I usually hate the cliche "in my day" but it springs to mind as I join the fracas on overweight flight attendants. If the current attendants had to walk up and down the very narrow aisle of a DC3 aircraft, as I did "in my day", in 1957/58, they would know exactly why they could not afford to be wide in girth.
It’s like the aisle in two Roman Catholic churches, St Ann’s and St Francis where any slightly overweight pall bearer is unable to walk alongside their beloved’s casket. Not an ideal comparison, but it is the one which springs to mind.
Also when you were the lone attendant for twenty-eight passengers and two crew through more than eight hours of hopping up and down as many as eight islands, per flight, from Trinidad to Puerto Rico (and the same on the return) on what was called the "milk run", looking after breakfast, snack, lunch and tea, a bar service, landing forms, and be prepared for any emergency, you just had to be fit. It’s a scientific fact of life that overweight people are not physically fit, and I am not speaking of those who are naturally big.
Nowadays, with wide-bodied and wide-aisled aircraft, the wide hipped attendants may not find themselves in trouble, also there are now several flight attendants on any one flight.
One of the recent letters to the editor referred to the male of the species who come on flights to ogle the female flight attendants. While this may be true in some cases, one must remember that any individual sitting idly for hours on end in one spot, will have nothing more interesting to do than to follow every move of the flight attendants (male or female), and even the pilots when they venture out of the cockpit are stared at. These people in their uniforms become the stars on an aircraft.
I can distinctly remember at my interview in 1957 being told that I would have to put on some weight by the time my ground training was over. I was under the stated weight . As far as I was concerned, discrimination just did not enter into it, these were the requirements for the specific job, I wanted the job and soon found out, when during a dinghy drill in the deep ocean having to dive under an overturned dinghy and get it right side up, why it was necessary for me to be a little heavier.
A former manager of flight attendants remembers that as late as the seventies, weight restrictions were followed to the letter and without question: "You would be weighed at the first sign of overweight and taken off the line until you at least showed you were losing some weight."
After all said my source, "you are supposed to be very agile in an emergency trying to get people off an airplane. Wouldn’t you choose to follow a physically fit attendant off an airplane in an emergency, rather than an overweight one. The fit person is the one who would be ready and able. Also from a health perspective overwieght leads to strokes, diabetes, heart, it is a very demanding job, and in my time you were usually on your feet all the time, you didn’t just serve and leave the pasengers. You want to look good, not extremely thin, but within the guidelines of good health and physical fitness."
Another past manager remembers how this whole business of weight discrimination started. A particular flight attendant’s mother was big in the government. When the attendant’s behind started to spread and an attempt was made to take her off the line, a company doctor sent back a letter saying that her shape was peculiar to the African woman and it was tantamount to discrimination wanting to penalise that group for having that shape.
Both my sources agree that what was also happening is that standards were changing and discipline was breaking down. For instance, in the past when an attendant was summoned to the office a day after a flight there was no question of "it’s my day off so you will have to take me off a flight or reserve day to come to the office." The unions became involved and it all led to management’s inability of enforcing a more professional sizing system because sizing was not a shape that was feminine or flattering, it had to be a shape that could get you up and down an aisle pass a trolley, not to mention get you through a door in an emergency. Remembering too that the flight attendant works in a small galleys and needs to be a certain height to get into overhead lockers.
Nobody, it seemed, was forceful enough to stand up and say you have agreed to certain conditions which would have included regulatory weight requirements so how come all of a sudden you come back overweight from maternity leave or have put on an excessive amount of weight and you are calling it discrimination.
Speaking of discrimination, in 1957, still a time of racial discrimination in the United States, the coloured hostesses sensibly agreed not to be rostered for overnights in Miami or Bermuda, as we would have had to be housed in different hotels to the white attendants. As far as I remember, none of us was upset, those were the facts of life over which we had no control, and it was better not to go at all than to be shuttled to a different hotel.
Another source remarked that at to-day’s interview, an applicant is not told why he or she has not been selected, so the selection panel can look at you and decide your weight is against you, but will never say go away and lose ten pounds. "But when more mature flight attendants say as we get older we must put on weight, there must be flexibility between five and eight pounds, certainly not 28 pounds. In any event why should the company be the one making these impositions, where is a person’s pride in his/her own appearance and well being. They can’t tell me they are feeling to the max of good health like that."
And although the airline industry has gone through change and there are no longer age requirements for retirement, and in the United States it can be very much like a bus, with attendants wearing polo shirts and sneakers, BWIA happens to be maintaining a certain level of professionalism that requires a uniformed look which doesn’t mean all wearing the same clothes, but will mean physical appearance also. A distinction has to be made between a mature increase in weight, grey hair, breasts which may hang a bit, some spread and wrinkles, and provision is made for those things in the industry.
Actually, says my source "the traveller will tell you he or she feels more comfortable seeing one or two mature people amongst a bunch of novices, it is a comfort zone, they enjoy maturity, but the mama- size is not a requirement. On the other hand I have no recollection of seeing one overweight steward, so it is not a matter of wanting to pick on the women because of pregnancy."