“I Hate The Passengers”: Delta Flight Attendant Admits Giving Up Enforcement Of Safety Rules

A flight attendant at Delta says the airline has the worst passengers on the planet, and that they’ve stopped caring about enforcing safety rules. They still want the paycheck, the layovers, and the travel benefits. They’ve just had it with the people onboard. The job is amazing. I hate the passengers. She says passengers provoke crew to have something to complain about for compensation, and employees believe management will punish them for doing their jobs when customers don’t like it. However there are two dubious broader claims that are just wrong: Delta’s premium positioning produces uniquely awful customers a union would fix things She claims Delta’s passengers are “the worst…on the planet. They are entitled, disrespectful, and unreasonable.” And she’s worked at two other carriers for comparison. And she says that flight attendants know that they’ll get in trouble if passengers complain, so: Compliance checks don’t exist anymore. FAA regulations are just sentences in a book. We can’t enforce them, passengers don’t listen. …I no longer do anything more than serve cookies and Diet Coke. The interesting thing is that while this crewmember says she’s stopped intervening in passenger disputes, helping people make connections or get better seats, and offering the little extras that might make a trip better – Delta flight attendants generally do marginally more in these areas than cabin crew at other U.S. carriers. And rules enforcement can be lax on any airline. Does Delta Reward Passengers Who Behave Worst? The flight attendant’s argument is that passengers pay a premium and think this gives them permission to do whatever they want. When an employee objects, the passenger complains or emails the CEO. Management takes the customer’s side. So employees learn to stop objecting. One commenter offers a remarkably cynical explanation for Delta’s reputation for nicer flight attendants: passengers like the airline because crew let them get away with things other airlines enforce. Congregate in the galley/workspace, land with a drink in your hand and mattress pad on, have bags at the bulkhead, have your service dog out and running around. If a crewmember says anything to you, photograph them and their personal information. Premium! The original poster agrees, saying that letting passengers do whatever they want produces great customer recommendation scores, “and that’s the only thing that matters!” The only specific management allegation involves overhead bins. And that comes from a flight attendant at a different airline who relays what a passenger told them about Delta. So, you know, super reliable. The claim was that they’d asked a passenger to move some of their three bags and jacket out of a bin on a full flight, and the passenger swore at them and insisted this never happens on Delta. The original poster responds that the passenger is correct though, that Delta management has explicitly told flight attendants not to enforce the one-bag-up, one-bag-down instruction that’s still made in announcements. Passengers on most airlines are allowed one carry-on and one full-sized bag And even if in theory only the full-sized bag is supposed to go in the overhead bin, to ensure fairness and available space for all passengers on a full flight, that’s not even close to a claim about ignoring FAA safety regulations (unless a given airline’s own formal carry-on plan they submitted to the FAA specifies no personal items in the overhead bin). They claim also that compensation rewards people for manufacturing problems. They look for ways to inconvenience themselves, and try to provoke FAs so they can get miles. Many of the complainers are outright liars and the airline just gives them miles. So it continues. Another commenter, who says they work elsewhere, caricatures the complaints they see online this way: I stuck my foot out into the aisle on purpose to see if the flight attendant would trip and fall, and she did but now my shoe is scuffed, how many miles can I get for this. But that just suggests that the same incentive is at play regardless of airline, having nothing specific to do with Delta. And there are passengers who go looking for compensation. Years ago one FlyerTalk member that was ultimately banned from the forum used to talk about damaging Northwest Airlines inflight entertainment systems so he could get compensated when his TV didn’t work. If They Think Delta Passengers Are Bad, They Should Fly The Competition There are entitled people everywhere. Frontier and Spirit had some of the best fights, if we’re judging by the videos. Nobody needed a premium brand promise to start one. American Airlines has had plenty of inconsiderate passengers who drank too much, defiled the lavatory, wound up in duct tape or removed from the aircraft too. For years American was chasing Spirit and Frontier, concentrating on costs and packing more seats into planes while Delta pursued customers willing to pay for a better experience. American’s heavily domestic network, coastal weakness, and corporate sales mistakes also left them less oriented toward the buttoned-up business traveler than Delta. That doesn’t make American’s customers worse people. But Delta’s premium customer mix hardly explains awful behavior. And another Delta flight attendant rebuts them, arguing that Delta’s passengers are much better than those at their previous two airlines. An individual flight attendant’s base, trips, and small sample size of passengers will shape their view as well. And I see plenty of lack of enforcement on other airlines. Some crew are engaged and proactive. Others make an announcement and disappear. Some enforce rules rigidly, while the next crew doesn’t seem to notice the same conduct. Passengers learn from that inconsistency, too. Flight attendants are “primarily there for your safety” in a specific economic sense: federal rules set minimum cabin staffing, and airlines have to pay for those positions whether or not they think another person serving meals and drinks would generate enough revenue to justify the cost. Those staffing requirements align with FAA safety regulations. But many of the instructions that seem officious are enforced selectively, regardless of airline. That doesn’t mean all rules are pointless, or that abandoning compliance checks is appropriate, but that Delta certainly isn’t alone in the experience. A Union Doesn’t Make These Problems Disappear Several commenters offer unionization as the answer. One claims the situation would change overnight. The original poster agrees that they desperately need representation. It’s somewhat concerning that the push to unionize at Delta is coming here from a flight attendant who already says they’ve abdicated doing their job. A union can bargain over working conditions and provide a process for challenging discipline. It can also protect employees that shirk in their duties, leading to more work for everyone else around them and broadly demoralizing the rest of the crew. American, United, Southwest, Frontier, and Alaska all have unionized flight attendants, and it’s hardly a panacea for them. And non-union Delta pays more. Delta earns more, and pays out large profit sharing bonuses. Those might not be as robust under a union, affecting incomes even before the cut of pay the union takes. In 2022, United’s flight attendants union published data on its members: 91% reported feeling unvalued by the company, 99% said their issues were unresolved, and 96% found management unresponsive during irregular operations. The union had failed to deliver job satisfaction. In fact, they’d delivered the opposite. Passenger Behavior Is A Function Of How Small-d democratic Flying Has Become Flying is relatively affordable and accessible compared with what it once was. Far more people can take trips that would once have been out of reach. That means people with very different backgrounds, experiences, and expectations wind up sharing a small space in a metal tube for hours. They don’t necessarily have the same norms about personal space, how loudly to talk, whether reclining is rude, or what to do when someone tells them no. And we don’t know what brought them onto the plane. Someone may be going to a funeral. Someone else is trying to see their kids while dealing with an ex. A delay might mean missing a vacation dinner, or it might mean missing the last chance to see a parent alive. I also suspect we share fewer social norms than we once did. People seem less likely to agree on how to behave around strangers or defer to someone trying to keep a shared space functioning. An airplane forces those disagreements into confined spaces. We aren’t normally exposed to people so different from us, let alone pushed so physically close to them. It’s natural that people burn out on that experience. I’m reminded of the tagline of Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut film Clerks whose tagline was “Just because they serve you doesn’t mean they like you.” Seniority creates a certain kind of lock-in. You can’t just go somewhere else because you’d be forced to start at the bottom. So you hang on longer than you should, unhappy day after day, when it would probably be better to get a change of scenery. Topics on this page