Yesterday I posted about a disabled, wheelchair-bound woman whose husband was forced to carry her onto a Ryanair flight after the flight crew refused to help her when her Ambulift device failed to show up.
I began that post with this: “Everybody knows that flight crew members these days won’t help you lift a bag into the overhead compartment, even if you are a 90-year-old woman.”
While the overall post, rightly, is generating a lot of discussion and a degree of outrage and indignation, some readers, also rightly, feel my broad generalization of flight attendants in this sentence was off the mark. Reading it now, I agree.
I am not circling the wagon here — I feel that many flight attendants won’t help you these days to the degree they used to, say, 10 years ago. As one attendant, “Ann,” puts it: “Bottom line, you pack it, you stow it. If you can’t stow it, then check it.”
But another reader, flight attendant “Alexis,” has a point: “Not all flight attendants are uncaring and lazy.”
I have seen flight attendants refuse to help with bags on maybe a half dozen different U.S. airlines in recent years, all citing either union or company policies. Usually they find a passenger nearby to help. My 90-year-old lady reference was based on an experience from a NY-Denver flight a few years back when I saw, maybe four rows up, a woman easily in her 80s, and maybe a good deal older, struggle to get her small roller into the overhead compartment. She asked a passing male flight attendant, who was rather large, for help and he said, “I’m sorry, but I am not allowed to.” A man in the woman’s row quickly jumped up to help.
As in any job, there are lazy, malingering flight attendants. But I know there are many dedicated and hard working ones as well.
But my using a rather limited brush of personal experience to paint an entire group was wrong and I apologize for the overstatement.