Time to tinker : an ethnographic study into how long-haul flight attendants manage the disconnect between their working realities and their airline's expectations

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Department of Anthropology – GSSS

T i m e t o T i n k e r

An ethnographic study into how long-haul flight attendants

manage the disconnect between their working realities and their

airline’s expectations.

Master’s thesis presented for the completion of the program: Msc Applied Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.

by Katherin Anna (Katoo) Miszewski Student number: 12166820

Word Count (excluding abstract, key words, reference list & applied report): 20 850 Applied report word count (excluding reference list): 3 266

Date Submitted: 21 June 2019 Supervised by: Dr C. H. (Tina) Harris Second Reader: Dr L.G.H. (Laurens) Bakker

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Declaration: I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy [http://student.uva.nl/mcsa/az/item/plagiarism-and-fraud.html]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.

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Abstract

This paper examines the work of long-haul, economy class flight attendants at a European Airline and shows how there is a disconnect between the expectations of the airline and the reality of a flight attendants work. It goes on to examine how flight attendants manage this disconnect. Each of the three chapters shows different variations of this disconnect and how it manifests as paradoxes. The first chapter looks at how the temporal structures that govern the work of flight attendants are simultaneously highly standardized while at the same time demanding an enormous amount of flexibility from the flight attendants. The second chapter shows how the structures from the previous chapter are responsible for “breaking” the body of the flight attendant and then recreating it to perform in the way that the airline considers appropriate. I go on to explain how flight attendants are expected to present as being “healthy”. What results is what I refer to as a kind of bodily dissonance. However, the impact on the body is not consistent so flight attendants have to tinker with their self-care to look “healthy” enough for the airline. The final chapter shows how flight attendants are systematically alienated from one another while the airline expects them to be sociable. In each section I show how flight attendants tinker their reality to meet the airline’s expectation. To do this research I conducted in depth interviews, online participant observation, textual news analysis and policy analysis. As this is an applied anthropology project, I have partnered with Mirabeau, a digital design agency, to whom I will give recommendations about possible software solutions that could aid the work of flight attendants.

Key Words

Flight attendant – long-haul flight – standardization – flexible labour – emotional dissonance – bodily dissonance – alienation – sociality

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Writing this thesis has been a privilege and a pleasure but there are a few people I want to thank for helping me along the way. Firstly, I want to thank my academic supervisor, Dr Tina Harris and my organizational supervisor, Mr Henk Haaima for their ongoing support and guidance when I didn’t know which way to turn. Secondly, I would like to thank all of my family members for their endless love and reassurance but I want to extend an extra special thanks to my mom for going above and beyond to help me. Finally, and most importantly, to my research participants, thank you for making the fieldwork so fun and enlightening, I am eternally grateful.

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Introduction

This project came to life when I was asked “how can we redesign the long-haul flight?” by Henk Haaima, the creative director of Mirabeau, a digital design agency based in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. This question captured my imagination because there is no obvious answer. In order to attempt to answer his question, I have to make the familiar – the long-haul flight - into something that is unfamiliar, a mainstay of the anthropological tradition.

What immediately stood out to me was the experience of flight attendants working in the economy section of long-haul flights. Flight attendants are on planes to keep passengers safe, happy and comfortable and yet, from the previous research that I have read and my own research, it appears that for the most part they feel none of those themselves. There are many psychological and sociological studies pointing to the issue that flight attendants are burnt out, stressed and fatigued beyond a level that is considered ‘healthy’ (Sonnentag & Natter, 2004: 367). The most obvious reason for these issues is the impact of jetlag associated with long-haul trans meridian flight. However, the aim of this research is to dig deeper than what appears to be obvious.

Therefore, while Henk’s question fascinated me and caught my attention, it also worried me. Hidden behind his question is the assumption that the long-haul flight needs to be redesigned for the passenger which could result in more work for flight attendants. I am also worried about designers making assumptions about flight attendants and their work. My hope is that this thesis will bring the flight attendant to the forefront and prevent assumptions from guiding the design process.

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When I first started this project, and during the time that I was constructing my proposal, I had planned on researching and writing about the personal and professional notions of care that are held by flight attendants. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you see it, soon after the commencement of my research I became aware of the fact that the division between “personal” and “professional” notions of care is almost non-existent. In order to research that question I would have had to nit-pick and tease out any potentially interesting arguments. The argument of the thesis would have had to be forced onto the data rather than letting the data guide the argument of the thesis. I am thankful that this issue was made apparent early on into the fieldwork as it allowed me time to adjust my course and write about a topic that I find much more interesting and relevant, both to me and my partner organization, Mirabeau.

In the conclusion of this thesis I will provide abstract ideas to Mirabeau concerning how they might design software or tech for flight attendants in the future; the aim of these ideas being to encourage thoughtfulness in the design process. The reason that I will be giving more

philosophical or abstract ideas is because that is exactly what Mirabeau has requested. They

know that I am not a designer so they have explicitly told me that they do not want pragmatic design recommendations. Rather, they want to be told where the problems are in long-haul flying so that they can come up with their own creative ways to solve them. It is for that reason that I have taken their research question around redesigning the long-haul flight and reformulated it to ask: “How do economy class flight attendants manage the disconnect

between the expectations of the European airline and the reality of long-haul flying?”. The

newly reformulated question brings the issues related to long-haul flying to the forefront which Mirabeau can then interpret. The ideas that I give will be suggestions on how I think they should address the problems, based on the research that I have conducted. In the appendix of this thesis I have attached a summarized version of the thesis that I will give to Mirabeau. Mirabeau has also asked for me to keep a lot of the literature and theory in the summarised version, so that is what I have done.

Within this thesis I seek to show how the work of flight attendants is based around a set of paradoxes each pointing to a central issue around the individual flight attendant being placed in opposition to the regulations that govern their work. The paradoxes that I will explore are: structure versus flexibility, worn down body versus healthy appearance and alienation versus sociality. I have structured my thesis in such a way that each of these paradoxes become their own chapter. Building on that, I will show that the root cause of each of these paradoxes is a

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disconnect between the expectation of the airline and the reality of being a long-haul flight attendant. Furthermore, I will show how flight attendants manage this disconnect by making small adjustments or tinkering to meet the airline’s expectation.

The first chapter will concentrate on temporal structures. I will show how flight attendants are expected to be flexible within one of the world’s most standardized industries. In this chapter I will look into the rosters and schedules that govern the life and work of flight attendants. Furthermore, I will address the ways in which flight attendants are expected to rigorously follow those schedules while simultaneously adapting them to fit each flight. To do this, I will first lay out exactly what the structures are and the way in which they are fundamentally temporal in their nature. I will then delve into the training and knowledge acquisition process that flight attendants go through. This will show how they are treated in the same way as a temporary flexible labour force but because of the knowledge that they have, they are not at replaceable.

The second chapter will be structured around explaining how there has been a shift away from the emotional dissonance and emotional labour that Arlie Hochschild argued for in her book

The Managed Heart (1983) and towards a kind of bodily dissonance where flight attendants

are supposed to look healthy where in actuality, they are labouring within a system that stimulates ill health.

The third and final chapter will show how there is a clash between airlines’ expectation for flight attendants to be sociable both with their colleagues and passengers while promoting loneliness and alienation through a point system that punishes them for wanting to work with colleagues that they know.

Within all of these chapters I will show how flight attendants adjust their experience to meet the expectation of the airline.

Methodology

Before I started the data collection process for this thesis, I made the decision to only focus on the experience of flight attendants that primarily work in the economy class of one European

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airline. If I had included the business and first classes along with other airlines, the project would have become too extensive to complete within one year.

The primary method of data collection that I used for this project was in-depth semi-structured interviews with flight-attendants that regularly work on long-haul or intercontinental flights. My interviews were with an equal number of men and women and their ages ranged between 23 and approximately 55. All of my participants were born in Europe and work for the same European airline. In total, I completed 12 interviews which is fewer than I was hoping for. In saying that, I felt that because each of the interviews went into such depth I was still able to gather more than enough information and I am happy with the outcome.

There are two main reasons that I ended up doing so few interviews: First of all, Mirabeau had promised to provide me with contacts as they have a few large airlines on their books but unfortunately, they did not deliver on their promise, a setback which stunted my fieldwork before it had even begun. This resulted in me having to make a plan and turn to my own network. The turning point was when I was put in contact with Ellen, a good friend of a family member of mine. Ellen posted on a few closed Facebook groups on my behalf calling for flight attendants that would be interested in being interviewed.

The second reason ended up becoming an important insight for two of my chapters: long-haul flight attendants are working on unconventional schedules and they do not work together so they do not necessarily have a close network of colleagues that they can call upon for help. Both of these points meant that it was very difficult to make appointments with flight attendants.

I knew before I started this project that participant observation in the classical sense would not be possible because it would be too time consuming and too costly. However, because I knew that I would not be doing participant observation, I made a constant effort to keep in mind that sometimes what a person says and what a person does are completely different. In order to try and work around that problem, I used other methods to triangulate my findings.

One of the other methods I used was internet observation. To do this, I added myself to 10 “open” Facebook groups and followed flight attendants on Instagram. I found these platforms to be hugely enlightening due to the sheer amount of content that was published on a daily

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basis. Interestingly, I found the content on Instagram to highlight the highs of being a flight attendant. On this site, I mainly saw posts about the “glamourous” side of flying: from the exotic destinations to the beautiful hotels and happy, smiling faces. The only sign of potential strain are the copious Instagram posts showing cups of coffee. Facebook on the other hand was much more grounded and real in the kinds of posts that I encountered. More often than not I came across posts of people asking for advice around issues about how to manage being a flight attendant with a young family, how to overcome a sense of loneliness or how to get sick less often. All of which are very real issues faced by real flight attendants. I did however notice that often Facebook can become a nasty and judgemental place. I made an effort to keep that in mind while analysing posts and comments that I came across.

On top of this, I kept a close eye on the news and set up Google alerts to send me any internet posts with the term “flight attendant” in them. The information that I received through this method allowed me to stay up to date in an industry that is changing at a rapid pace. For example: I learnt about Virgin Atlantic’s “no make-up necessary” rule through a Google alert.

In order to find out if the news I was reading was relevant to the flight attendants that I was interviewing, any time I heard something interesting I would ask them about it. I did the same for any interesting information that I found on Facebook and Instagram. The method of asking flight attendants about news that I found interesting also allowed for me to keep my interview guide up to date and stopped me from asking questions that were no longer relevant. For example: at the beginning of the fieldwork, I mainly had questions about the split between personal and professional notions of care, but as it became clear that it was a very difficult question to answer, I simultaneously became aware of the issues around structures like rosters and schedules, appearance and alienation. Therefore, I shifted my questions to rather focus on those topics. So rather than using news and internet sources as arguments or points in themselves, I used them in collaboration with the information that I learnt from the interviews.

The final method I used was policy analysis in an attempt to understand what the legal standards of a flight attendants’ work are. To do this I turned to the policy of the European Commission, the International Civil Aviation Authority, the European Authority in Aviation Safety as well as the International Air Transport Association.

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Ethics

When it came to the ethics of studying flight attendants I did not face too many challenges. I have, however, made an effort to anonymise each participant that I spoke to as much as possible without losing the richness of their stories. To anonymise the flight attendants, I will only refer to them by pseudonyms and I have deleted some identifying characteristics. Along these lines, I have also anonymised the airline that I was focussing on and will only refer to it as a “European airline”. I realise that this errs on the side of caution but when it comes to real people doing real work for a real airline, I think it is better to be careful. On the point of safety, a few flight attendants told me details about highly guarded safety procedures that they have on board but I have chosen to leave this information out entirely.

Additionally, as I mentioned in the methodology section, I only added myself to “open” Facebook groups. Most of the “closed” Facebook groups had questions that you had to answer upon requesting to join the group. These questions included asking for information about employee numbers and it would not be ethical to lie to get into a group. I also would not have felt comfortable sharing information that was not open to the public. Even on the “open” groups, once I was part of the group I announced myself as a researcher and let the admins know that if they were not comfortable with my presence, they could remove me.

With regards to the fieldwork, I conducted all of my interviews in places where the flight attendant would comfortable. Most of the time this was in cafes around Amsterdam but I was also invited to a few flight attendants’ homes and to the airport to do interviews. On a personal level, I did not feel unsafe at any point during the research. If I was ever uncertain I knew that I could phone or email my supervisor, Dr Tina Harris.

Finally, with regards to data privacy and protection, all of my interview recording and transcripts are stored on a password protected website that only I have access to. All of the data has been saved under the participants’ pseudonyms so that even if someone were to access that website, the data cannot be traced back to the flight attendants that I interviewed.

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Literature

Standardization

To start the discussion on standardization in the work of flight attendants, the issue at the heart of my first chapter, I turn to Yoshio Kondo who defines standardization as “formulating and implementing various standards governing… the performance of work” (1996:35). By this he means that standardization is put in place to ensure that overall, the same quality of work is completed by the whole work. In the case of flight attendants, standardization takes the form of time through rosters and schedules. Rosters dictate when a flight attendant will be flying and where they will be flying but schedules are used to ensure that all flights of the same length receive the same level of service. For example: all overnight long-haul flights have a dinner service and a condensed breakfast service that are served at the same time as the drinks service. The schedules prevent missed or extra services from occurring.

Building on this, Gilson et al argue that the point of standardization is to detail how work should be performed. The aim of this being to eliminate inconsistency and improve efficiency (2005: 522). For flight attendants, standardization by this definition means that they all have to fall into line and provide the same service to every passenger. To build on the example above: the schedule shows that all of the flight attendants are equally spaced throughout the plane to ensure that all of the passengers get served relatively quickly.

Most of the literature that has been written on standardization in work has been written on the standardization of output, not the standardization of the workplace argue Newburry and Yakova (2005:44). I would contest, however, that in the case of the flight attendant it is impossible to separate work output and the workplace and I suspect that this is the case in many service based jobs. For example: it would be impossible to separate the hospital from the work output of nurses. The workplace is the cabin and the work output is caring for passengers both of which are reliant on each other.

Adding to the discussion on standardization, I consider the airline to be a kind of bureaucracy because of its clear hierarchy and management through rules and standards (Weber, 1958: 196). Within an airline there are hierarchies but there are also hierarchies between the cabin crews, purser and pilots on the airplane. It is vital to the success of the flight that all of these members

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work together and that there is communication (Bienefeld & Grote, 2014: 279). The whole crew needs to work together and follow a set of standards to ensure that this communication is clear and the flight is safe. For example: if there is a fire in the cabin, there is a standard procedure that flight attendants have to follow to extinguish the fire. That procedure would include informing the pilots so that they can make an emergency landing if necessary. The hierarchy in the plane means that the pilot has the final call on whether the flight continues or lands and they make that call on the information given to them by the cabin crew.

The flight attendant case becomes further complicated when you consider that the airline is not only a sort of bureaucracy but also a large organization that is driven by profit. Thus, there is a increasing pressure on flight attendants to work on more flights while the number of crew members on board is being reduced and seats for passengers are being increased (Baker, 2013: 67; DutchNews.nl, 2018; NLTimes.nl, 2016, PaddleYourOwnKanoo, 2018). Under these conditions, the standards are shifted to be more financially efficient without necessarily taking the experience of the flight attendant into account. The result being that flight attendants have to work harder to meet the expectations of the airline.

Care Work1 and Emotional Labour

The labour of flight attendants is classed as being a kind of care work because it is fundamentally based on the tending to or looking after of people and their needs (Abel & Nelson, 1990: 3). For that reason, I feel that it is important to address care work in this literature review.

A simple way to look at the practise of giving care can be seen to fall on a scale from physical care to emotional care (Fisher & Tronto, 1990: 39). Physical care could include the care of a comatose patient by a nurse. In this instance, the nurse is providing the kind of care to ensure that the patient stays alive. They address the bodily needs of the patient. On the other end of the scale is emotional care such as the kind of care provided by a therapist. In this example, the care provided revolves around the mental and emotional wellbeing of the patient as opposed to the physical bodily maintenance in the previous example. I find this scale to be very enlightening with regards to the kind of care that flight attendants provide in that they fall to neither side of the scale naturally. Rather, they shift between providing physical care to the

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body by serving food and drinks and attending to medical emergencies. However, they also shift to the emotional side of the scale by tending to the emotional needs of the passengers. An example of this might be the reassuring smile of the flight attendant during a particularly turbulent part of a flight. I understand that the use of this scale may be too simplistic, but I feel that it adds more to the understanding of care work than it takes away. There are nuances to care work that this scale does not account for.

However, the care given by the flight attendant is not provided in a vacuum. The flight attendant cannot do whatever they want. They are governed by their environment. There are two reasons that I say this: firstly, there is a group of flight attendants that work together as a team to address the needs of the passengers on board. Therefore, the kind of care of the flight attendant is intrinsically social (Fisher & Tronto, 1990: 39). It is imperative for the safety of all on board an airplane that the cabin crew are working cooperatively, even when a situation calls for a unique response (Ford et al, 2013: 499). The second reason I suggest that the care given by flight attendants is not given in a vacuum is because they are providing care as their work. This means that there is an organization behind the flight attendant that monitors and regulates the kinds of care that they can give. It will also structure how the flight attendant conducts themselves while at work to provide care because, again, they are the face of the airline.

Abel and Nelson present an argument that “bureaucratic organisations operate on the basis of a general set of rules, but the essence of caregiving is attentiveness” (1990: 12). Pols et al add to this point by arguing that care is less about being “warm and good” and more about “the handling of daily life [and] of making things work from one day to the next” (2010:17). This is the process that they refer to as “tinkering”. It is the “tinkering” and adjusting to the situation that makes for a good care giver and therefore makes for a good flight attendant.

What this means in the case of the flight attendant is complicated in that they have to follow sets of rules, such as service schedules, that determine how and when they provide care to the passengers but the “essence of caregiving” or “tinkering” mean that they react to the needs of the situation. Here you can see the tension created in the work regime. On the one hand, they are expected to care for everyone in the same way but on the other hand they are expected to provide specialized care to those who need it such as young children or elderly passengers. What is created is a sort of contradictory working environment.

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While my research question has changed and is no longer solely focussed on care work, I still consider care to be an important concept that is fundamental to understanding the work that flight attendants do. I will, however, be focussing on the importance of “tinkering” in work that has been standardized.

Furthermore, with regards to the literature on flight attendants and their labour, the seminal theory is that of emotional labour that was developed by Arlie Hochschild in her book The

Managed Heart (1983). Emotional labour is the theory that the emotions of the flight attendant

are managed for the benefit of the airline. For example: when a passenger is rude, the airline expects the flight attendant to regulate their response so that the passenger leaves feeling satisfied. Flight attendants had to be happy and a smile was seen as being their best accessory. A flight attendant was never allowed to shout or fight back. Within this thesis and chapter two in particular, I will reference the emotional labour that Hochschild theorised but I will depart from it to develop my own argument around the body and dissonance.

Alienation

I find Alienation to be a tricky concept to work with as it has many definitions and variants and therefore needs to be clarified. Alienation is often depicted as being a psychological state that is related to mental illness but in this context, I will unpack its structural nature (Seeman, 1975, 91; Yadaf & Nagle, 2012: 333). By this I mean that I am not going to go into detail regarding the psychological impact of alienation. Rather I will look into how alienation has historically been defined by Marx as the disconnect between the worker and the product of their labour (Seeman, 1971: 136). By this he means that workers are labouring to manufacture products that they will not receive adequate compensation for. They will not have any control over how it is sold, where it is sold or how much it is sold for. The labourer works hard for days and weeks to make a product that is then solely controlled by their employer. For example: in flight attendants, their sellable product is their sociality but because of how the airline how structured their workforce, flight attendants are disconnected from that sociality.

Furthermore, I will later go into detail about the kind of alienation that Seeman defines as “Isolation” (1959:788). By this definition, alienation occurs when the individual is estranged from their society. Dean expands on this by noting that social isolation can also be seen as being “a separation from the group” (1961:755). The difference them is that I feel that by

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Seeman’s definition, alienation comes from a feeling of isolation whereas by Dean’s definition, alienation comes from a physical separation. For the purposes of this thesis, I feel that both definitions are relevant but I will go into more detail in chapter 3. 2

Introduction to participants

To help the flow of this thesis, I will introduce a selection of the flight attendants that I spoke to during my research in the section that follows. Pseudonyms have been used and any details that may give away the identity of the flight attendant have been “blurred”.

In the beginning, there was Ellen.

Ellen lives with her young family in a small town about an hour outside Amsterdam. She has two children under the age of five and a loving but hard-working husband. Ellen has been flying for the past 18 years so she knows the industry better than most. She also knows what it means to be a single woman flying with no responsibilities but she also knows what it means to have two young children and a husband at home while living the intense flight attendant lifestyle. Ellen is working part time now as she wanted to spend more time at home with her children but that by no means negates the impact of continuous long-haul flying. Through Ellen’s Facebook post I was put in contact with Megan, Sam, Riley and Sadie.

Megan is in her late 40s, she has two preteen children. Before becoming a flight attendant, she worked in the tourism industry. She had a friend who was a flight attendant so she thought she would give it a try because it seemed to her to be an amazing job.

Sam is in his early thirties. In the beginning of his working life he was working in the music industry but quickly learnt that it was not what he wanted to be doing with his life. He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do so he searched the internet for weeks until he came across

2_{I want to acknowledge there has been a great deal written about gender and abuse within the work of} flight attendants. Historically only women could be flight attendants and when men came into the industry they were feminized and sexualized explains Drew Whitelegg in his book Working the Skies:

The Fast-Paced, Disorientating World of the Flight Attendant (2007). While I understand that these

themes are important, they did not explicitly or implicitly appear in my fieldwork or analysis so I will not be going into them in detail.

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an advert calling for flight attendants. He knew that the job would include night shifts and long hours which he said he was used to after working in the music industry. He has been flying for 8 years and says that he cannot imagine going back to an office job.

Riley is a young woman in her mid-twenties. She has only been flying for three years and joined the profession after a friend of her mother suggested that she would be a good flight attendant.

Sadie is also a young woman in her mid-twenties. He father worked at an airline when she was growing up so she had a sort of fascination with the industry. She went on to work as a gate agent for a few years while studying before deciding to become a flight attendant. Her husband also works in the aviation industry so there is a shared understanding that she is not at home very often. Sadie had done research during her studies so she knew about the challenges of finding participants to talk to so she put me in touch with Laurence and Pierre.

Laurence is a homosexual man in his early twenties. He used to fly full time but he has recently decided to cut back to flying part time for health reasons that he understandably did not want to talk about.

Pierre is a man in his mid-forties. He has a young child and his partner is a part-time flight attendant. He said that from when he was a small child he always wanted to be a pilot but because he wasn’t good in mathematics, that was not possible. Pierre used to work for another airline but when that airline went bankrupt he moved to this European airline. He told me that he mainly likes to fly to South America because he can speak Spanish.

Finally, there was Emma. I was put in contact with Emma by a friend of my brother. Emma is a young woman in her early twenties that has been flying for the past year and a half. At the same time as flying she is also doing her masters at a university in Amsterdam. She says that she uses her time away to do her university work. Emma became a flight attendant because the sister of her ex-boyfriend was a flight attendant who suggested that Emma would be perfect for the job.

It is clear that each of the flight attendants that I have highlighted are completely different in terms of ethnicity, age and class. They all come from different backgrounds and each had their

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own unique reason for becoming a flight attendant. They come together in that they are all long-haul flight attendants that currently work for the same European airline. A desire that brought them all together was an urge to see the world. Megan, Sam and Laurence all had floor to ceiling world maps in the living rooms of their respective apartments. Laurence also had a Starbucks mug collection with a mug from each city that he had flown to (that has a Starbucks!). The collection took over a whole shelf in his kitchen.

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1 | Standardized Structures versus Flexibility

“I’m sorry but I cannot meet today” rapidly became the standard response when I asked flight attendants if they would be able to meet for an interview. At first it frustrated me deeply: why did no one want to talk with me about their work? What was I doing wrong?

However, when I did eventually set up appointments with a few flight attendants and I asked them why so many of their colleagues were not able to talk to me, it became apparent that I was not the problem and neither was my research. The problem was that every day of a flight attendant’s life is accounted for by the airline that they work for with most of that time not being spent in their base country. Any time at home is spent with friends and family. Flight attendants are not necessarily able to choose where they will be and when.

It is for that reason that in the first part of this chapter I want to make it clear that flight attendants are subject to a highly structured and regulated workplace. I will address the structures that govern how flight attendants do their work and I will show how these structures affect the temporal experience of flight attendants.

In the second part of the chapter I will address the lack of autonomy that flight attendants have over their temporality and the ways in which airlines systematically take control away from flight attendants in order to maintain a flexible and profitable work force. In order to do this, I will use Sarah Sharma’s concept of “temporal labour” (2014:57) to explain the temporal structures and “tinkering” as used by Pols et al to explain workplace flexibility (2010: 15). I would also like to make a note that when I speak of temporal structures and flexibility I am speaking on two levels. The first is larger in scale and refers to how when and where flight attendants will be working which is scheduled and managed by a time structure called a roster. The second is smaller in scale and refers to the work of flight attendants on the plane itself

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which is controlled by a service schedule. The experience of having to remain flexible in a structured environment takes its toll, of course, but I will address that in the following chapter.

1.1. The Structures: Globally Regulated

To begin this chapter I wish to start on the global scale and discuss the roles of the three the main authorities that govern the international aviation industry as they hold a great amount of power and have a direct impact on the working experience of the flight attendant. They are the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Additional to these two international authorities, there is also the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). All of these parties are important for the aviation industry but they serve different purposes.

The ICAO is a UN special agency and works with each UN country’s own aviation authority to develop international policy around safety, the environment and air traffic control (ICAO, 2019). IATA on the other hand represents 290 airlines from 120 countries and they primarily deal with the commercial side of the industry, they are not a regulatory body. Their mission is to improve standards for “better travel” (IATA, 2019). Finally, there is EASA whose mission is to ensure the highest levels of safety and environmental protection in Europe3. The reason that I mention these three authorities is because of the role they play in unifying the aviation industry through the implementation of “standards”. What these standards do is paint the industry with a universal brush that means that all personnel working in aviation are expected to follow the same set of guidelines. I cannot think of any other industry that is managed on the same global scale. The working standards of nurses in England, for example, will be entirely different to the working standards of nurses in Argentina. Of course, this is because airlines have to fly between different countries so what works in one country has to meet the regulations of another. For instance: all planes leaving South Africa for the United States or Australia have to be sprayed with insecticide by the crew members on board after the doors of the plane have been closed. The crew members leaving South Africa have to therefore adjust their usual tasks on board so that they meet the demands of the United States and Australia4

3_{EASA. 2019. The Agency: Facts and Figures. Available:} https://www.easa.europa.eu/the-agency/the-agency. [Accessed: 5 June 2019].

4_{Jarvis, R. 2014. Here’s Why SAA Sprays the Cabin on some International Flights. Available:} http://www.travelstart.co.za/blog/airplane-cabin-spraying/. [Accessed: 16 June 2019].

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For the most part, the commercial standards that impact on the work of flight attendants are related to issues around safety and emergency procedure. Additionally, IATA has developed a guideline for dealing with unruly passengers and has been a powerful force in urging each country to implement laws that will allow for these passengers to be prosecuted5_.

I find it interesting that IATA has weighed in on such a subjective issue. I understand that an unruly passenger is a safety concern but the way in which a flight attendant addresses a passenger that is being difficult is not “one size fits all”. One passenger might be calmed by a flight attendant gently explaining the situation to them whereas another passenger might need to be physically restrained. To standardise how a flight attendant responds can therefore be seen as restricting the work that flight attendants are able to do.

Aside from commenting on the management of unruly passengers, there is no mention of how passengers should be treated from a service point of view. This is at the discretion of the airline and what sets them apart from their competitors, it is also what makes the biggest impact on the work experience of the flight attendant.

1.2. The Structures: Airline Regulated

Flight attendants spend their lives constantly on the run. Each day of their lives is dictated by rosters that tell them where and when they will be flying. Each minute within those working days is dictated by schedules telling them exactly what they have to do. Within this section of this chapter I will address three structures: The Roster, The Service Schedule and The Standby. I will therefore show the power that temporality has over flight attendant’s ability to perform their care work.

First, however, it is important to know what is expected from the flight attendant legally. According to the European Commission on Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, the maximum amount of time that a flight attendant can work per year is 2000 hours, with 900

5_{IATA. 2019. Unruly Passengers. Available:} https://www.iata.org/policy/consumer-pax-rights/Pages/unruly-passengers.aspx. [Accessed: 5 June 2019].

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hours in the air6. Interestingly, the commission states that these hours need to be spread as “practicably as possible throughout the year”. However, they do not make clear whose sense of “practicable” they are taking into account: the airline or the crew member which I would assume would look very different from each other. Additionally, flight attendants have to have 7 days off per month and 4 weeks of paid leave per year.7

At the European airline that I am focussing on, the rules are slightly different. The maximum number of hours that a flight attendant may fly is 100 hours per month but that only accounts for time that is actually spent in the plane once the doors are closed. Any time spent in briefing, walking to the gate or between flights is not accounted for or paid for. If a plane takes off late, flight attendants will not be paid for any extra time spent waiting at the gate. Additionally, according to Emma, meeting 100 hours a month is nearly impossible even when flying full time. In her first year of work she flew 695 hours – an average of 58 hours per month. While flight attendants may choose to fly less, they will then be paid less. Like with Ellen, who after the birth of her second child who has developmental issues, decided to take a few months off to look after her children. She was of course allowed to take time off but it was unpaid. In the same way, flight attendants may choose to work fewer hours has there is no minimum flying hours required but it is still work and it has to be worthwhile. The only requirement that has to be met is that flight attendants have to work on each type of plane that they are trained on, usually three, every six months at least. Time in the air is money and life is lived from moment to moment.

As Drew Whitelegg argues in his book Working the Skies, the time of the flight attendant is always short term, there is no “future” (2007, 205). The airline only releases rosters two months in advance meaning that any personal obligations that are scheduled before the roster is released are only tentative. This means that structure in a flight attendant’s personal life is jeopardised. Personal events like birthdays get pushed to the side to make way for flights. This is exactly what happened when it came time for Ellen to celebrate her eldest child’s fifth birthday – they had to celebrate on Christmas Day despite the child’s actual birthday being sometime in January because Ellen knew that she would be on standby and she had no say over

6_{European Commission. 2019. Working Conditions – Sectoral Working Time. Available:} https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=706&langId=en&intPageId=206. Accessed: 16 June 2019.

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that. She ended up being called for a flight the day before her daughter’s birthday so she was thankful that she had planned ahead by adapting her life to fit with the airline’s needs.

The first temporal structure that I will discuss is the roster which takes the form of an online calendar that shows flight attendants when they will be working as shown in Figure 1 which depicts one working week. The whole website is full of abbreviations and airport codes that can only be translated by those in the know. The roster shows the amount of time that will be spent at a work destination which can vary depending on the length of flight and the region of work. If a flight attendant is working a super long-haul flight, like to Sydney in Australia, then they will be part of a 14-day cycle with stop offs along the way.

This long cycle will mean more recovery time at home. However, working within Europe on short-haul flights is not any easier: days can consist of 04h00 wake ups followed by two or three flights per day for five days in a row with only a two-day rest thereafter. Although

short-Figure 1: A sample roster courtesy of Emma. Flight codes and base airport have been edited out for privacy.

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haul flights are not the main focus of this project, they provide a meaningful insight into the hectic life of the flight attendant. However, no matter whether a flight attendant is flying within Europe or Internationally, they have to adapt to fit the scheduled time frame of the airline and the demands of the passenger. This is what Sharma referred to as “temporal labour”. Sharma describes this kind of work as workers labouring to fit the time of others irrespective of what would be better for the worker (2014:57). In the case of flying, the roster plays the role of shaping the work of flight attendants so that they are able to meet the needs of the market. It could be seen as a mechanism of controlling the time of the flight attendant.

The service schedule on the other hand takes the form of an iPad app that lays out which kinds of service must be given on the plane. This will depend on the length of the flight: it may just be a beverage service, a beverage and food service or multiple food services on very long-haul flights. It will also determine where on the plane each flight attendant is working. In October/ November of last year, one Dutch airline made the decision to remove one flight attendant off each flight to cut costs (NLTimes.nl, 2016; PaddleYourOwnKanoo, 2018; DutchNews.nl, 2018). However, because the legislation that I mentioned earlier in the chapter said that the remaining flight attendants could not work longer hours to make up for the lost flight attendant, one service was removed from each flight. Now instead of there being separate food and beverage services, they are done together. In essence, this was supposed to make the work easier and more efficient. Emma explained that although she had just started working when the changes were made, she noticed that everyone she worked with was really fed up with the decision because although it is technically manageable to have one less crew member, if there is an emergency on board or one of the crew members gets sick, it makes the work of the remaining flight attendants much more difficult. The consequence of the decision is that although flight attendants are not working longer hours, they are working much harder. At the moment, there are still teething issues with the new service schedules that need to be ironed out before any serious conclusions can be drawn but it would be interesting to keep an eye on developments.

The service schedule can be seen as being a small-scale version of a roster. The difference is that rather than controlling the days and months of a flight attendant, the airline controls flight attendants through schedules that order their hours and minutes. In this way, the schedule is clearly a structure that ties work to time. The amount of time that a flight attendant spends actively working on a flight is linked to what the airline has decided is an appropriate “level of

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service”. The level of service depends on the class that a flight attendant is working in – first and business class offer more service and therefore more of the flight attendant’s time but the seats cost more money. In the economy or “coach” class, the service is more basic. Flight attendant’s move through the aisles with trolleys that they have packed with food that has been prepared by an airline caterer. Each flight attendant will be assigned a section of the plane that will be their working area for the duration of the flight, this is usually around 15 rows. After the flight attendant has finished packing their trolley, they will move to the front of their working area and move along the aisle offering a meal and something to drink to each passenger. The speed at which they complete this task depends on how full the plane is, how long the flight is and how responsive the passengers are. In general though, according to the flight attendants I spoke to, they usually tried to get this done as quickly as possible. The longer they took, the more agitated passengers at the back of their working section would get. Again, Sharma’s concept of temporal labour comes back. Having to complete the service quickly makes for a stressful operation for the flight attendants but a pleasant experience for the passenger. The needs of the passenger come first, placing a direct pressure on the temporal experience of the flight attendant.

Adding to the discussion around temporal labour is the issue of being on standby or on reserve which means that a flight attendant is called to stand in for a colleague if they are not able to fly. This means that a flight attendant is told that they could be flying out at any time within a specific time frame as shown on 13/14 December in Figure 1. There is no guarantee that they will be flying nor that they will be staying at home. Being on standby creates a sense of temporal uncertainty.

This reminds me of Laurence who when asked when and where he was going next he said “I have no idea! I am on standby next!”

Laurence went on to tell me about an instance not too long ago where he was on standby and told to come to the airport as he was needed on a long-haul flight. He said that he had no idea where he was going until he got to the briefing at which point he was told that he was going to Saudi Arabia. In contrast to the roster and schedule that ensure that the flight attendant is constantly running, being on standby slows the temporal experience as flight attendants are told to “wait and see” if they will be flying. Again, flight attendants have to adjust their pace to that of the airline and the market.

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During the time I spent researching flight attendants it became evident that to the airline, what is most valued is a flexible labour force that they can manipulate to meet the demands of the market. I imagine the labour force of the airline to be a bit like a giant, multifaceted Rubik’s cube: each face of a block being a flight attendant. The airline shifts the cube to meet demands from the market until there is a combination of available faces that can work together on a flight. The combination only has to do with availability of the flight attendant. Issues such as interpersonal connection or personal flight preference are completely irrelevant to how the airline shuffles their staff. The shifting of flight attendants in this nature is done in order to stay competitive within a fast-paced, ever moving and growing global market of airlines (Shalla, 2004: 350). Additionally, the consumer market is fickle with its demand, especially within the field of global travel. A destination that is popular for one season might be much less pressured the next. If an airline places its flight attendants too far in advance it could end up with a severe problem on its hands. It is therefore in the interests of the airline to maintain a flexible workforce that it can mobilise where and when it needs to (Shalla, 2004: 350).

What this means for the flight attendant, like Laurence, is that the airline’s “time” comes to command their lives with their personal life falling by the wayside.

1.3. Highly skilled and Irreplaceable

From the points that I have laid out in the first part of this chapter, I would therefore argue that the work of flight attendants can be seen as a kind flexible labour; their time and working conditions will always be uncertain and managed to benefit the airline. Where and when they will be working is at the discretion of the airline and the flight attendant will only find out a few months in advance unless they are on standby in which case they will find out on the day of flying. They are not flexible in terms of being replaceable as they are working on full or part time fixed contracts (Lippman & Scott Brown, 2016: 565). Depending on the airline, the length of their training can vary but flight attendants will always be highly skilled in their knowledge of the plane, service and emergency responses. They are trained to the point that no matter what happens on the plane, the bodily knowledge that they have will take over, even in moments when there is no time to think. They are also retrained and have to take exams every year to ensure that their knowledge is up to date.

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It is for these reasons that an airline cannot simply hire anyone off the street to work as a flight attendant. There is too much skill required to do the job. Flight attendants do so much more than what meets the eye. At 42 000ft, any emergency that occurs on a plane is the responsibility of the flight attendant: from sick babies, to heart attacks to snakes – there is no limit to what flight attendants have to deal with. A story that Emma told me stands out: she was on a very long-haul flight and there was a sick baby. The baby’s mother was doing everything in her power to sooth the young child but she was failing. Emma said that as soon as she became aware of the situation moving beyond the mother’s control, she jumped in to help. Within a few moments a more senior flight attendant had been brought in to help along with a doctor that was on the plane. Emma told me that it was over before it had even begun. Everyone was okay in the end.

Emma’s story perfectly captures the importance of rigorous training and embodied knowledge. As Barth points out: “knowledge is dependent on that person’s own individual experience” (2002: 2). While I agree with this statement to some extent; each person as an individual has their own ways of viewing the world and how to act in it depending on where they grew up, who they were raised by and their values. However, in the case of the flight attendant and the work that they are supposed to do, the training overrides the personal knowledge that a person has of a situation. Again, I would argue that this is a way in which airlines implement standardization. Even where a flight attendant is supposed to respond creatively and adapt to the situation at hand, they have to pull from a set of responses that the airline has predetermined as being “correct”. I suspect that working in these conditions could be very stressful but also provide a degree of comfort. It could be stressful if there is no action that is appropriate but it could also be comforting like in the situation the Emma described: the knowledge that she had learnt and embodied through training kept the situation under control, stopping it from escalating.

Building on this argument, Cohen presents the view that knowledge can only be reproduced within the same context in which it was initially encoded (2010, S195). It is for this reason that the training of flight attendants takes place in grounded airplanes with a series of mock emergencies. I am sure that at some point in her training Emma would have been taught how to deal with a sick passenger. The Flight Attendant Career Connection Facebook group has become a sort of online home for people wanting to become flight attendants or in the process

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of training to become one. Each day the page is flooded with posts asking about what to expect from training and each day there are comments relaying how exhausting the training sessions are, not because they are necessarily very physical but because the days are long and the exercises are repetitive so that any knowledge learnt becomes deeply engrained in the body and mind of the flight attendant. Therefore, a temporary flight attendant without this specific type of knowledge could not have acted in the same way that Emma acted with the ill baby.

The result is a highly skilled permanent work force that is expected to be able to provide the same level of flexibility as a temporary one. The airline has full control over which flight attendant flies where and when. In a way flight attendants become chess pieces that are moved around the board with the aim of staying competitive. Those chess pieces have no control over where they are being moved. Much like how EP Thompson describes the flexible work of manufacturing employees whose days are lengthened or shortened by the employer according to the amount of produce that they have to make, the airline adjusts the working hours of flight attendants according to the demand of the market (1967:71).

1.4. Systematic Degradation and Creation of Autonomy

Despite being highly skilled, working within a hectic temporal structure, undoubtedly necessary for every airline (a flight with passengers may not go ahead without flight attendants on board) flight attendants have a surprisingly low amount of autonomy over their time. To add to this, the changes in temporal structures that airlines have made in order to stay competitive have worsened the working conditions of the flight attendant and jeopardised any autonomy that they may have (Shalla, 2004: 350).

Within the flight itself, service schedules are laid out by the airline and it is expected that flight attendants will follow it minute for minute but in reality, that is not the case. As a team, the cabin crew may adjust their service to the conditions on the plane. For example: the service that they provide on a very busy plane may differ slightly from the service that they would give on an almost empty plane. The airline also expects this from their flight attendants. Here the contradiction in expectations becomes evident: flight attendants are expected to rigorously follow a schedule but they are also expected to adjust to the specifics demanded from each individual flight. Adjusting to the specific situation at hand, especially in the work of care, is

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what Pols et al refer to as “tinkering” (2010: 15). To tinker is often seen as being a bad thing. It can mean to fix something that is not broken but in the case of care work, such as that of a flight attendant, to tinker is seen as being a professional duty to adjust to each situation on its own terms (Lane, 2017:2). To tinker means that there is an issue that needs to be dealt with but the flight attendant is aware that what will work for one problem will not work for another so they adjust their actions to be appropriate. For example: Pierre told me a story about how he was on a flight that was delayed in the air and sent on a go around. He could tell that some his passengers were getting nervous so he went to give water to anyone that wanted some. Nowhere in the service does it say that he has to do this but he improvised and did what he thought would be best for the passengers. I will provide more examples of how flight attendants tinker in chapter 2 and chapter 3.

With regard to monthly rosters, there is almost no allowance for autonomy. Each flight attendant has to follow a monthly roster and there is no room for deviation within that. The roster is online and confirms the flights that each flight attendant will be working about two months in advance. They may either let the system choose flights for them or they can choose specific flights. There is a catch however: for each flight that a flight attendant chooses, a point will be added to their name. For each point that is added, the chances that they will get their specific flight gets less. What results is flight attendants “saving up” their points for the “really good flights”. In the past flight attendants could fly at a discounted price if there were open seats on a plane but with the increase in frequent flyers there is a decrease in available seats for flight attendants. What results is flight attendants choosing to work specific flights instead of hopefully getting a seat on the plane.

As I have mentioned, the system does not take things like personal preference or previous destination into account which flight attendants might do if they had the choice. For example: some flight attendants, like Ellen, say that they prefer to fly east because they find that the jetlag is more manageable for them in those time zones. On top of that, if a flight attendant has flown west, they may choose not to immediately fly east as it will take a greater toll on their body. The one exception to the point system is that flight attendants are allowed to choose the region that they wish to fly to “for free”. However, the difference between flying to New York or Los Angeles is enormous and flight attendants do have preferences for certain flights. This is not only because of the time difference and jet lag but also because of the kinds of passengers. Emma, Ellen and Sam all mentioned to me that there were specific flights that, if they had the

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choice, they would not work on. Cape Town, for instance, is a flight that many flight attendants at this European airline do not enjoy working on board of because often the passengers are difficult and entitled. Other flights, such as to South America, are much easier because the passengers are kind and appreciative. What this example shows is that flight attendants are able to “tinker” and improve their flying experience to some extent, like not immediately flying west after flying east, but they still do not have full control over the reality of their work.

What has resulted is that flight attendants are effectively punished by the system when they try to take control for their own time as, on the whole, flexibility is more valued than autonomy.

1.5. Chapter Conclusion

On the one hand, flight attendants are expected to follow the temporal structure of the airline by sticking to rosters, schedules and periods of standby, all of which are highly standardised. These temporal structures do not necessarily take the time of the flight attendant into account as they have all been developed to cater to a fickle and demanding consumer market. What results is flight attendants having to adjust their working time to fit the airline’s time. However, at the same time as being expected to fit into the rigid temporal structures, flight attendants are supposed to be flexible and adjust their work to each situation that they might find themselves in. The result of this is a paradox in which flight attendants have to remain flexible within a standardised industry. To build on this, in the next chapter I will explore the impact that working in such a paradox has on the body of the flight attendant.

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2 | Bodily Feel versus Appearance

It was a cold and rainy day in the middle of March in Northern Europe. I had arranged to meet with Pierre after he landed from a long-haul flight from South America. I know that very long-haul flights such as this one can land early so I got to the airport half an hour before his scheduled landing but as luck would have it, because of the inclement weather and a closed runway at the airport, Pierre’s plane was put into a holding pattern and ended up landing an hour late. This meant that Pierre had been working in the cabin for 12 hours and he would be facing a 7-hour jetlag. I had never met Pierre so I wasn’t sure what to expect but I more or less thought that he would look tired and a bit “shabby” after having flown for such a long time. That was not the case. Instead I was greeted by a well-groomed and smart looking Pierre. I offered to buy him a cup of coffee, as I did with all of my participants, which he gladly accepted. As we sat and talked with one another, he repeatedly apologised for being tired. If he had not told me, I would never have noticed. It was only when I looked closer and really paid attention that I was able to see that his eyes were red and very slightly glazed over with exhaustion. If I had been on his plane or saw him walking through the airport, I would assume that he was wide awake and on his way to work. He is presenting himself as being healthy and alert when in reality he feels tired and worn down. How can someone who says that they are drained still look so good? And what is the significance of it?

In this chapter I will show how the structures and lack of autonomy over one’s time that I unpacked in the previous chapter have an impact on the body of the long-haul flight attendant. I will first discuss the reality of the bodily experience and how it is systematically deconstructed by the airline structures so that it can then be reconstructed into performing with the “correct”

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technique. I will then address the airlines expectation of what the perfect flight attendant should look like. Furthermore, I will address how historically, the management of the appearance of the flight attendant has always and will always be a priority for airlines, despite decisions that appear to encourage freedom over one’s own body. I will show how there is a clash between the experience of the body and the expected appearance of the flight attendant that creates a new kind of dissonance that could potentially provide a contemporary take on the infamous emotional labour phenomenon that was theorised by Hochschild (1983). Finally, I will show how flight attendants tinker in an attempt to manage this bodily dissonance.

2.1. The Reality of the Body

The issue of the body has for a long time been an interest to anthropologists because of its significance as a site of power struggles. Who has control over the body of the flight attendant shows where the power lies. The social body, body and space, and bodily politics have all been studied for many years and highlight the importance of understanding the human body within its context (Van Wolputte, 2004: 252-254).Within the first section of this chapter I will unpack the impact that relentless long-haul flying has on the physical body of the flight attendant. To do this I will first address the work of Csordas (1990) and Mauss (1992), both of whom have written on the impact that practise has on the creation and management of the body. In the case of flight attendants “practise” refers to the adherence to the schedules and rosters in long-haul flying.

Csordas argues that it is through practise that the body is created (1990: 7). In the case of the flight attendant, it is through the following of rosters and schedules that the body becomes worn down and is therefore brought to life. It can be said that in this situation, creation of the body comes from the destruction of it. Take the case of Ellen for example:

Ellen told me that years of long haul flying have taken their toll. She now has a rule that for the whole day before she leaves for a flight and the whole day after she returns, she will not see anyone or do anything. They are personal days for recovery. The same goes for while she is away, where in the past she loved flying to new destinations because she could see new parts of the world. When she got to the destination she would go out and explore all the new and exciting things. Going to the “crew drinks” after landing was a must but that is no longer the

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case because of how she feels that her work has been intensified since the she started flying. Ellen says that she feels that the impact on her body is greater than ever before, despite flying less. Now when she gets to the destination, the first thing she does is have some food and a shower and then she goes to sleep. She may choose to lie next to the pool for a while if there is one or perhaps go shopping if she is in America. Being away from home means sleeping and recovering from the flight out so that she can do her best possible work on the flight back. In this case, it becomes clear that Ellen’s body is only made visible because it is tired. In the same way in which invisible infrastructure is only noticed when it is broken, the body of the flight attendant only becomes clear when it is “broken” (Star, 1999: 382). For example: most passengers would only really take notice of the way in which a service works when something has gone wrong. Perhaps the flight attendant is too tired or weak to pull the trolley up the aisle with ease, here the invisible and usually seamless service becomes visible because of the tired body and in turn, impacts on the flight experience of passenger.

This was not unique to Ellen either - Megan and Pierre are also in their mid-forties and have been flying since they were in their early twenties. They have flown for half of their lives and it has taken its toll. Both of them told me that jet lag is not something that you can get used to.

Of course, it is not only flight attendants that have been working for years that feel the impact of long haul flying. Constantly being on your feet while working in the sky is physically exhausting and physical ailments such as musculoskeletal pain, fatigue and stress are not uncommon, especially in the case of long-haul or trans-meridian flights (Ono et al, 1991: 163; Sonnentag & Natter, 2004: 367; Heuven & Bakker, 2003:93; Lee et al, 2008: 499; McNeely et al, 2018: 4). Riley, for example, told me a few times about how her back gets sore after working long hours and Emma mentioned that it is not uncommon for her to feel a crippling sense of exhaustion after working. Both Riley and Emma are young women who would not face these bodily issues if they were not long-haul flight attendants.

In an attempt to prevent flight attendants becoming overworked or tired while working, flight attendants are legally mandated to rest every few hours (EASA, 2016:21). For this reason, some types of aircraft, usually the larger ones, have overhead crew rest areas where flight attendants can go and lie down between services. This is especially useful on the extremely long-haul flights where it could be four or five hours between the services. But going to lie down to rest or sleep is not always what flight attendants think is best for their body and work. Take Riley