Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet

by Heather Poole

In the spirit of books like "Waiter Rant" and "Kitchen Confidential", blogger and flight attendant Heather Poole gives the inside scoop on how to be the most hated passenger on the plane, whether passionate affairs with pilots are really as frequent as you'd think, what it's like flying in a post-9/11 world, and everything else passengers never knew. Readers will learn what it's like to live in a flight attendant crashpad in Crew Gardens, Queens, where the bedrooms are crammed with bunkbeds and the neighbors get the wrong idea about why attractive women are coming and going at all hours. They'll find out why it's a bad idea to fall for pilots, and - in Heather's case, at least-why it can be a good idea to fall for business class passengers. They'll watch passengers and coworkers alike get escorted off the planes by police, and learn insider secrets on starting salaries, FA schedules, celebrity misbehavior, and much more. Packed with sometimes unbelievable and always hilarious stories, "Cruising Attitude" intermingles the best of galley gossip with Heather's own experiences of life in the sky.

• ISBN10: 0061986461
• ISBN13: 9780061986468
• Publish Date: 20 April 2012 (first published 6 March 2012)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Inc
• Imprint: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 272
• Language: English

Reviews

[ibeforem]

For someone who “doesn’t read memoirs”, I’ve picked up more than a few this year. This one drew my eye because I enjoy flying, and had absolutely no idea what a flight attendant’s job was like.

After finishing the book, I’m fairly certain that I would never want to be a flight attendant. I never would have imagined a super-strict book camp, or the fact that for a long time, an attendant makes so little money they are lucky if they can afford to rent a room of their own, let alone an entire apartment. And we’re not talking about the 70s or the 80s here — when Poole became a flight attendant in 1995 she made $18,000. That number is even lower now, because attendants took a pay cut following 9/11.

And it was the lifestyle that I found most intriguing about this book. We also get plenty of stories of crazy behavior, by both passengers and crew, but most of them are nothing we haven’t already imagined for ourselves. The real meat is the life of the flight attendant. She does a pretty good job of explaining the system, but I’m still not sure I completely understand it. The concept of being “on reserve” is ridiculously complicated. Being a commuting flight attendant also seems a bit complex.

Overall, I found this to be not only interesting but very entertaining. Poole has a nice easy tone, and she seems like someone who would be fun to hang out with. The one pick I have about the book is that I think it could have been a little better organized. She goes off on a lot of tangents. Entertaining as they are, I think sometimes the reader can lose the theme of the chapter.

If you like humorous memoirs, this is definitely one to pick up. I know I’ll never look at a flight attendant quite the same way again.