Everyone has an odd airline stewardess story. Please feel free to send me yours. We exchanged a few while dining out last Friday. Here are a couple of mine.

While feeling bothered at having been awoken to move my seat from the reclined position into the upright position I asked the stewardess why this was necessary or safer than reclining. Her answer was that the change in position from back to upright affected the aerodynamics of the airplane during landing. I am still pondering how this could ever be possible but I guess she didn’t major in Physics at school.

When flying home from a weekend in California with DK I distinctly heard the overhead announcer say “We are cruising at 35000 feet and we will be serving smagmandiviters shortly.” I have always wanted to start a restaurant called Smagmandiviters since.

While flying on Ted the video tutorial on safety kept welcoming us to Ted as though Ted was a real person. “Ted welcomes you” and “We know you have a choice and Ted is glad you chose us for your airline.” I started to crack up because it sounded so silly that this fictitious person who is really an airline would be gracious. Then as they were going through the safety instructions the instructions for the floatation device were “There is a flotation device under your seat cushion that can be easily removed by lifting your seat. Don’t do that now!“ Like I was going to tear apart my seat while watching the safety video.

JT had a funny story about Southwest. The stewardess had sung Leaving on a Jet Plane before take off. During the flight they experienced a lot of turbulence. So the stewardess told everyone to put one hand on their seatbelt. Then she asked everyone to raise their right hand but leave their other hand on the seatbelt. Then she announced that everyone was now riding the Southwest rodeo.

Apparently the airlines are all headed for bankruptcy again. Detroit is heading in the same direction. The result will be that the companies will restructure and older employees including ex-stewardesses will lose their pensions since that’s one of the things you get to ditch when you go bankrupt. I can imagine that at some point someone should legislate that pensions should all be ditched for 401Ks or other mechanisms where the employees keep their money separate from the corporation. There is no reason to allow a big clunky business that is likely to go bankrupt to be responsible for people’s livelihood when they are 80. It is too tempting to screw the old people.