Qantas, Virgin flight attendants reveal the shock reality of working 30,000 feet in the air

There’s a dark side to working 30,000 feet in the air.

Medical emergencies, sleep deprivation and 20-minute lunch breaks are all in a day’s work for Australia’s battler cabin crew.

And then there’s the blow-ups over ham-and-cheese toasties.

“It’s quite an interesting moment when someone calls you a f**kwit because you don’t have any toasties left,” a Virgin flight attendant told NewsWire this week.

“Most of us just laugh it off, but it does get grating for a lot of the crew.”

In exclusive and wide-ranging interviews, two flight attendants – one with Virgin and one with Qantas – exposed the gobsmacking levels of entitlement that some members of the travelling public possess.

“I had a friend giving CPR (to a passenger) a few years ago,” the Qantas attendant said.

“In the middle of CPR someone tapped her on the shoulder and asked when they were getting breakfast.”

Both have worked the notorious Bali route, but warned the stresses of the job extend far beyond rude and abusive passengers.

The day-to-day reality

For one thing, flight crew are exposed to sickness at elevated rates – the inescapable effect on working in a contained aluminium tube crammed with hundreds of other people.

“Probably in the first 18 months of my flying career, I remember my friend saying to me, ‘You are sick all the time’,” the Qantas attendant said.

“I probably don’t get as sick now or maybe I work through my sickness better, I don’t know.

“I think you’re just rundown all the time.”

A flight crew work day is rarely a 9-5 clock-off job and the Qantas attendant said her shortest day was about 10 hours.

“The other thing that is probably not like a normal job is that the timings can be really weird,” she said.

“So for example, out of Brisbane we do a flight to Manila.

“And we start working in Brisbane at about 6pm. So you’re taking off about 7.30pm and so you’d land in Manila at 1.30am.

“Now that’s fine, but the flight the next day that you go home on takes off at 2.45am.

“So your wake-up call to go to work in Manila is midnight.”

Uneven work schedules means sleep deprivation and the attendant estimated she lost at least one night of sleep a week.

“There’s a lot more loss of sleep I think than people realise,” she said.

“(That’s) particularly on Australian airlines. We do a lot of ‘back of the clock’ flying just in order to meet up with other carriers or in other countries or other flights.”

And when the flight crew are working, it’s hard for them to catch breaks.

Qantas cabin crew are entitled to a 20-minute break within the first six hours of duty and then 20 minutes every subsequent four hours.

Virgin workers get 20 minutes every five hours.

“On the A330 there’s four seats in economy (class) with a curtain around them,” the Qantas attendant said.

“So the crew go and sit in there and they can close their eyes, read a book, watch a movie, do whatever it is they want to do to decompress.

“A couple of the aircraft have a seat at a door. So you’ll just basically pull a curtain around that and sit at the door.”

“You can’t go to get away. That’s probably the thing that is the most misunderstood part of the job I think, that there’s no time where you are truly on a break.”

The Virgin attendant said he could see up to 1000 people per day and always needed to “be on”.

“They are long days,” he said.

“We can see up to 1000 people per day, which is physically and mentally exhausting.

“We’re also away from our families for some significant milestones and that can be emotionally draining.”

Flight crew training is also extensive and constant.

From CPR and evacuations to firefighting and training to take down terrorists, flight attendants form a core part of the world-class safety record at Qantas and Virgin.

“There’s a whole lot of extra skills that we don’t probably talk about as much because it’s not fluffy,” the Qantas attendant said.

The Virgin attendant said crew members went through six-month checks to keep “up to standard”.

“We are constantly running towards the fires, so to speak,” he said.

Horror stories

And then there’s the growing swell of poor behaviour from travellers, which the Qantas attendant said had escalated since the pandemic.

“People have less patience and less resilience,” she said.

“So there is an increase in negative behaviour, a real increase in selfishness.

“That the only people that are important are, you know, the person involved.”

Some of the stories are appalling.

“I was talking with a couple of colleagues the other day and one of them had been having a conversation about seat belts for children,” she said.

“Making sure the child had a seat belt on, which is a requirement. It’s a safety thing.

“And these people just did not want to put a seat belt on this child.

“And the idea that if you push back enough and you get rude enough and angry enough that somehow you’ll be able to browbeat your flight attendant into not following the law.

“It just means there’s so many more conversations that you have to have with people about their behaviour.”

She said she had never had to physically restrain someone, but she knew crew members who had been forced to take that dramatic step.

“I think people don’t realise how much training we do around de-escalation techniques,” she said.

“Twice a year we do full emergency procedures. We do training around de-escalation, like verbal de-escalation, physical de-escalation. We do training in physically restraining people and defending the flight deck.”

Bali

The Qantas attendant said there was “a different demographic” of flyers travelling to Indonesia’s island paradise and they could on occasion present additional challenges.

“Certain routes have a certain demographic and the way that people behave,” she said.

“Responsible service of alcohol is pushed a lot more on (Bali) flights.

“We’re always very careful with alcohol but if you’re on a Bali flight, you’re probably counting (drinks consumed) more than you would necessarily on another flight.”

The Virgin attendant said some passengers tried to sneak in booze from duty-free shops or vape in the airplane rest room, or even in their seats.

He also said he had copped verbal abuse from people unhappy about the on-board menu.

“About the lack of options available for purchase, the retail menu in the seat pocket,” he said.

“Being called every name under the sun because we can’t get them a toasted sandwich or a wrap.”

The Qantas attendant said there were often “triggers” and “warning signs” that a passenger might prove to be difficult.

“When someone sits in their seat and you haven’t taken off and they ask you for a beer, yeah, that’s a bit of a warning sign,” she said.

“Ordering for mates. Ordering multiple drinks.

“Like, ‘ah three rum-and-cokes and what are you having Macca?’ That sort of thing.”

The Virgin attendant said “pressing the call bell constantly” was another warning flare.

“There’s nothing wrong with having a good time,” he said.

“It’s about having it in a responsible manner.”

He emphasised that “99 per cent” of travellers to Bali were “amazing people” but the “one per cent” tainted it for everyone else.

Pay rates

Despite the unique pressures of the job, pay rates for cabin crew are at the lower end Australian salaries.

The award rate, or minimum level of pay, for a full-time entry-level flight attendant is $26.64 an hour, which is just $1 an hour more than the minimum wage a 21-year-old worker can earn at a fast food outlet.

According to employment platform Seek, the average annual salary for a flight attendant ranges between $55,000 and $65,000.

The average annual salary in Australia was $102,700 in November 2024, according to the ABS.

But the wages landscape for crew members could be shifting.

This week, the Flight Attendants’ Association of Australia announced some 750 additional Qantas cabin crew would receive pay bumps of up to $20,000 a year.

The union credited the passage of Same Job Same Pay reforms, which seeks to equalise pay rates between direct hire and labour hire employees at large enterprises, for the uplift.

The Qantas attendant said she welcomed the industrial relations changes.

“The whole thing with Same Job Same Pay is they are doing the same job,” she said.

“It’s not like being employed by a labour-hire company changes the nature of the work.

“They do the same training, they wear the same uniform.”

Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson has warned the reforms will erode the company’s competitiveness against rival international airlines.

“We compete with 55 competitors internationally,” she told Sky News last year.

“The cost for labour, for cabin crew now for us, for Qantas international, is three times what our competitors from say the Middle East or from Asia bear.

“So it is going to continue to put pressure on the business and we don’t have productivity offsets right now to do that.

“We’re going to have to go looking for them. We will go looking for them because the one thing we have to do is to make sure we have a sustainable business that can compete on a sustainable footing.”

‘Second to none’

The attendants are both experienced and told NewsWire there were important reasons why they decided to keep flying.

“We took a group of special needs children away for their first camp,” the Virgin attendant said when asked about a cherished moment from the job.

“And they were just so excited to be on the plane. They were so inquisitive, asking us lots of questions. It just made our day. It was special … one of the most memorable things I’ve ever done. Just seeing how excited they were to be travelling. Their pure excitement for it, it was second to none.”

The Qantas attendant said she was proud to be a part of her “tight-knit” work community.

“I’ve never been bored and I love the people that I work with,” she said.

“I think we’re a really close-knit community.

“It’s an amazing job and the people are amazing. It’s something to be proud of, to be a part of that community.”

Both attendants pleaded with Australians to think more carefully about the responsibilities of their job and to remember when they step onto a plane, they’re also stepping into a workplace.

“I think people need to understand that the role of a flight attendant is not to be waiter or a waitress,” the Qantas attendant said.

“They are the first responder, the only people that can help you in an emergency.

“People need to take a bit of a look at how they perceive this role and realise that they are coming into somebody’s workplace.

“We want them to have a great experience but everybody needs to have a great experience.

“All the customers and all the staff need to be respected. So be kind.”