Elliott Neal Hester

When a passenger call light blinks on, I place the newspaper on the adjacent seat and get up to answer the call. The last six rows of seats are empty, save for one male passenger from Arizona. He asks for another Budweiser. When I return, I ask what brings him to Colombia. He hesitates. His eyes flicker suspiciously as if he were a stockbroker deciding on whether to give insider information to a stranger. Suddenly, he breaks into a big smile. “I’m going to get married,” he says. He whips out a photograph of his fiancie. She lives in Cali and is drop-dead gorgeous. I stare at the photo a couple of seconds longer than I should. Judging by the number of attractive local women on the airplane, however, it seems that beauty is abundant in Colombia’s third largest city. The women sitting in 14-C,16-A, 21-A, 21-E, 22-B & C, and 25-D, E, & F could easily be finalists in the Miss Universe Pageant.

My Lonely Planet guide to South America claims that Cali has the most beautiful women in Colombia, and Colombia has the most beautiful women in all of South America. I take another look at the photograph and agree with LP’s assessment. Las calenas, they are called. After another sip of beer, Mr. Arizona tells how he and his senorita hooked up.

The fiancie, it seems, had registered with an agencia matrimonial, or marriage agency. The same agency to which Mr. Arizona belongs. He tells me that Cali is rife with similar organizations. He heard about marriage agencies on the Internet. “You fly down, look through a book of photos, pick the woman [or women] you want to meet and the agency arranges an introduction,” he says. “The rest is left up to you.” Mr. Arizona goes on to tell me that some women are looking for a green card, others are looking for excitement. Most are hoping to find true love. He confesses that on a previous trip, he fell head over heels in love with his very first date. But after subsequent meetings she confessed her true feelings. “She told me I was too short.”

I wish him luck with his marriage, then walk toward the aft galley and begin a conversation with a passenger from Oklahoma. He is not traveling to Cali to meet women. He is coming for sport. As it turns out, he is a wrestling coach for the U.S. Olympic team. The Pan American Games are being held here in a few days, and a few spots remain open on the U.S. freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling teams. “The team to beat is Iran,” he says, in a soft-spoken Oklahoman twang.

“Iran?” I say.

“Iran. They’ve got one of the best wrestling programs in the world.”

A few minutes before landing, I walk through the cabin to do a seat belt check. The man seated in 10-C does not have his seat belt fastened. I suggest that he do so, but he doesn’t respond. I look at his face more closely and notice that his eyes are wet. I ask if he is OK and he shakes his head. No. He is definitely not OK. I drop to one knee and listen to his story. As it turns out, he is traveling to Cali for the funeral of a friend. His friend, a young Colombian man, was driving a Ford Explorer near the better-watch-your-ass zone on the outskirts of the city. He was killed for his automobile by leftists rebels or right-wing militias or members of a drug cartel. Maybe it was an independent car-jacker. Nobody knows for sure. The funeral is tomorrow. The murder, he says, will probably go unsolved.

I squeeze his shoulder and look directly into his eyes. He really appreciates the fact that I am taking the time to listen. He does not say this, but I can tell by the sad smile that struggles beneath his moistening cheeks.

While walking down the aisle toward my jump seat, I remember an incident that occurred on a flight from St. Thomas to Miami. It happened a couple of days after the island had been battered by a killer hurricane. On board was an American woman traveling with her young daughter. Their clothes were dirty, their blonde hair greasy and unkempt. But the strangest thing was that they had no carry-on luggage — not even a purse between them. After take-off, the woman began to sob uncontrollably. I sat in the empty seat beside her and put an arm around her shoulder. She cried non-stop for nearly 15 minutes, then regained composure long enough to tell her story. As it turns out, her home was completely destroyed. She had no insurance. No job. No money. No belongings, save for the clothes on her back. Because water was scarce on the ravaged island, she and her daughter hadn’t bathed in three days. She apologized for the smell. I told her not to worry about it. They were flying to Connecticut “to live in my mother’s tiny living room,” she said. This revelation opened the floodgates once more. She let loose the miserable gut-clenching cry of a woman whose life had been completely destroyed. I held her for the entire two-and-a-half-hour flight, abandoning my role in the meal service without protest from an understanding crew.

The memory fades as I strap into my jump seat in the rear of our Boeing 757.

As the aircraft descends into Cali, something goes wrong. Suddenly, the aircraft pulls up. Or so it seems. There is a powerful thrust from the engines, a noticeable trembling of the fuselage. I trade a glance with my colleague who is seated across the galley. “Are we aborting landing?” he asks, in a voice much calmer than one would expect. I peer out the tiny galley window, unable to tell for sure. “Dunno,” I say.

We are both a little nervous, and for good reason. It was here, on Dec. 20, 1995, that an American Airlines 757 headed down a valley toward the Cali airport, veered off course and crashed into a mountain. Four people survived; 159 did not. Neither of us mentions this. Working flight attendants rarely discuss airplane disasters. Especially while the plane they’re on is vectoring toward a landing strip. I close my eyes and try not to think of the mountains, focusing my attention instead on the beautiful images flickering on the dark screen of my eyelids: 14-C,16-A, 21-A, 21-E, 22-B & C, and 25-D, E, & F.

When the gear wheels kiss the runway I am relieved. I do not mention this to my colleague. If he is relieved, he does not mention it to me. (Later, the captain gives a very rational, albeit technical explanation about our approach. It was routine. “No, the landing was not aborted,” he adds.) We stand at the back of the plane in silence, watching as passengers deplane. There is a knock on the right-hand galley door. Airline security. A small uniformed woman enters the aircraft and asks if I locked the liquor carts. Of course I locked the liquor carts. I nod my head, she smiles and turns to frisk a catering representative who enters the plane behind her.

For obvious reasons, security is a huge issue in Colombia. Tomorrow morning, when we arrive at the Cali airport for our return flight to Miami, we will pass through three security checkpoints. At the second checkpoint all passengers are frisked by hand. Sometimes the crew is frisked, sometimes we are not. Carry-on items are subject to inspection at all three checkpoints. The last time I was here, two security officers at the first checkpoint were playing with an automatic hand gun. After my bag passed through the X-ray machine, I reached down to grab it. I noticed then that the security officer was holding a gun in his outstretched hand. He pulled back on the slide, pulled the trigger several times, and nodded approvingly to his comrade. On a previous pass through the first security checkpoint, a different officer toyed with a nickel-plated revolver. He spun the chamber once and smiled at his co-worker, oblivious to the widening eyes of me and my crew.

This is what we’ll go through tomorrow morning (minus the gun play, perhaps), exactly ten hours from now. At present, the entire crew — four flight attendants and two pilots — are waiting for me in the jet bridge. I am the last to leave the aircraft. Together, we roll our crew bags down the jet bridge and past the immigration checkpoint. There, in a long queue of passengers, I notice familiar faces: the groom from Arizona, the Olympic wrestling coach, the grieving friend, the lovely occupants of 14-C,16-A, 21-A, 21-E, 22-B & C, and 25-D, E, & F. I wave to all of them as we skirt immigration. They all wave back and smile.

Outside the airport, a mob of maybe 200 people are waiting to greet their loved ones. The faces are black, white, brown, olive — the Cali region, according to my guidebook, is one of the more ethnically diverse areas of Colombia. The crowd is like a solid, multi-hued wall. We push through a crack in the surface, dragging our roll-aboards over shuffling feet that seem oblivious to the parade of tiny wheels. Above the crowd, I see the curved slope of our crew van. The driver sees us and gives a quick wave. One by one, he places our bags in the van’s rear compartment. We pile in through the side door, but when the driver turns the key in the ignition, the engine fails to start. He tries again and again without success. Suddenly, the captain loses it. “This is the third damned time this has happened this month,” he cries. Because the driver doesn’t speak English, he fails to respond. The Spanish-speaking flight attendant chooses not to relay the captain’s message.

After a few minutes, we crawl out of the van. The captain rushes into the airport, toward company operations, to arrange secondary transport to the hotel. While he is gone, I mention that in 14 years of flying, I can’t recall a single instance when the crew van has broken down: not in Buenos Aires, Madrid or the Dominican Republic. Not in Brussels, St. Martin, Mexico City, Ecuador, Venezuela, Jamaica, Boise or anywhere else. “We take van transport for granted,” I say. The crew shares my sentiments. And so does the crew van, apparently. As if by magic, the engine turns over and roars.

When the captain returns, we pile into the van and pull away from the curb. He makes a few abrasive comments to the driver and tells the Spanish-speaking flight attendant to translate. Patricia, an English-speaking flight attendant, interrupts. “Why don’t you learn Spanish and tell him yourself,” she says. Patricia and the captain begin to argue. “He needs to get a new van,” the captain exclaims. “How do you think passengers would like it if our airplane engines failed to start?”

“It happens at least once every day,” I say. The Captain ignores my comment.

For about five seconds, a peaceful silence settles inside the van. As if prompted by some unheard question, the captain barks at Patricia. Seems he didn’t get a chance to make his point. Patricia barks back. They go back and forth, back and forth, yelling at each other like an old married couple. The other crew members are quiet. I look out the window, watching a South American moon play peek-a-boo from behind a drifting veil of clouds.

In less than 30 minutes we are in downtown Cali. There are a few glittering high-rise office buildings here, and lots of neon lights. But the surrounding area is rife with stubby, one-story buildings that are beaten and shabby. While waiting for the green light, just one block away from the hotel, we hear a loud popping noise. This is followed by a five-second hiss. It’s the hose to the air conditioning unit, the driver says. He’ll have to fix it before picking us up tomorrow morning. And as we pull into the driveway of the Intercontinental Hotel, a palace fit for kings and queens, the captain starts bitching again. Apparently, the Cali Intercontinental does not receive the satellite television channels he prefers.

The downside to this wonderful perk is the risk of being bumped from the flight. When this happens (and it happens quite often) we’re forced to stand by for the next flight. And maybe the next. By the time we’re turned away from the last flight of the day, we are frazzled, bitter and worn. Then we return to the airport the following day to repeat the nonrevenue-passenger process.

Because my sister was to be married in Barcelona, Spain, on Oct. 8, I couldn’t take the chance of being bumped from my Oct. 6 flight from New York. Unless her matrimonial record ends up like Elizabeth Taylor’s, this wedding would be a once-in-a-lifetime event. Besides, the wedding rings were tucked in the pocket of my jeans. If I failed to show up, the ceremony would be ruined. I handed my credit card to a travel agent for the first time in 15 years. I actually winced when she snatched it.

The full-fare, coach-class, round-trip ticket from New York to Barcelona cost $415. As I wheeled my carry-on toward the Iberia Airlines check-in counter at JFK Airport, I experienced a traveler’s epiphany. No longer was I the lowly airline employee hoping for an empty seat. Suddenly I realized that by forking over a large sum of cash, I was one of them — a full-fare passenger, armed with the right to bitch and moan, able to demand service with a tantrum.

Almost immediately, I was pounced upon by a roaming customer service representative. “You’re going to have to check that bag,” she said as I rolled up behind the zigzag procession of passengers at the ticket counter.

“Excuse me?”

“Your bag,” she said, pointing to my one and only carry-on. “It’s too big; you’re going to have to check it.”

I looked down at my regulation Travel Pro 22-by-14-by-9-inch airline-issue roll-aboard. It’s the same black bag I’ve wheeled onto thousands of airplanes, the same piece of luggage that easily fits in the overhead bin of the Boeing 767 aircraft I was about to board. My Travel Pro could be the poster bag for carry-on propriety.

“Ahhhh … it’s not too big,” I assured her, smiling.

“Yes it is,” she said.

“No it’s not.”

“Yes. It. Is.” Her words came in a harsh staccato burst that reminded me of childhood arguments with my mother. She might as well have been telling me it was time for bed.

I understand the difficulty of spending eight hours on your feet, regurgitating airline policy upon an often infuriating and infuriated public. But the rep had been off base with her comment. I stared in disbelief at the airline employee, my colleague. Instead of acquiescing as I would normally have done while traveling on an employee pass, I decided to stand my ground. I was a legitimate full-fare passenger, after all. How dare she infringe upon my rights.

“I’m sorry, there seems to be some confusion,” I said. “My carry-on is well within the limits of airline policy. It fits in all the overhead bins that run along each side of the 767 cabin. It fits in the overhead bins above the center seats, too.”

“It’s a full flight,” she barked. “It’s too big.”

This is why so many passengers are pissed off by the time they finally make it to the airplane. Many times I’ve manned the aircraft door, greeting passengers with a “Welcome aboard” and a smile, only to have them growl like wounded lions.

“Look,” I said, exasperated. “The bag fits.”

She crossed her arms, looked me up and down and then frowned. “We’ll see,” she said.

If the customer service representative was the Wicked Witch of the North, the ticket agent was Mother Teresa. She welcomed me with a genuine smile that instantly put me at peace. “Sure, your bag can be accommodated in the overhead bin,” she said, while issuing my boarding pass. “Have a nice flight.” She meant it, too — I could tell by the song in her voice.

But when I strolled away from the ticket counter, carry-on in tow, I felt twin laser beams boring into my back. I spun around, fast enough to catch the customer service agent averting her eyes. She was going to get me. I could feel it.

When I boarded the flight 45 minutes later, guess who was standing at the departure gate? In my mind’s eye I saw the customer service rep snatch my Travel Pro and try to run away. In reality, I handed my boarding pass to the flight attendant and, just before entering the jetway, I locked eyes with the rep. She sort of shrugged her shoulders, no longer interested in me and my bag.

The plane was packed. I was seated in an aisle seat, near the middle of coach. As the final passengers trickled into the cabin, passengers in my area began to focus on four empty seats. These were crew rest seats, reserved for flight attendants during long-haul trips such as this. After the service, the attendants are allowed to take turns resting. At this time they are temporarily off duty. Most passengers don’t know this, of course — before takeoff, they look at four empty seats and see visions of transatlantic comfort.

The man in front of me made a break for one. He was a big guy and could no doubt use the extra room. But as soon as he plopped into the crew seat, a flight attendant immediately asked him to move. I could hear her explaining the policy. I could hear him saying it was ridiculous. This is an ongoing battle between passengers and flight attendants. “Just let me sit here until you guys finish the service,” passengers will say. If the attendants make the mistake of allowing a passenger to sit in the seat, they open a can of worms that can never be closed. When the first attendants come to rest, the passenger is either asleep or so comfortable that he’ll vacate the seat only after being threatened by a visit from the captain. Believe it; this has happened to me more than once.

Moments after the big guy retreated to his original seat, four last-minute passengers hustled on board. Judging by the familiar way they spoke with cabin crew, I knew they were airline employees. But the big guy didn’t know that. When the four passengers sat in each of the four crew seats, the big guy went ballistic. He began shouting at the flight attendants. The passengers are non-revenue employees, one flight attendant told him. “When the crew rests begin, they will have to stand up in the back.”

Taking great interest in this comedy of errors was the woman sitting across the aisle from me. As a matter of fact, she seemed to take great interest in just about everything. The boarding music (“inane”), the cabin interior (“unappealing”), even Spain itself (“a marvelous little country,” which no one knew more about than she). The poor Spanish girl wedged into the window seat was forced to listen to this woman’s pontifications through takeoff, the cocktail, dinner and coffee services and the beginning of the in-flight movie. Anyone sitting near ground zero was bombarded by her ramblings about Spanish museums and Antoni Gaudí architecture. She spoke with constant, deafening pretentiousness. Then suddenly, after finishing a second can of beer, the woman fell fast asleep. Bam! She was out. It was as if someone had knocked her unconscious — exactly what I had felt like doing.

Mouth open, legs spread as wide as Mike Piazza waiting for a fastball, the woman’s head lolled on her neck as if it weighed 100 pounds. In the next instant, her head fell onto the shoulder of her Spanish seatmate. Unable to pry the snoring woman from her shoulder, the Spanish woman pressed the flight attendant call light. They readjusted her limp body, reclined the seat and everybody laughed.

Everyone but me. It was at this time that the wedding rings went missing. Two 18-karat gold bands, each in its own tiny case, had been in the right, front pocket of my jeans. Every few minutes I would pat the pocket just so I’d know they were still there. During the last pat-down, I freaked. The rings were gone.

Visions of an apocalyptic wedding danced in my head. Months earlier, when I’d asked what she’d like as a wedding present, my sister — an unconventional woman to say the least — asked me to buy the wedding rings. Bursting with pride, I went to several jewelers, searching for just the right bands. Not only did my sister trust my taste in jewelry, she trusted me to fly across the Atlantic and show up with the goods less than 48 hours before she would recite her vows. Now she was going to murder me.

After five or six minutes of cardiac arrest, however, I found the precious metals. The boxes were wedged between the seat cushions.

The wedding went off perfectly. My sister and her new husband were happy with their rings. But two days after the reception, after taking a cab to Barcelona’s airport to catch my flight home, a funny thing happened.

If you have time to listen, I’ll tell you about it sometime.

I’ve been forced to serve passengers who ate like pigs and smelled like pigs, who dressed, waddled and snorted like pigs. I’ve waited on pig families. I’ve tried to silence pig tour groups. But like most flight attendants, I can’t claim to have ever been on an airplane with a real pig — the oink, oink, roll-in-the-mud, soon-to-be-bacon variety.

Unfortunately, some of my colleagues at US Airways can no longer make this claim. On Oct. 17, aboard a Boeing 757 en route to Seattle from Philadelphia, passengers were startled to see a pig in first class. That’s right: a pig, in the first-class cabin of a commercial jet. Reports claimed the beast weighed as much as 250 pounds.

US Airways spokesman Dave Castleveter verified the incident. “I can and will confirm that we did transport, in the cabin of our aircraft, a large animal, a pig.” “One thing is certain,” he said, “it will never happen again.”

Why on earth was a pig allowed to board an airplane?

According to a USA Today report, a mother and daughter had telephoned ahead to request special consideration on the flight. They mentioned something about a doctor’s note and said they’d be flying with a 13-pound “service” animal. Instead, they showed up at the gate with a porker that weighed as much as a middle linebacker.

Service animals, like seeing-eye dogs for instance, are allowed to fly with their owners. Large, nonservice animals are forced to fly in the aircraft’s pressurized cargo compartment. Small animals (cats, rabbits, dogs, etc.) can ride in the passenger cabin, but only if owners keep the pets in a kennel that fits under the seat.

Service animals do not bark. They don’t oink. They don’t complain about the in-flight movie. They sit quietly at the feet of the only human being they care about. Flight attendants will tell you that service animals are some of the best passengers they could ever hope to have.

It’s still not clear what kind of “service” the pig was intended to provide for its owner.

Maybe the woman had been born and raised on a farm. Maybe she was emotionally attached to the animal. Leaving it behind might have created “separation anxiety.” Without the faithful pet beside her, perhaps the distraught passenger would have flown into a fit of air rage.

Whatever the excuses, it’s difficult to understand why a gate agent allowed the pig to board the plane — and in the first-class section, no less.

The animal settled into the space between 1A and 1C — directly in front of its two human escorts. The thing was so big, according to the report, that one end of its body protruded into the aisle. This could have been the crew’s golden opportunity to eject the animal. Airline passengers are constantly told to keep carry-on items out of the aisle, by mandate of the Federal Aviation Administration. No portion of the aisle can be blocked during takeoff, during landing or while the plane is taxiing from the gate.

Nevertheless, the pig stayed put. To its credit, the creature remained quiet for most of the six-hour flight. There it lay, sleeping wedged against the bulkhead, soaking up the high-priced ambience of first class. But when the plane landed in Seattle, the pig went hog-wild.

According to published reports, it ran up the aisle, tried to enter the cockpit and then camped out in the galley. There, the redolence of leftover food drifted from service carts. Perhaps this is why the pig became so stubborn. To make it leave the galley, someone had to throw a piece of food.

Throughout this ordeal, the pig acted like a … well, it acted like a pig. Unlike real service animals that know how to keep their bodily functions in check, this fat four-legger dropped feces — more than once. Pissed-off passengers promptly told the owner to clean up the stinky mess.

This was an airplane, after all, not a pigsty.

How did the agents let themselves get duped by pig-loving passengers with a doctor’s note? Why didn’t the captain overrule them?

And I’m surprised at my flight attendant colleagues. How could they have been so insensitive to the passengers? As soon as the plane reached cruising altitude, they should have slaughtered the oinking swine and served pork chops in first class.

I was assaulted by harsh breath that shot from her nostrils as if from a high-pressure air hose. The nose blasts hit me right between the eyes, on and off, on and off, in tune to the rhythm of her animosity. Despite a nervous twitching in my upper lip, I stood in front of the boarding gate like a true airline professional: a phony smile pasted across my face, fingers locked behind my back, shoulders back, chin up, chest thrust forward like an army recruit in the face of a maniacal drill instructor. I was dauntless. Unflappable. Quite capable of handling the situation. But as the hulking passenger loomed before me, growing angrier with each blink of her eyes, I felt the first pangs of vulnerability.

She was a big woman. A very big woman. Maybe 220, 230 pounds — an inch or two taller than me and maybe 40 or 50 pounds heavier. With the exception of her hips, the rest of her body was as sturdy as an offensive lineman’s. The only barrier between us was the flimsy podium that I had been standing behind while plucking tickets from some 200 passengers who were now safely aboard the aircraft and ready to fly to Barbados.

Professionalism be damned, I clutched the top of the plucking podium and felt myself take a tiny step backward. In my mind’s eye, I saw the irate passenger turn the podium into kindling with one sledgehammer blow of her fist. But she wouldn’t do something like that, would she? It was 9 a.m. We were standing in front of a departure gate at John F. Kennedy Airport. She wasn’t going to go psycho on me. But when I looked into her eyes and saw storm clouds gathering there, I though it best to brace for the storm.

“How can you charge so much for extra baggage?” the woman demanded. “How can you!” When I opened my mouth to answer, she waved one hand, compelling me to silence. The barrage of questions continued as if I was the subject of an FBI interrogation. “Why did you change the checked baggage rates? Huh? Why are you making it so difficult for me to carry my belongings on your airplane? Do you have any idea how expensive this is? Huh? Do you? Why are you so inflexible? Why?”

She paused, gathering her hostility in one great exhalation. “You people are so … so … ughhh!”

Am I the one responsible for charging passengers for extra baggage? Am I the one to blame for a change in rates? Is my goal in life to make it difficult for passengers to carry belongings onto my airplane?

Because flight attendants spend more time with passengers than do other employee groups, we’re often hit by the crap passengers want to throw at less reachable targets: baggage handlers, catering chefs, aircraft cabin designers and airline CEOs with $10 million salaries and golden parachutes that make them twice as rich upon retirement — even if the airline goes belly-up in the interim.

We aren’t the ones who design tiny overhead bins that can scarcely accommodate a tote bag, yet we get yelled at when there’s not enough room for a carry-on bag the size of an Amana fridge. We don’t establish short connection times, though we bear the brunt of passenger rage when they come stumbling onto an aircraft, clutching at their chests due to the 30-minute sprint from gate Z-29. We don’t determine seat pitch, the boarding hierarchy or whether passengers should be served peanuts or lobster thermidor on a three-hour flight. And we most certainly don’t create the pricing structure for additional checked baggage. All this is left up to some bonus-motivated number cruncher sitting at a computer in an ergonomic airline office (far away from seething, fist-clenching, flight attendant-hating passengers), creating policies that give shareholders a more profitable bottom line.

As for the female passenger who ached to put me in a headlock, she never gave me a chance to say what I’d been trained to say: We’re sorry for any inconvenience the change in rates may have caused, ma’am. The increases were necessary due to blah, blah, blah in the blah, blah, blah because of blah-blah. She went on and on, refusing to let me speak, while lashing my ears with her ceaseless rant about unfair baggage rates.

Rather than bite the bullet and hand over her ticket as a couple of hundred passengers had done before her, the woman shook the ticket in my face. “This is ridiculous,” she continued, spraying me with spittle as she spoke. “You should be ashamed.”

“Please, ma’am,” I said, wiping my face with a sweep of one uniformed arm. I pushed both hands forward in a gesture intended to make her step backward and settle down. “I don’t know anything about a change in baggage rates. I don’t impose company policy. If you have a question about rates, you need to return to the boarding desk and speak to the agent. I am a flight attendant, ma’am. I am not here to argue with you. I am not here to be spat upon either. I am here to take your ticket voucher, return your boarding stub, welcome you aboard the goddamn — welcome you aboard the airplane and point you in the direction of your seat. That’s it. That’s all. I’m sorry!”

Apparently, my sermon fell upon deaf ears. The angry passenger proceeded to light into me with an “I’ll never fly your fucking airline again” tirade that ranked among the best I’ve ever heard. “You people are the worst. The very worst!” she screamed. “I never have this problem when I fly other airlines.”

I looked straight into her eyes, unable to quell the anger that had been bubbling inside. “When you fly other airlines, ma’am,” I said, “I never have this problem either.”

With that she was speechless.

Out of the corner of one eye, I noticed both gate agents rushing toward me. I looked at my watch. It was about a minute before departure. The agents were anxious to close out the flight on time. From about 20 yards away, one of them made a throat-slashing motion. This was a signal for me to pluck the passenger’s ticket and hurry aboard. Reluctantly, I turned to face my tormentor. Eyes wide, mouth open, face scowling like an NBA coach after another bad call by the referee, she began to shout, showering me with spittle and unmerciful morning breath. As if to make an exclamation point, she tapped the ticket against my nose.

Two seconds later she repeated the infraction.

Repressing a primordial urge to punch the woman in her face, I snatched the ticket, removed the voucher and the small portion of the boarding pass, gave the woman the boarding stub and told her to either board the aircraft or be left behind. She responded with one final insult: “Only stupid people work for stupid airlines,” or something of that nature. She then grabbed a duffel bag that seemed more like a body bag, and lumbered into the jet bridge. I followed, making sure to stay at least 10 feet behind.

Once inside the airplane, I asked the agent about the new baggage premium. The way she explained it, the airline had imposed a temporary increase due to heavy summer traffic. It was charging $50 for every additional bag to the Caribbean. Nobody was happy about it. Least of all the passenger who was presently plodding down the aisle.

After the woman found her seat, our twin-aisle DC-10 aircraft pushed back from the gate and began rolling. I’m not sure exactly how far down the taxiway we had gotten when the trouble began. It all happened after the purser announced our flying time from New York to Barbados. One minute I was gulping down some OJ and sharing layover plans with a member of my crew. The next minute a horrible scream ripped through the airplane. The sheer volume of the outburst could have made Alfred Hitchcock roll over in his grave. My guess was that a carry-on bag fell from the overhead bin and slammed into a passenger’s head. Or maybe one of the more melodramatic female attendants had discovered a run in her pantyhose. Perhaps someone saw a rat in the cabin. More likely, the scream came from an outraged passenger who found out her seatmate paid a couple of hundred dollars less for the flight. (The range and complexities of airfares can make some people mad enough to scream.)

As cabin crew converged upon the coach-cabin screamer, instinct told me not to join them. I waited in the service center — the galley area between first class and coach — running one finger across the edge of my empty cup while the drama unfolded. Somehow, I knew who the screamer was. And though I refused to acknowledge this consciously, deep down inside I had an idea why she was screaming.

After attending to the passenger along with half of the crew, flight attendant Maybelle Montrose crept up the aisle, shaking her head in the slow jittery manner of a woman who should have retired long, long ago. Maybelle was a senior mama, a dinosaur of undetermined origin. When asked about retirement she once said, “They’re gonna have to carry me off the airplane in a body bag.” Though age and mileage had diminished her physical abilities (it took her about 20 minutes to prepare and serve a first-class gin and tonic), her tongue was as sharp as a Ginsu knife. “We got chicken, we got beef, we got drinks,” she would say to startled first-class passengers. “Speak up if you want something. They tell me I’m deaf in one ear.”

Maybelle saw me standing in the service center and fixed her good eye upon me.

“Did you pluck that passenger’s ticket?” she said.

“Ahhhh … yeah.”

“Did you bother to read her boarding pass?”

“Ahhhh …”

“I didn’t think so,” she said, rolling her eyes. Maybelle put a frail hand on my shoulder. “That passenger isn’t supposed to be on this airplane.”

“What do you mean?”

“That scream you heard.”

“Yeah.”

“It came from her. She let loose when she heard this plane was headed to Barbados.”

“She’s not going to Barbados?”

“She is now.”

I stared at the floor, the grim realization of my ineptitude creeping up like a mugger in Nikes. “According to her ticket,” Maybelle continued, “She’s supposed to be flying to Montego Bay, Jamaica.”

“Shit!”

“Shit is right,” she said. “And you’re standing right in the middle of it. Where on earth did you learn to read?”

Today, this incident would have never occurred. Major airlines have spent millions of dollars on Enhanced Gate Readers, those ATM-like machines that stand before the boarding gate, swallowing and then spitting out boarding passes fed into them by flight attendants like me. Inside the belly of this electronic beast, boarding passes are scanned to check the passenger’s name, travel date and flight number. A video display shows which seats are taken. Seat duplications are supposedly a thing of the past. Above all else, the machine is designed to prevent mistakes exactly like the one I had made. Had I been privy to an EGR while boarding the Barbados flight, the woman’s ticket would have been spat out like a rotten apple. The words “Invalid Flight” would blink across the screen, urging me to send her to the proper gate.

But because EGR machines had yet to be invented, because I was rushed by agents, attacked by the passenger and driven by demons that still haunt me to this day, I failed to take a good look at her boarding pass. In frustration, I had snatched it and forced her to go on board. It was my fault, I admit it. I really screwed up this time. A Jamaica-bound woman was stuck on a Barbados-bound airplane, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

A few seconds after Maybelle and the purser entered the cockpit, the taxiing aircraft came to a sudden halt. I knew exactly what had transpired. The two women had no doubt informed the captain of our dilemma. In the process, they named me as the culprit. After firing off a couple of expletives, the captain probably radioed dispatch for consultation. We were in the middle of the morning rush hour at JFK. Planes were lined up nose to tail, moving down the taxiway in a stop-and-go procession that crawled toward the runway. Ultimately, the captain would make the final decision as to whether the aircraft would return to the gate and allow the passenger to deplane. He was probably chewing on his options at this very moment, and wondering if I actually had a brain.

While this was happening, a couple of flight attendants continued to console the mis-boarded passenger. Her screams had diminished, tapering down to gut-wrenching sobs that permeated the cabin like audio from the in-flight movie. From my hide-out in the service center, I could hear her. I hunkered down in front of the elevator, worried about retribution, plotting an escape, afraid to show my face in the cabin for fear of being spotted by 220 pounds of pissed-off passenger.

“That woman is really upset.” Having heard a new voice, I turned to find a colleague standing next to me. Her name was Brenda or Glenda, I think. Maybe it was Melinda. We had been introduced during the preflight briefing. As is often the case with new faces (with the exception of rare characters like Maybelle Montrose) I had already forgotten my colleague’s name.

“She’s looking for you, you know,” Brenda or Glenda or Melinda said.

“What?”

“That woman. The one whose ticket you plucked by mistake. She’s looking for you.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope. She said you’re the one who took her ticket. You’re the one who made her board the wrong flight. She wants your name. She wants to report you to the company. Judging by the way she keeps clenching her fists, I’d say she wants even more.”

Brenda or Glenda or Melinda raised an eyebrow. “She’s demanding to speak with you.”

I just looked at her.

“Well?”

“I’m not going back there.”

B.G.M. chuckled. “I can’t say I blame you,” she said. “She is a rather large woman and she’s really ticked off.”

Just then Maybelle and the purser emerged from the cockpit. Walking briskly through the first-class cabin, the purser wore a grim look on her face. Maybelle hobbled along, trying her best to keep up. When she reached the service center, she threw me a disgusted glance and started sucking at her dentures. Worse than chalk being dragged across a blackboard, the sucking sound was driving me insane.

I threw a look at Maybelle. Maybelle threw a look at me. Somehow, the sucking sound intensified.

Despite the high-pitched shrill of air being drawn through dentures, all eight flight attendants huddled together, waiting for the purser to speak. “The captain says he’s not going to return to the gate,” she said. “There are apparently several aircraft waiting in line behind us. We’re No. 5 or 6 in line for takeoff. It’ll take forever to get back to the gate. By the time we offload the passenger, get another departure slot and creep through traffic, the flight will be more than an hour late.”

“So what about the mis-boarded passenger?” Brenda or Glenda or Melinda said.

The purser let out a sigh. “The captain said she’s going to have to fly with us to Barbados and fly back later tonight on the return flight. There are no flights from Barbados to Jamaica. Dispatch says the company will provide hotel accommodations at JFK for the night. Tomorrow she’ll have to show up at the airport for her flight to Jamaica.”

Maybelle and the purser broke the huddle and walked down the aisle to deliver the bad news. The shouts that ensued were even louder than before. There were harsh words. Threats. The halfhearted promise of a lawsuit. Murmurs washed through the cabin as concerned passengers learned of the injustice. Above it all, there was Maybelle’s creaky, grandmotherly voice, explaining, in no uncertain terms, that nothing could be done.

Unable to contain her anger, the woman rose from her seat. She was coming for me. All 220 pounds of her. From my position in the service center, I could hear heavy footsteps falling against the cabin floor. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. What should I do? Where could I go? Should I hide in the cockpit? Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Sneak down the right side of the aircraft as she marched up the left? Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Dial 911? Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. The footsteps were getting closer. No time for deliberation. In a true act of cowardice, I opened the elevator door, pushed the down button and descended to the lower lobe galley. There, out of the elevator and in the belly of the aircraft, I was haunted by the sound of footsteps from above. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Thump, thump.

Suddenly, there were shouts from the elevator shaft. Then the frantic pitter patter of flight attendant feet. There was a moment of silence, followed by muffled sobs and a heavy-footed retreat. Thump, thump, thump, thump …

Soon afterward, the elevator engaged. As it descended, I looked through the elevator window and saw Maybelle Montrose’s scrawny ankles, then her kneecaps and the loose-fitting shape of her uniform dress — which was way too short for a woman of her age. When the elevator completed its journey, I finally saw Maybelle’s face, a face crisscrossed with wrinkles and twisted into a permanent grimace. A face that could curdle milk. A face beaten, but not bowed, from decades of confrontations with passengers and crew.

She was smirking.

The elevator door swung open. Maybelle stepped out. She folded her arms and looked at me. Moments like these are what she lived for. There was a twinkle in her eyes that had not been there before my ticket-plucking fiasco. For an instant she was a spry young stewardess, anxious to see the world and all the wonders held within it. But when she opened her mouth, the facade crumbled.

“You caused quite a commotion upstairs,” she said, her voice like a screen door on squeaky hinges. “But you can relax now. The passenger you screwed over is finally in her seat.”

“Please,” I said. “You’ve gotta do me a favor, Maybelle.”

Her smirk blossomed into a full-grown smile. It grew wider, brighter. Her false teeth seemed to clatter with anticipatory glee. She knew what I was about to ask, and I knew what her answer would be. I asked anyway.

“Will you switch positions with me?” I said. Maybelle’s jump seat was located in the first-class cabin, while mine was in coach — perilously close to the enemy. “Please? I don’t want to deal with that woman again. I don’t think I can handle it.”

Maybelle looked at me, twin beams of triumph gleaming from her ancient eyes. Without saying a word, she pointed a long, crooked finger toward the elevator. I stepped in, closed the door and felt myself rising, slowly, quietly, toward the fate I deserved.

Plane collisions involving birds are quite common. Some 5,000 “bird strikes” were reported last year. But because such reports are voluntary, the FAA believes the actual number of incidents could be five times as high.

The problem has become so pervasive that some officials are aggressively seeking solutions. Because of the large number of birds hovering over Nepal’s Kathmandu airport, hunters recently were employed to scare off the feathered creatures by setting off firecrackers or by shooting at them.

The hiring of hunters comes after two recent incidents in which airplanes collided with birds in Nepal. Last month, a Royal Nepal Airlines 757 was forced to cancel a flight after running into a bird during takeoff from Kathmandu. A few weeks earlier, another airline’s plane hit a bird as it prepared to land.

Birds aren’t always the source of trouble, however. Last month, when an engine exploded on a Japan Airlines flight bound for Tokyo, pieces of the engine fell on a neighborhood in Jakarta, Indonesia. It’s still not clear what caused the engine to explode. And although no one was hurt by the falling debris, 16 homes were damaged.

More homes were damaged in France several years ago when a chunk of ice fell from an airplane. Such an incident can occur when water leaks from waste valves beneath a plane’s fuselage. Water freezes, and more water freezes on top, until it accumulates like an iceberg and eventually breaks off.

This is what experts believe happened in December when an unidentified object slammed into a water supply dam near Sydney, Australia. “They have found a hole, but they have not found what made the hole yet,” Sky & Space magazine editor Jonathan Nally was quoted as saying. “If it had been a meteorite there would have been stacks and stacks of reports of sonic booms or big fiery lights in the sky.” There were no such sightings. The suspected ice created a crater that measured more than 100 square yards.

But there’s more than ice and engine parts falling from the skies. In August, the right wheel fell off a Blue Panorama Airlines 737. The plane, which had just departed an airport in Spain, was forced to make an unscheduled landing amid emergency vehicles lining the runway in Rome.

A similar incident happened near Los Angeles in March. An American Airlines 757 lost its right nose gear, but managed to land safely with 105 passengers on board. Because the 757 has two wheels attached to the nose gear, it was able to land on just one. The wayward wheel descended on South Gate, a small community about 10 miles east of Los Angeles International Airport, landing in a gutter next to the sign for an Albertson’s supermarket. It then bounced diagonally across the street, into the parking lot of St. Helen’s Roman Catholic Church, stopping right next to a woman who was entering the church. “Maybe she prayed a little harder,” the Rev. John Provenza told the Associated Press. “By the grace of God, it could have really been bad.”

The grace of God became apparent again exactly 15 days later, when a landing gear door fell off a Delta Airlines 727. Shortly after Flight 1827 took off from Boston’s Logan International Airport, the 30-pound, 3-by-6-foot metal door crashed into an empty street in a quiet residential neighborhood.

But last month, God’s grace was not in evidence. That’s when the body of a Russian man fell from the wheel well of a KLM plane headed to Amsterdam from Moscow. The man was already dead when he fell, and his body was found in a water-filled ditch a few miles from the Amsterdam Airport. The body of another Russian man was discovered in the wheel well of the same aircraft. Both men were rape suspects who were apparently trying to flee police.

Because airplane wheel wells are not heated, stowaways often freeze to death from the subzero climate at 30,000 feet. But a few souls have beaten the odds. In August, mechanics found a man in the wheel well of an Air France 747 that had just arrived in L.A. after a seven-and-a-half-hour flight from Tahiti. Miraculously, the man survived after being rushed to the hospital, where he was treated for hypothermia.

What’s even more astounding about the man’s dramatic voyage is that he managed not to fall out of the wheel well.

From this new and unusual vantage point, you look around and catch glimpses of insanity — a walking cane minus its owner hurtling through the cabin, a laptop crashing against a bulkhead, an explosion of peanuts, a sea of twisting heads. No longer do you have to imagine how it would feel to fly. You are flying. You are a virtual Peter Pan — an airborne tourist caught in the grip of severe turbulence.

This is what can happen when you fail to buckle your seat belt.

And don’t forget that the seat belt sign had flashed on several minutes earlier. The flight attendants had roamed down the aisle, reminding everyone to buckle up, and the captain had warned of bumpy skies ahead. He told you to stay in your seat, to strap in tight, to be ready for a good jolt or two. However, as with most airplane announcements (except for those warning of delays or route diversions), you processed the captain’s remarks as gibberish. Besides, you don’t like wearing your seat belt; it’s too restrictive. You were annoyed when a flight attendant interrupted your conversation to tell you to buckle up. In fact, you rolled your eyes and frowned at her.

Now look at you — folded like a pretzel between Rows 27 and 28, five rows from where your seat is.

In-flight turbulence is nothing to kid about. Airline industry sources say that, each year, an average of 58 passengers are injured in the United States while not wearing their seat belts during turbulence. This is the leading cause of injuries to passengers and crew in nonfatal accidents.

In the 10-month period between October 1999 and August 2000, 72 passengers were injured in four separate incidents involving Chinese, Japanese, U.S. and British airliners. Perhaps the most serious incident occurred when a China Southern Airlines flight from China to Hong Kong plunged 2,000 feet, injuring 45 passengers. Although several of the injured were treated at a hospital and discharged, 21 had longer hospital stays and seven were in serious condition.

Chances are, none of the injured was wearing a seat belt.

I can’t help being reminded of a video that is part of the New York City Department of Motor Vehicles license application process. After finishing the drivers test, applicants are required to attend a class, which includes a video showing in glaring detail a series of gruesome accident scenes. A state trooper then appears on-screen to address the group. When the other driver wannabes and I watched the video, we began to have second thoughts about steering the streets of New York. In an authoritative, “I’ve seen it all so you better listen” voice, Trooper Johnson left us with one comment about driver safety: “In all my years on the force, I’ve never had to pull a dead person from behind a buckled seat belt,” he said.

Trooper Johnson had a good point.

Since that day, I’ve never failed to wear a seat belt while driving or riding in a car. And because Trooper Johnson’s advice can easily be applied to airplane passengers, I always wear my seat belt when traveling as a passenger. While on duty, however, I’m forced to throw caution to the wind. The nature of the job demands that flight attendants check for compliance when the seat belt sign winks on during turbulence. It’s no surprise, then, that we’re usually the first to be injured.

During one flight to the Caribbean, I stood before the toilet in the lavatory, eyes closed, pants gathered around my ankles, answering the urgent call of nature. But before my bladder could be purged, I found myself mashed against the ceiling, with my feet dangling precariously above the toilet.

Over the years, colleagues have told me they’ve been slammed against the cabin ceiling or thrown into the laps of startled passengers. I’ve heard about the busted backs, fractured limbs and bloodied faces that resulted when passengers didn’t buckle up, even after the seat belt sign flashed on, the crew completed a mandatory safety check and P.A. announcements warned of dangerous bumps ahead.

One fellow flight attendant was slammed against the ceiling so violently that his uniform shirt ended up completely covered with blood. Luckily, he sustained no permanent injuries. But when the plane landed, and the more severely injured passengers were removed, an airline supervisor walked up to him and asked him to change his shirt.

Can’t have bloodied flight attendants limping through the airport terminal now, can we?

Like most flight attendants, I’ve been forced to scramble to my jump seat during moments of rough turbulence. If I ever were launched toward the ceiling, I always imagined it would happen in the aisle or the galley, surrounded by humanity. I never thought that severe turbulence would strike when I was alone in the lavatory, with my Calvin Klein underwear at half-mast.

Without warning, I seemed to float in slow motion toward the ceiling. I was an astronaut in the middle of a weightlessness experiment. With my back pressed high against the lavatory wall and my neck smashed against the ceiling at an angle that only a contortionist could appreciate, I was at the mercy of God and aircraft dynamics.

That’s when I peed all over the toilet and the walls. I even let loose on my own shoes. This embarrassing act was not the result of fear. It happened because the turbulence hit before I could finish my business.

The experience brought back childhood memories of an amusement park ride. Twenty or 30 people entered a round room without straps or any safety apparatus. A disembodied voice then instructed us to lean against the wall. The room spun slowly at first, then picked up speed, with the centrifugal force pinning us against the wall. Then the floor dropped, and we spun around and around, stuck to the wall like wet clothes in the final wash cycle.

Everybody loved it. I did too.

But I did not love my experience in the airplane lavatory.

In the next split second, I watched in horror as a couple of gallons of d-germ came splashing up out of the toilet. (D-germ is the pungent blue chemical that swishes around the toilet bowl after every flush.) It was a surreal moment — a Salvador Dali painting come to life. My trousers were soaked with d-germ, and my only consolation was that there were no chunks.

The plane suddenly regained its composure. Wobbly as an Olympic gymnast who has been out drinking all night, I came sprawling through the lavatory door.

Nobody on the plane was hurt. Everyone, including my fellow crew members, had been wearing seat belts.

Startled and only slightly bruised, I strapped myself into my jump seat, smelling like a toilet.