is a great place, but it’s fast and hectic and expensive. It’s fun and glamourous and there is always something to do and see, and there is also plenty to see and do in other Australian capital and regional cities. It’s why I feel just as content in Perth as I did in Sydney.

(Side note: crew don’t just commute from other places in Australia by the way. I have met crew who commute from South Africa, Japan, Fiji and Los Angeles, just to name a few!)

ANYWAY. This means this ‘day in the life’ blog will actually be ‘two days in the life’ of a flight attendant, as when I have a trip I always fly to Sydney the day before, spend the night somewhere and then go to work the next day. This helps with fatigue management – which is very important as cabin crew – and while not ideal, as I am giving up my days off in order to fly to Sydney the day before I need to work, it has proved the least stressful way to do it.

As always, I fly standby between my home city and my base city, which means nine times out of ten I am squashed into a middle seat in the last few rows of the plane. This is not that bad really, as I am so, so, so used to air travel now, and it is a sacrifice I am willing to make anyway, in order to live in Perth. I don’t get upgraded to business, in case that was the next question about the roll off your lips. Sometimes I can request to sit in the cockpit with the pilots, which is awesome and the coolest opportunity I will never tire of or say no to, but it is usually because there are absolutely no seats left in the cabin and I must sit in the cockpit on a hard jump seat for four hours if I want to get to my destination at all that day.

I usually arrive in Sydney late afternoon or at dinner time, and to save money I usually try to walk to my accommodation. If it is too far to walk, I catch trains and buses, and stay at hostels, or commuter houses. Commuter houses are a new thing to me, and I have only started staying at them in the last few months. They are commonly called crash pads in the US, and they are, at least in Australia, just houses converted into a whole bunch of rooms that crew can pay for by the night. The ones I have stayed in are nothing special but definitely adequate enough, with en suite, air con and a TV, plus the use of all the house’s facilities – kitchen, laundry and backyard. I can’t complain – and the crash pads have the added bonus of being able to check in at 8am if I need to, which you could not do in a hotel.

It’s nice to get a good night’s sleep before my trip so that I am ready and raring to go for what is always a long day at work. I only fly long haul trips, so every trip is at least a fourteen hour flight. These flights can be crazy busy, so I need to be ready, physically and mentally to handle it all with my crew.

Stay tuned for the next part of this entry, where I will go into detail about a day in the life of a flight attendant – before take-off, during the flight and after landing.

Jorgs