One woman takes us inside the mysterious world of a flight attendant, from unruly passengers to 3-inch heels

Courtesy of Annette Long

The life of a flight attendant isn't for everyone.

"People think there's glamour associated with this job, and there is to some extent when you're talking about, 'I just got back from Beijing, and I know the best shops in the Pearl Market,' or 'I spent Chinese New Year in Hong Kong,' or 'after spending the day at Ipanema Beach in Rio, we went to a fabulous churrascaria,'" says Annette Long, a flight attendant with 13 years of experience.

"But the job itself is far from glamorous," she continues. "Even if you're working in first class or business class, it's not glamorous at all." Many flight attendants don't realize just what the job entails until they're doing it, she says.

This includes early wake-up calls and sporadic hours; flight delays and cancellations that will nix plans; weekends and holidays spent working; and often dealing with difficult or ungracious people.

But while the job isn't as glamorous as many people think, being a flight attendant does come with its own unique set of perks, among them the ability to travel the world at little cost and the flexibility to arrange your work schedule.

Because of this, the competition among flight attendant candidates is so fierce that, for certain airlines, applicants compete with thousands of other applicants. It has even been said that it's harder to get invited to certain flight-attendant training centers than to get into Harvard University.

"It's very competitive, and people get passed over all the time," Long says about becoming a flight attendant.

To find out what makes the job so appealing, we spoke to Annette about what it's really like to be a flight attendant. Here's what she said:

Getting the job

"This is like a second career to me. I was in sales before this, working for a cruise line doing business development and management, and after September 11, I lost my job. After September 11, for anybody in the travel business, it was a long time before we got jobs.

"I was coming back from a job interview in Chicago, and I saw this older, plumper flight attendant from a regional jet airliner with a trainee badge on. I had always wanted to be a flight attendant when I was a little kid, and the regionals were hiring, so I came home and thought about it and decided I was gonna go for it.

"I started applying for a regional airline in 2003, and when I got the job, I took a huge cut in pay — but it was bigger than unemployment was paying."

Pay

"You can earn a nice middle-class living, but you're never going to get rich doing this job."

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, flight attendants earn on average $46,750 a year, while the bottom 10% earn around $26,000 and the top 10% earn more than $70,000 a year. Pay varies depending on seniority, flight hours worked, and airline.

Perks

"My best friend works for another airline, and we travel a couple of weeks a year. We've done a week in Beijing, a week in Shanghai, a week in Buenos Aires, and Prague.

"The biggest cost, aside from hotels, is generally airfare, and I don't have to worry about that so much. Of course, we go when it's cold and no one else wants to go there. And since employees are the bottom of the barrel, we have to fly on standby, and we don't have priority.

"Probably a secondary big perk like travel is the way we can arrange our schedules. You can find people to work your trip — you don't get paid for it, but you get time off. You can bid schedules that are day trips, so if you want to be home most nights, you can. There's so much schedule flexibility once you get a little bit of seniority, you can make your schedule look as great as you want it to be."