A year of pandemic flying exacts heavy toll on flight crews: union boss

Working conditions and the stress of the pandemic's effects on the travel industry are wreaking havoc on lives of flight attendants a year into the pandemic. For people in the airline industry having to try to deal with all this on their own, and particularly for flight attendants, a lack of good information from the US government has led to the isolation of people, genuine desperation as well as real disconnection from families and friends, said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA). AFA represents almost 50,000 flight attendants at 17 airlines. “We’re seeing a dramatic increase on mental health issues and that ranges from a lot of issues people are concerned about. Their health or their family’s health or actually dealing with very difficult things … having lost someone or having someone in the hospital,” Nelson said. “And then you layer on top of that the real insecurity about whether or not we’re even going to have a job.” To date, internal tracking by AFA shows that over 3,500 flight attendants have tested positive over the course of the pandemic and approximately 18 have died across the industry, an AFA spokesperson said. “And what has been very difficult is that in the beginning, you could track flight attendants getting exposed to Covid at work. And also, it was very clear when a flight attendant had passed,” Nelson said. “A year later, community spread makes it virtually impossible to tell whether or not someone has contracted this at work.”<br/>