There’s an underground cartoon book quietly making the rounds of the airline crew world. Most of what crews see daily appears in this collection which has become sort of a therapy outlet for flight attendants and pilots–which may be why the book registers so well with insiders in the airline crew world.
If you’re an airline passenger, you probably won’t see the collection, because it sells under the radar at Amazon Books: the title is designed to sidestep non-crewmembers, while airline pilots and flight attendants seem to find the collection a readily-available, quick escape from crewlife reality through a good laugh.
The pilot who drew all the cartoons and produced the underground collection purposely priced it below the cost of a basic Starbucks coffee ($3.99) on Kindle so that his fellow crewmembers could enjoy the cartoons instantly at the lowest price Amazon allows for the Kindle version. The paperback strains to stay under $10 (but it still does!) for over 150 pages of iconoclastic insider humor.
Cartoons are one way airline crews enjoy a little private de-stressing over the typical pressures of crew life outsiders just wouldn’t understand.
Often, the joke’s on crews themselves in the subtle satire of typical flight crew situations those in the know will understand only too well:
Often, crew life challenges extend from the air to the ground in ways only a flight attendant could make sense of–but they sure do:
In the most demanding aspects of crew life, there’s little slack: hours are long, rest scarce, delays and reassignments the rule rather than the exception. Crews handle all that, never letting passengers know of either the stresses they experience, nor the sardonic view of airline life that at least takes a little of the edge off of the relentless demands:
Since the collection was created and is drawn by an airline pilot who flies at least 90 hours a month, additional cartoons get added regularly as new situations play out from the airline crew perspective:
So, if you are a crewmember, you know where to find this little underground crewlife collection. It’s drawn by an airline crewmember for airline crewmembers and every newhire flight attendant who flies on my crew gets a copy gratis as a welcome to the crewlife world. If you’re considering crewlife as either an airline pilot or flight attendant, maybe you want to check this out for the insider view BEFORE you commit yourself to life as flight crew.
And if you’re the average airline passenger, maybe you want to see what your crew seems to be laughing about among themselves. Meanwhile, this little underground crewlife chronicle quietly finds its way into the right hands on flight decks and airline galleys worldwide.
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