I’D NEVER DATE a pilot. They’re way too geeky!” said one of my favorite pilots, right after I mentioned I had dated one back before I’d become a flight attendant. Then, with a mischievous grin, he added, “But I’ve dated flight attendants from every single airline.” I did not doubt it for a second.
Pilots are type A personalities. They’re logical thinkers who must remain calm, cool, and in control as they command the aircraft. There’s no room for emotion when faced with a decision like the one Captain Sully had to make when he ditched an aircraft into the Hudson River. Flight attendants, on the other hand, are nurturing and caring. The issues we deal with are rarely black and white. So if opposites attract, it only makes sense that pilots and flight attendants would wind up together. And maybe it isn’t a surprise to learn that pilots often marry nurses and teachers, while flight attendants get involved with police officers and firemen.
There’s a saying in the airline industry that you’re not a real airline pilot unless you’ve been furloughed, gone on strike, and been divorced. I can’t help but wonder how many pilots have flight attendants as ex-wives, since so many of them are brazen enough to try juggling more than one of us at the same time. It’s not pretty when a pilot gets caught—and they almost always do. This is because flight attendants have a tendency to talk—a lot—and invariably we wind up talking about them. One lucky guy became the subject of jump-seat conversation when his wife and mistress were paired together to work a trip. Imagine how he must have felt when he pulled up that list of crew names! While his wife raved about her amazing husband, the girlfriend shared intimate details of her hot new man. Surrounded by passengers, a midflight fight broke out between the pissed-off mother of two and the young hot mistress who had no idea her perfect boyfriend wasn’t so perfect after all. A different mile-high love triangle went down a little more peacefully when, instead of coming to blows, two flight attendants agreed to confront the wandering groin at the airport. They stood, side by side, arms crossed, at the top of the jet bridge just waiting for the bastard to walk off his flight. I wasn’t there to see the end of it, but I’m sure the passengers seated in the surrounding gate area went home with quite an interesting story to share that day.
While not all pilots end up with flight attendants, many do tend to marry often. There are a few horror stories of embittered pilots who have made the galley gossip rounds. Take, for instance, the San Francisco–based pilot (I hear he’s now deceased) who refused to speak to flight attendants at the end of his career. He made the first officer do all the talking for him. Later he went on to write about “gold-diggers” and the “lopsided” court system in a book, The Predatory Female: A Field Guide to Dating and the Marriage-Divorce Industry, after he wound up paying millions to a few “undeserving” ex-wives. I can’t help but wonder how he may have died. Predatory female or pissed-off flight attendant? Or a combination of both? Then there’s the story about a captain everyone hated from Eastern Airlines who got poisoned in flight and ended up in a hospital on his layover. The crew got called in for questioning upon returning back to base. As the story goes, he had recently divorced a flight attendant and was vocal about his hatred of all women. A friend of mine was working as purser on that flight and swore it wasn’t her—she always passed off the job of feeding pilots to the most junior flight attendant on board.
Pilots and flight attendants usually love or hate each other—maybe a little too much since there’s rarely an in-between. It’s usually the latter for our more senior flight attendants who’ve been there, done that more times than they’ll ever admit. They make it a point to take new hires under their wings and school them in the ways of pilots. One such flight attendant went so far as to write down a few tips in case I forgot:
Tip 1: Don’t do it.
Tip 2: Don’t do it.
Tip 3: Don’t do it.
Tip 4: If you do mess up and do it, don’t do it more than once.
A flight attendant who dates more than her fair share of pilots is referred to as a “Cockpit Connie,” unless she’s someone you really dislike, in which case she’s an “air mattress.” One can assume this kind of flight attendant is familiar with “touch and go.” Pilots, on the other hand, get stereotyped as three things: womanizers, cheap bastards, and horrible dressers. Unfortunately, stereotypes come from a seed of truth and, because I ignored all four points on the list, I’ve dated them all, starting with Gary.
I met him at LaGuardia Airport back when I was still working for the watch company. My fourth flight ever was a trip to New York. A girlfriend at work had scored super cheap tickets to visit her family over the weekend and invited me to come along with her. It was a quick three-day trip that landed late at night on day 1 and departed back to Dallas late in the afternoon on day 3, about two hours shy of the firework show over the city. While we were waiting for our return flight to board I thought it might be fun to ask a pilot to take a photograph with me. I would frame it and give it to my mother as a sort of gag gift for her birthday—she had a thing for men in uniform, which is one of the reasons she married my father, a retired lieutenant commander in the navy.
I had my camera out and ready to go when I locked eyes on three gray-haired pilots heading my way. With my girlfriend egging me on, I was just about to ask, but at the last minute I chickened out. They were too involved in a serious conversation to bother with my silly request. How could I have possibly known they were probably just discussing filing with the IRS after a third failed marriage? Right behind them, walking all alone, I spotted another one, and this one was young and cute and looking right at me. Gulp.
His name, it turned out, was Gary, and I’m pretty sure I saw him blush when I told him what I had in mind. Now if I had known my mother was going to react the way she did after she unwrapped the gold-framed photo on her birthday, I would never have stopped him to ask if he’d pose in a picture with me. And I certainly wouldn’t have given him my phone number if I had thought my little joke would take on a life of its own, making its way into the homes of my grandparents, who displayed the photograph of a smiling tall, dark, and handsome pilot standing beside me with my big hair and exposed midriff on a bookshelf in the family room for all to see.
I knew nothing about the airline business at the time, so I paid no attention to the three gold stripes circling the wrists of Gary’s uniform blazer. What I didn’t know was that these signaled that he was a first officer, not a captain. Captains sit on the left-hand side, wear four stripes, and get first dibs on a choice of crew meal, almost always passing the vegetarian entrée off to the first officer. Pilots are never catered the same thing to eat on board a flight as a precaution against food poisoning. My colleagues and I were taught a lot of things in flight attendant training, but landing an aircraft wasn’t one of them. This is why we aren’t allowed to swap out cockpit meals for passenger meals if we run out of choices and a passenger doesn’t get what he wants. If you go to use the first-class lav and catch a flight attendant eating what you think should have been your meal, don’t get upset! Chances are that one of the pilots decided not to eat at the last minute.
Seniority for pilots works pretty much the same as it does for flight attendants. The big difference between pilots and flight attendants is a pilot can move up in rank. You can always tell how senior a pilot is based on the aircraft he’s flying. The heavier the airplane, the bigger the paycheck, with the captain making substantially more per hour than a first officer. When there’s an opening, the most senior first officer or captain will “move up.” When a captain on a smaller plane is upgraded, the most senior first officer has a shot at becoming a captain. From time to time you’ll find the first officer has more seniority than the captain. In these cases, the first officer has chosen quality of life over pay (a life off reserve). Now, if I had worked for an airline the day I met Gary, I would have known immediately that he was pretty low on the employee totem pole—he had three stripes and was working a flight that departed late in the afternoon on the Fourth of July.
When Gary walked away after our picture that day, I thought that was that, end of story. He lived in Florida and I lived in Texas. Where could it possibly go? I figured I’d never see him again, which is why I’d had the nerve to ask him for the photo in the first place! The last thing on my mind was to hook up.
But then I boarded my flight, plopped down into my seat, glanced out the window, and saw a familiar-looking pilot looking up at the wing. “Oh no, he’s our pilot.”
“Wave!” my girlfriend exclaimed, leaning into me. I grabbed her hands and held them firmly down.
“Oh shit!” I exclaimed, sliding way down in my seat when he looked up.
An hour into the flight, just when I was starting to relax, a flight attendant holding a tray of food stopped at my row. “Gary asked me to bring you this. It’s his crew meal,” she said.
“How sweet!” my girlfriend squealed. Stunned, I just sat there. I’d really thought Gary hadn’t seen my shocked face framed in the airplane window. My friend unlocked my tray and the flight attendant placed the first-class cheese lasagna on my table. It looked delicious.
“Umm… tell Gary I said thank you.”
When I myself became a flight attendant, I reflected back on this moment many times and wondered what the heck Gary was thinking by sending the first-class flight attendant back to coach to serve me, a passenger he barely knew, a passenger wearing a crop top on a plane, a crew meal that should have been the flight attendants’ by default.
I’m not sure which was more embarrassing, Gary’s big-ball move or me ringing the call light after I finished eating so a flight attendant could take away the tray. Because unless it’s an emergency or the seat belt sign is on or you’re stuck by the window next to a sleeping passenger, you really shouldn’t ring the call light. Flight attendants use a chime system to signal different emergency situations, and when we hear it, we assume it’s an emergency. If we get a series of passengers who start using it to order drink refills, there’s a cabin full of flight attendants wondering if they should grab a serving tray or a bottle of oxygen. If you can, it’s always best to get up, stretch your legs, and walk to the back to say hi to the crew. Or just wait for a flight attendant to pass by—we’re each required to walk through the cabin at least once every fifteen minutes. As for that flight attendant who came back to pick up the meal Gary had sent back after I did what I now would never do (ding!) she never once made me feel anything other than special. She handled it like a professional. Even so I’m positive I was galley gossip for the remainder of the flight.
Even though we’d exchanged numbers and I’d promised to mail him a copy of the photo after I got home, I was still pretty surprised when he called, and even more shocked when he asked me out. He had a layover in Dallas and wanted to know if I’d like to meet for a drink, since it’d probably be too late for dinner. But if I wanted dinner, he’d love to take me out, he quickly added. I’d never dated someone like Gary before. At the age of twenty-three I was only used to dating guys who had recently graduated from college, most of whom were still unsure of what they were going to do with their lives, not men in charge of aircrafts. I felt totally unworthy of his attention. I spent my days deciding which lugs went with which dials, mixing and matching different leather straps, while he spent his days flying passengers to their destinations. Handsome, smart, and sweet, he was a total catch. Too bad for my mother, he wasn’t my type. At the time, you see, my type had a tendency to suck.
In hindsight, I realize the problem with Gary was that there was no problem with Gary. The man was perfect in every sense of the word. But I was twenty-three, and at that time in my life, there was one thing that I really couldn’t handle. What bugged me wasn’t that he had a four-year-old son or an ex-wife who lived not too far from his parents’ house. Where he lived. No, what disturbed me were his clothes. I almost died when he showed up for our first date basically wearing his uniform. Because I knew he was on a layover, I let it slide—the first time. No doubt about it, Gary looked handsome standing in front of a cockpit door greeting passengers, but the uniform belt and uniform pants paired with a bright yellow T-shirt just didn’t cut it on the dance floor.
It’s an interesting topic, pilots and fashion. I’m not sure I can even use the two words in the same sentence since they go as well together as orange juice and toothpaste. Ask any group of flight attendants if they can spot a pilot in civilian “layover clothes” and they will emphatically say yes. Don’t believe me? Next time you’re at the airport look for the guy wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses. If he’s also sporting pleated khakis with a powder blue golf shirt underneath a Members Only jacket, nine times out of ten his name is at the bottom of the non-rev standby list. Despite the reality, for so many women the word “pilot” conjures up images of dashing men in uniform. Think Richard Gere (Officer and a Gentleman), Tom Cruise (Top Gun), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Aviator), Andy Garcia (When a Man Loves a Woman), John Travolta (he owns a 707), and Jake Pavelka—ya know, Jake, the pilot from that television show The Bachelor who later went on to shake his groove thing on Dancing with the Stars. While he looked oh so dreamy dressed in a tux, I couldn’t help but wonder as I watched the women fawning in their desperate quest for a rose if they would have even given him the time of day if they’d seen him in real life—say, passing through the lobby of a hotel in his layover clothes, holding a passenger’s discarded day-old newspaper while sipping a discounted cup of coffee? Somehow I doubt it.
In the travel section of Barnes & Noble, I once met a guy named Bob. I didn’t believe him when he told me he was a pilot. He looked too good to be a pilot! Not that Bob is conventionally handsome. He’s kind of nerdy. But he knows how to rock the dark denim without the pilot’s trademark running sneakers. When I asked Bob why so many pilots dressed terribly, he said it’s because his coworkers spend too much time looking for tools in the Sears catalog and then accidentally stumble into its clothing section. “It’s not so much that being a pilot causes one to be fashion-challenged, it’s just that we tend to be better at things like engineering, checking the car’s oil, fixing things around the house, and not asking for driving directions. This opposed to fashion design,” he explained.
Too bad Bob wasn’t around to help my roommate Jane’s date, a 767 first officer, pick out something to wear on their first date. Hot Shot showed up dressed to impress wearing golf shoes, skin-tight acid-washed jeans, and a turquoise jacket.
“He looked like such a nerd,” Jane cringed after the date. “I don’t think I would have agreed to go out with him if he’d looked like that when he asked me out.”
Thank God for first impressions. And uniforms.
They spent three weeks getting to know each other over the phone before their first date. They weren’t intentionally taking it slow, but that’s how long it took before they were finally able to coordinate their schedules. In the long run, this was a good thing since it helped that Jane was practically head over heels for the guy by the time they finally went out. Otherwise she might not have been able to overlook the off-duty fashion disaster, and he would have never made it to second base. Two months into the relationship Jane talked her man into donating the shoes and the jeans, along with a dozen or so obnoxious Christmas ties and half a closet full of college clothes, to Goodwill. Then she borrowed his credit card and went shopping. She may have purchased a few things for him, too, because after they broke up two years later Hot Shot was considered one of the best-dressed pilots in the system. Much to her dismay he had no problem scoring another flight attendant who got to enjoy the fruits of Jane’s labor. But don’t feel badly for Jane. She upgraded to an airbus captain.
Gary and I didn’t date for long. In fact we didn’t really “date.” We went out a few times over the course of five months or so. But Gary turned into the better-looking but terribly dressed version of my mother when he began spending a lot of time talking to me about his job and why I should be doing it—or one somewhat similar to it. I never told him I’d interviewed with an airline before. Perhaps I wanted to block it from my mind. Instead I kept explaining to him that I wanted to do something more with my life than serve drinks and pick up trash. Every time I told him this I sounded snottier and more full of myself until I began to make my own self sick. I don’t know why Gary put up with me. But he did, and that’s when I started inventing reasons not to go out with him. When he didn’t take the hint, I stopped calling him back.
A year after he disappeared from my life, I became a flight attendant with the same company Gary worked for. Needless to say after I graduated from flight attendant training I began thinking about him again. More than anything I wished I had handled things with him differently. All I could do was worry about running into him again! It was inevitable. It didn’t matter if the airline I worked for was a big company with almost twenty thousand flight attendants or that flight attendants worked with different people all the time. The interesting thing about being a flight attendant is that while we may not see a person we’ve worked with for years after a trip, out of nowhere they’ll pop up on the other side of the cart, as if no time had passed, other than that person gaining a little weight or losing a little hair. Just when we begin to feel comfortable and think that maybe, just maybe, the one we’d like to avoid has quit or retired or transferred to another base, his or her name will appear on a crew list. One minute we could be working with a flight attendant on the prowl, and the next time we see her she’s the mother of three, sharing sippy-cup tips on the jump seat. Or even worse, one minute a pilot is dating a regular girl with a bad attitude on the ground, and the next time he speaks to her, she’s wearing a matching uniform—but lying about it.
I had just moved into the crash pad with Georgia and Victor, the mankini-wearing, drugged-out landlord, when out of the blue Gary called to “check in and say hello.” Too embarrassed by my past rants against the airline industry to tell him the truth—that at that moment I was laying over at a Holiday Inn not too far from the airport in Oklahoma City—I did the next best thing. I lied. I didn’t want him to know I had just finished eating breakfast for dinner at a Denny’s across the street by myself as I was the extra flight attendant on a trip and therefore on my own for the next three days, so I told him everything was great, life couldn’t be better, and yes, I was in fact still working for the watch company. I went on and on about a life I no longer had or even wanted. I was on a roll, describing in detail things I hadn’t done in over a year with people I no longer worked with, and Gary quietly listened. I don’t remember how the conversation ended, but it’s safe to assume that it did and when it did I was relieved. After that I dreaded flying the Miami run even more than I had before, which I didn’t think was possible.
If I did find myself walking through the Miami airport, the most chaotic airport in the world and home of the most amazing people-watching on Earth, I did so briskly and never stopped for anything other than what was absolutely necessary. Rice and beans at La Carreta and a café con leche from Café Versailles. While I’d nervously wait in line for the most delicious Cuban takeout food, I’d scan the horizon for a familiar face, always scoping out what I could duck behind, maybe a magazine stand or group of passengers, in order to avoid an unwanted run-in. At some point I knew I’d have to face my fears, but I kept hoping that day would come later, not sooner. While I waited for the inevitable to happen I imagined all the different scenarios that could possibly occur—well, all but the one that actually did occur.
I had boarded a flight in Dallas with my crew. The plane was in the process of being catered and cleaned when I spotted a pair of aviator Ray-Bans on the galley counter. Naturally I picked them up, tried them on, and walked into the lav to check myself out in the mirror. As I stood with the door open, reapplying lipstick, I heard a familiar voice behind me say, “Excuse me. I think I left my sunglasses on board.”
Oh boy. I swallowed hard and slowly turned around.
“I guess these are yours then.” I took the shades off and handed them back to Gary. “Long time no see,” I said, cringing as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I didn’t know what else to say!
“W-what are you… when did you—”
“Last year.” I didn’t want him to know I had been lying the last time we spoke, so I did it again. I told him exactly what had happened, only I shaved off a few years. Then I did what any other flight attendant would do when a person dares to step onto the precious galley floor. I offered him a drink and prayed he’d go back to his seat, which turned out to be the left seat on a flight to Palm Springs. Gary had been upgraded to captain. I congratulated him and wished him the best.
“I can’t tell you how odd it is to see you here, on an airplane, in uniform. You really look great!” he said.
I blushed. “Thanks. You do, too.” He did. Even better than before.
When he took off his hat and scratched his head, I caught a glimpse of a young boy holding a bat and wearing a red jersey in a photograph tucked inside the clear plastic pocket on the underside of his cap, which is where single pilots keep their business cards and the others keep family photos. A way to distinguish one hat from another since they all look alike hanging on the back of the cockpit door during flight.
“So… why did we lose touch again?” he asked earnestly.
“Umm…” I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I stared at the oven door for a count of three, as if seriously pondering the question, and then looked directly into his beautiful brown eyes and lied again. “I don’t remember.” What can I say? I was on a roll.
“Would you like to get together… again, sometime?” he asked. I couldn’t believe it. I’d said terrible things about flight attendants, stopped calling him, become a flight attendant, and lied about it, and he still wanted to see me again.
Of course I said yes. Because I knew Gary was a great guy! I could only assume I’d grown up over the last three years. Surely I could appreciate all he had to offer this time around now that I was in a completely different place in life. Now that I was older and wiser and well traveled, I figured Gary and I had to have a lot more in common. So I scribbled my number across a beverage napkin and told him to call me for a second time.
Midway through round two of our first date, it was clear that we had a problem. Gary was, well, not very exciting. But he was thoughtful, in that he brought flowers and always opened doors. He was the kind of pilot that would grab crew bags out of the first-class closet and line them up on the jet bridge for a quick escape. But if I wasn’t talking, we weren’t talking—talk about stressful! At least with the CEO I could share funny stories, but if Gary hadn’t already heard my funny stories, he’d heard of ones just like them. I knew he was a catch, so I tried not to let that deter me. But as he walked me to my hotel door at the end of the night I found myself dreading the kiss good night. Determined not to let a little thing like chemistry come between us, I kissed him anyway! I felt nothing. Really putting my all into it, I tried again. But we just weren’t meant to be.
Years later, during a vacation in Puerto Vallarta, my mother turned to me and announced, “There’s something I need to tell you.” When my mother starts a conversation like this, what follows next is guaranteed to be frightening.
“Dad’s dead?” I said half-jokingly.
“Worse.” My mother covered her face with her hands and I could have sworn I heard her say something crazy like “I wrote Gary a letter.”
“You did what?!”
“Right after you completed flight attendant training and moved to New York. You just seemed so sad and lonely. I was worried about you. I thought maybe if he knew you were a flight attendant he might call and offer to take you out.”
I leaned back in my seat and adjusted the air vent so I could breath. I wanted to kill her. The fact that Gary had acted surprised to see me on the airplane and never even let on about the freaking letter just proved to me that he might be even crazier than my mother! Or one of the nicest guys in the world. Either way, it meant that he lied, too, kind of, so in a way we were even, sort of.
I haven’t seen Gary since, but my mother has. Twice. The first time he was the captain on one of her flights. After years of staring at that stupid photograph, she recognized him right away. She almost died when he walked on board and stowed his bag in the first-class closet. The last thing she wanted to do was embarrass me, so she never told him who she was, but she does think he may have known based on the way he lingered around in the galley a lot during the flight. The second time she ran into him—a decade later!—he knew exactly who she was and told her so in the rear galley as she was setting up carts. After she was through telling me all about how great he was, and how he had nothing but nice things to say about me, and how he’s moving to New York and is engaged to a girl who looks, based on a photograph, kind of like me, she exclaimed, “I swear, Heather, you’ll never do better than him!” And she turned out to be right… at least as far as pilots were concerned.