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How flight attendants in the US coped with '9/11'

Report based on data from the Aviation Community 9/11 Project

"Nothing will ever be the same again" - How flight attendants in the US coped with '9/11'

by Bobbie Sullivan, PhD

For some time, I have been studying psychosocial “stress” in aircrews. Most of my work has been quantitative in nature; however certain subject matter can never adequately be described by quantitative data alone.  In such cases, I have employed qualitative methods to obtain the “in-depth” information required to better understand people’s experiences, and the nature of their responses to stressful events.

My presentation today is based on qualitative data collected by means of focus groups, structured interviews with individuals, and a collection of autobiographical personal narratives written by respondents to an on-line survey.  These data document the experiences of airline flight attendants working in the United States at the time of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 – hereafter referred to as “9/11”.

As exemplars of stressful phenomena, the events of 9/11 and their sequelae are of transcendent significance for flight attendants.  Let me illustrate what I mean by highlighting a few points:

• By most accounts available to us, flight attendants were the first to be murdered by the terrorists aboard the planes that were hijacked on 9/11.  Those who survived the initial struggles to take over the aircraft ultimately lost their lives a short time later when the planes were intentionally crashed.
• When US airspace reopened several days after the tragedy, flight attendants were expected to return to work in the face of great uncertainty.  No one knew what was going to happen, and it was impossible to guarantee their safety.
• The US aviation industry, already in a slump, nearly collapsed in the months following 9/11, resulting in tens of thousands of flight attendants being furloughed, or losing their jobs outright.  Those who remained had to accept massive cuts in pay and benefits in order to keep their jobs.

In a few moments, I shall elaborate on each of these points.

My report today focuses sequentially on individual flight attendants’ reactions and responses to learning of the terrorist attacks on 9/11; how they coped with the immediate stress; and how they dealt with returning to work in the days soon after 9/11 in the midst of national chaos and personal fear.  I will then relate their descriptions of the changes in their lives -- proximal and distal, psychological and pragmatic -- that followed in the wake of the catastrophe.  Context is provided by current psychological theory concerning human response to acute stress and mass trauma.

Attention will be given as well to temporally diffuse issues that are important for understanding flight attendants as a group, including media image, professional identity, and what they see as the devaluation of their profession both by their employers and the traveling public.

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Hearing about the attacks

The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 rank as some of the most widely publicized events in recent history.  Thanks to pervasive – some would say obsessive – media coverage, the images of that day are indelibly etched in the minds of people around the world.  For Americans, “9/11” ranks alongside Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President Kennedy as exquisitely memorable:  Virtually all Americans can readily tell you where they were and what they were doing when it happened, and how they learned the news.

This is an illustration of what psychologists term flashbulb memory.  Flashbulb memories typically are extremely vivid and enduring, and are instantiated by events that immediately arouse intense emotions, i.e., events that are unexpected, novel, shocking, and consequential.

For flight attendants (and other aviation personnel) an “insider view” led them to conclusions about what was happening that preceded those of the news media.  For example, early media reports suggested that the first aircraft to hit the World Trade Center was a small, private plane. Many flight attendants who were at their homes or in their layover hotels that morning were watching live news coverage of the events when the second aircraft appeared on their screens, moments before it crashed into the other tower of the World Trade Center.  Many flight attendants who saw this tell of recognizing instantly that the aircraft was a large airliner, not a small plane, and almost simultaneously realizing that they were witnessing an intentional act of terrorism, not an accident.

They knew by their professional experience that normal air routes in the vicinity of New York City would not have brought one, much less two, large aircraft that close to the World Trade Center towers.  The weather that day was clear and fine; no airline pilot would have mistakenly flown an aircraft that low over that particular location.  Flight attendants knew that even if the aircraft had been in distress, normal emergency procedures would have led the aircraft away from lower Manhattan, not toward it.

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