Memoirs from the Orange Army

Tel Aviv

Ok so, last time we spoke, I was on my way back to Britain from Budapest but now I'm home and rested but still not properly unpacked...crew life.

For our first story, I recall one of my earliest memories, it was an unforgettable experience. It was a beautiful day for flying and although I was excited, I was a little apprehensive about flying to Israel. Israel doesn't hold a good reputation in the world's media and is often portrayed as a politically unstable country owing to recent events such as the war over Palestine or rights movements protests over various issues. Tel Aviv however is also seen as the forefront of the middle east and rightly dubbed as the 'Non Stop City' amongst other nicknames. It is home to world famous landmarks including the White City which is now recognised as a UNESCO world heritage site. Tel Aviv is also the epicentre of world famous night life and events planning making it one of the most economically developed and safest countries in the world.

After the usual saunter through the airport and briefing, we got to the aircraft and it was beautiful. It was a brand new aircraft barely two months old which was also the same amount of time I had been with the company myself. I had finished all of my security and equipment checks, everything seemed to be in perfect working order and my fellow colleagues and I were ready to board. The Cabin Manager was clutching the passenger manifest which indicated were expecting one hundred and sixty passengers onboard with two hundred bags in the hold. This meant the hold was almost at full capacity. In the cabin we had twenty spare seats which meant we had room to breathe a little. We could move people to empty seats to better suit their needs or they were extra spaces to place excess cabin bags.

As the passengers began to board, I had an expression of surprise when I saw them. I was already made aware that because it was Israel we were going to, there would be quite a large amount of Orthodox Jews in the demographics of our flight. The fact remained tough, I had never really seen one in real life and was therefore fascinated by the new clientele boarding the aircraft. They wore simple black suits and black hats that looked a little peculiar to me. Inside their suits they had these small strands of white string neatly knotted at certain points and they hung freely swaying in the draft of passing people. Their hair bore ringlets which trailed tightly and neatly down the sides of their faces. Many of them wore thick spectacles and nearly all of them were clutching various books and chattering away. I was mesmerised by the way they looked and acted, there were a lot of them. There were one hundred and fifty seven passengers who were Orthodox Jews leaving the three remaining passengers to be tourists.

The commotion in the cabin was inexplicable. I was quickly overwhelmed by hats, strings, books and bustled around by bags of food. Some of the men would not sit next to women, there were infants and children running up and down the cabin, hats and hat boxes being carefully placed into the overhead lockers filling up the space quicker than I could rearrange them. I have been marvelled at by many passengers during my career at the ability to organise luggage in the overhead lockers to maximise the space for more things which many people likened it to playing daily challenge on the old arcade classic Tetris. Within mere minutes, the overhead lockers were filled with trolley bags and hats, the seat pockets were filled with bits of paper and books and the space under the seats were filled with bags containing excessive quantities of food. The problem now was there were still even more items of luggage arriving onboard. We had completely run out of space onboard which meant we needed to get the baggage tags out and squeeze the remaining trolley bags into the hold.

After what seemed an eternity and forty tagged bags later, the Cabin Manager announced boarding was finally complete. I and another of my colleagues were still getting as many people to try and sit down whilst the aircraft doors were closed in preparation for our departure. I never had such a busy boarding as this, we had wait for an engineer to bring us more extension seatbelts because we had used all eighteen. I have never, even to this day, handed out so many extension belts out on a single flight as I had with this one. There were approximately twenty five or twenty six extension seatbelts in total. All pre-departure duties had finally been completed, the safety demo performed and now we were ready to take our passengers back home to Israel. Despite such a chaotic display during boarding, I still couldn't wait to get on our way as it was already a very long duty and the boarding had taken its toll. The only problem unfortunately was we had now been given a slot from Air Traffic Control.