This brings new meaning to “airstrip.”
A stripping flight attendant might seem like an OnlyFans fantasy. However, that’s not the case for some air hostesses, who’ve turned to removing their clothes for cash and other desperate measures to make ends meet when not working the financially unfriendly skies.
“I am definitely not a girl that you would normally see in a strip club,” a stewardess, Bree, told NewsNation of her unlikely side hustle. “I grew up with a lot of morals, a lot of Christian morals. I have a partner, I have a job.”
However, after a long shift in the sky, the air hostess removes her wedding ring and stewardess uniform and prepares to begin her side gig at the strip club.
Unfortunately, this vocation exposed Bree to an unsavory environment rife with pimps, drug dealers, and scuzzy clients.
“I never had people asking me for blow jobs, and they would pay $500,” said the stewardess-cum-stripper, who opted to remain anonymous for fear of losing her stewardess job, while describing the change from her prior gig. “I would never get asked all the time if I could go home and have sex with somebody for money. This was not how I grew up.”
Of particular concern is fentanyl, which is so ubiquitous among Bree’s clientele that she learned to recognize its distinctive “peanut butter” scent, NewsNation reported.
She also carries Narcan with her in the event of an overdose from exposure — which can affect those who don’t even use the drug.
Bree said that her second job was borne out of “the need for survival.”
While flight attendants might seem like they make a lot of money, in reality they’re “dirt poor,” making under “$30,000 a year” in their first year, rued the crewmember. For reference, Bree rakes in between $300 and $1,000 per night stripping, enough to cover rent and more.
One problem is that many airlines, including United Airlines, don’t pay crewmembers for a lot of the time they’re on duty, including waiting at the gate, or while passengers are boarding or disembarking from the aircraft, NewsNation reported.
One flight attendant, named Kim, claimed that she is only compensated for around half the hours she works.
“You do training for six weeks, and you aren’t paid for any of that,” lamented the mother-of-three, who works for a major airline. “Sometimes, you work 10 1/2-hour days, and you get paid five.”
Kim added, “In all reality, I’m paid less than a McDonald’s worker.”
Stewardess Nasstasja Lewis claimed that her paycheck for working at a top airline was 250 bucks, enough to one outstanding bill and a trip to the grocery store for her and her son.
Left with no other recourse, the cash-strapped crew member resorted to eating passengers’ leftovers to tide herself over until her next payday. In the past, flight attendants have even stolen food from first-class snack baskets.
“You have to just put your pride aside and say, ‘Hey, I have to eat, or I don’t,’” Lewis said. “It does make you feel some kind of way during those times because you’re just like, ‘What am I doing here?’”
Thresia Raynor, a 17-year veteran with Alaska Airlines, was surprised at how many of her how many of her colleagues were homeless.
She told News Nation, “Every day at my job, I have to drop off a girl from a trip who has no car and transportation to a place of homelessness, or take her to a car where she lives, or quite often share meals with her at work because she has no food and no money for food.”
The mental toll is also alarming. A 2012 study found that the suicide rate among flight attendants is over one-and-a-half times that of the general population.
“A week doesn’t go by that I don’t hear another heartbreaking story from a flight attendant, and it’s from every single base,” said Ken Diaz, president of the United Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union — the largest in the nation.
He chalked up this airplane pauperdom to salaries not keeping pace with inflation, explaining: “No one’s ever experienced the cost of living like it is today. And when you put that wage rate in today’s cost of living, it’s nothing. They can’t survive.”
Liam Horgan, a first-year flight attendant with United Airlines who lives with 20 other crewmembers in the Bay Area, said his bosses even instructed him on how to apply for food stamps.
“I just feel like it’s kind of embarrassing that corporate greed has gotten to the point that management at these corporations are telling new hires, ‘Hey, we know we don’t pay you a living wage, so here’s how you can apply for welfare,’” he said.
United Airlines recently pledged to compensate their crewmembers fairly in line with the times.
“We are eager to reach the industry-leading agreement with our flight attendants that they deserve,” airline reps said in a statement, per NewsNation. We’re meeting with them the last week of October and again in November under the federal mediation process requested by the union. Both sides have been actively engaged in these negotiations.”
In the interim, like with Bree and others, flight attendants may have to get creative to stay aloft.
Some previous side gigs ranged from drug smuggling to — perhaps unsurprisingly given the times –social media channels on which they provide traveling tutorials and detail life working the oft-unfriendly skies.
In perhaps the most meta form of moonlighting yet, an American Airlines air hostess earns extra dough selling courses on how flight attendants can make money selling feet pictures online.
“I use a completely separate account from my main Instagram, and I just post a ton of pictures of my feet,’ she explained in one of her TikTok tutorials. “You have to actually look into feet photos and feet poses. Each different one has a specific name for what the pose is and people have different fetishes for each kind of pose.”
