Like I mentioned in my last post, Fly-Girls, a flight attendant docu-series airing soon, it’s rarely ever a good thing when flight attendants are in the news…
It happened a few seconds after the Captain on my flight from Miami to New York introduced himself and then asked if I had brewed a pot of coffee. I had, in fact. I always do whenever I’m working the galley. I poured him a cup and told him my name as we boarded a full flight on a 757.
After taking a sip, he whipped off his hat and hung it on a hook against the back of the cockpit door. Nonchalantly he said, “Did you hear about the bomb threat today?”
Immediately I stopped counting meals, chicken with rice and cheese tortellini, and spun around to face him. “What happened?”
“A flight attendant found a note in the lavatory. It said there was a bomb on board the flight.” And with that he was gone, too busy chatting away with a mechanic who had stepped into the cockpit.
Of course the first thing that came to mind when the pilot uttered those two oh-so-innocent words, “flight attendant”, was oh no, please don’t let it be a flight attendant who wrote the note. The next thing I thought was, I wonder if the crew was on reserve.
The only reason I suspected the crew was because something similar had happened a few years back. Even in that case, so many years ago, when I heard on the news that the flight attendant under investigation had been on reserve when she left a note in the lav, I had to laugh. Just because being on reserve does make one a little bit crazy. At times. But usually not that crazy, not bomb writing crazing of course!
When I mentioned to a friend, and lawyer, what had happened on the American Airlines flight from Boston to Miami, as well as whom I hoped the suspects would not turn out to be, he said, “Tell me, how does ‘we will get fired’ ‘we will go to prison’ get left out of the thought process before writing that kind of note?”
Good question.
Then I reminded him, as well as myself, that the flight attendants in question are innocent until proven guilty.
Two days later I am now unhappy to report that what I had prayed would not be the case seems to be kinda-sorta happening. The crew is now officially under investigation. The details are as follows…
- A flight attendant found a message scrawled on the bathroom cabinet that read, “Bomb on board – Boston-Miami”
- The aircraft was evacuated and luggage was searched by a bomb sniffing dog at an isolated area at Logan Airport. No bomb was found
- FBI interrogated two crew members; a male and female flight attendant
- Passengers were transferred to another flight and continued on to Miami
And here’s the kicker, the same two flight attendants under investigation for this bomb threat were on another flight from Miami to Boston just two weeks ago when a similar bomb threat was found. I kid you not.
Again, innocent until proven guilty.
But if these two are guilty, just how dumb are they to do it (period) on two different flights they’re crewing – two weeks apart! Do you think maybe, just maybe, they might be dating? I mean how else do two people get involved in something like this? Or do you think they’re roommates? Best friends? Or two disgruntled coworkers who just so happened to hold the same line last month? Seriously, what do you think?
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Photo courtesy of Purplemattfish