What is the average day of a Flight Attendant like?

Flight attendants have likely already worked at least 1 flight by noon.

Before becoming a flight attendant, I had all these questions about the job: Is it as glamorous as it sounds? How many days a month are flight attendants away from home? Those were just a couple of them.

What does an average day for a flight attendant look like?

In short, no day is exactly the same as the one before. Many family, friends, and customers ask me what ‘route’ do I fly, and I could literally be in Huntsville, Alabama one night and Los Angeles, California the next night. Generally speaking, flight attendants can fly anywhere between 1–4 flights on any given day. We are trained to work on any aircraft that the airline has in it’s fleet, so that could mean one long flight to another country, or three shorter flights within the states. No day is ever the same.

Flight attendants also do not work typical 8 hour shifts like most professionals do. We also do not work with the same people, hardly ever. Our duty day (a combination of the time we spend in the air, and on the ground) can be as long as 15 hours, but usually average about 10 hours. This again can vary widely on a day to day basis. For example, I recently worked a three day trip where the first day, I had a duty day of 7 hours, the second day was 8 hours, and the third day was 9 hours. The number of flights I worked each day, was 3, 4, 3, respectively. Flight attendants also can work 1 day trips, where we actually do not have to spend the night away from home. We can flight to a destination and then fly back home and be done.

Flight attendants also have reserve days, where we are on call and can literally be sent anywhere the company needs us to go. On call flight attendants are there for whenever the operation does not go as planned. i.e , a crew member calls out, a crew goes beyond their 15 hour duty day, or just anything that would require some flight attendants to be replaced. Depending on the company you work for, you can have between 6–18 reserve days per month.

I’d say in general, I spend about half of the month away from home. I personally enjoy getting to explore and layover in different cities, so that is not a problem…

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