A Feather Of Luxury ?

To get this special assignment or to be able to choose, I understood rapidly that working the cabin in First Class had certain flair of excellence…and importance!

 It wasn’t difficult to know why and those who had a real choice were the most senior'-esses"...

During my three-month term of probation, I had been chosen to it and only once by the Purser on duty. Part of the training was the assessment of my performance, working all classes of service…as previously mentioned.

In a Boeing 707 First class section, there were mostly three categories of passengers: the rich, stressed business men or women or famous people or… airline employees either deadheading or on a non-revenue ticket at vacation time.

It was much later in my flying career, and only once when I did work on a full flight, from New-York to Madrid, that our flight carried on board three very special passengers sitting in Coach, rich celebrities as they were.

This party of three sat uncomfortably crammed into the narrow three-seat row of the Coach Cabin! Uncomfortable, yes, because their well-trimmed and large strong bodies filled each inch of the space they had purchased!

USA’s Senator from Massachusetts Ted Kennedy (Bless His Gentle Soul…) was flying with his two grown-up nephews, making no fuss about it, behaving like the normal human being we all were.

Although whispers were heard as I walked down the cabin , before take-off, by admiring passengers and awed crews, Ted Kennedy nodded to the recognizing smiles and continued to converse gently with his family…thus quietening the initial seconds of excitement and, as I couldn’t help observing… thinking this was a show of real Class!

When we had reached our flying altitude, the service had begun and we all went back to our own business of caring all and without making further ado about it.

All passengers were treated equally and with respect.

That was my determination.

One gets used to celebrities and quickly the job takes over and forgets who’s who!

Some of us chanced the autograph begging. I could never do that…and have never done …during all my airline careers, in the air and on ground.

(I have all my life…felt a deeper love for the kind anonymous ones who treated me with respect…and gentleness!)

My one and only assignment at the very beginning tending to First Class passengers’ needs had not the expected impact upon me because it all went so fast…as I was working.

The moment when I truly experienced how high class TWA’s First Class service dawned upon me when I organized my own personal journey visiting my family in France, after months of silence and was sitting as a passenger.

With the kindest attention given to me, a rookie, by the TWA check-in agents at JFK-I , who were now my colleagues and later to become my best team-mates,  I had bought my first non-revenue passage between New-York and Paris…and had been given a seat in First Class!

It is not difficult to understand how I felt, as a First class passenger out of uniform, not only being honoured by such royal treatment, but also deeply touched by the secret emotions of having accomplished such feat which made me positively glow with pride…!

I had shoved fast and away the forebodings that might have glimpsed through my conscience because knowing I was not only the bearer of success for my family, but also the exposition of my true and genuine character witnessing I had fought for myself…and won, I couldn’t help but feeling what an awesome baggage I was bringing back to them, after two and half years in the USA!

It might have been, for some…in my world, fluttering with a soft feather of luxury, but for my parents, my siblings and my maternal grandmother, it would become an exceptional act of…endurance (?) which represented for them…fame and recognition …in their own slow dimension in time they were living in…

“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing…!”

                                                -  Abraham Lincoln  -