Cabin Pressure

There is nothing heroic about Steven Slater.

Slater is the JetBlue flight attendant whose dramatic Monday meltdown has become a curious cause célèbre among the take-this-job-and-shove-it crowd. As his assigned flight from Pittsburgh to New York’s JFK Airport was taxiing to the arrival gate, a woman reportedly stood up and began removing luggage from an overhead compartment. As he was instructing her to sit down, things got a bit physical. In a written statement to a New York court, Slater said, "I lost patience after a female passenger had an argument with another passenger and then opened the bin door hitting me on the head without apologizing.” In fact, she offered an expletive instead. Faced with a situation requiring tact and maturity, Slater chose not to step up but to step out.

In a meltdown reminiscent of Peter Finch’s deranged on-air “mad as hell” speech in the film Network, Slater grabbed the plane’s intercom to announce, “I’ve had it” – though not that succinctly – in a tirade that included volleying the passenger’s unladylike expletive back at her as a compound word. He then grabbed a can of beer from the beverage cart, popped the cabin door, inflated the emergency evacuation chute and slid into American folklore.

Slater’s mother, a retired flight attendant, told television reporters that her son actually exercised more restraint than she would have in the same situation. As I write this, a Facebook fan page dedicated to his antics has 178,381 followers, and the newly-unemployed and potentially unemployable Slater is being hailed as a working-class hero. Apparently, lessons learned at home have carried him far.

I find in Steven Slater more to be pitied than admired, more evidence of a deeply disturbed and conflicted personality than of an emblematic crusader. According to police, Slater’s dramatic exit was not immediate; he was reportedly sent to the front of the plane to cool down, and was observed drinking alcohol freely. In his MySpace profile, Slater describes himself as “Beating alcoholism and substance abuse ‘one day at a time.’” Monday wasn’t one of those days. Besotted thinking may be evident in his PA announcement, “I’ve been in this business 28 years,” an impressive achievement for a 39-year-old.

Slater’s conflicted view of his job is found in some of his regular posts, as “skyliner747,” to the online industry forum Airliners.net, in which he discusses the very issues that came to a head this week. On January 18, 2008, he vigorously deplored the actions of an agitated flight attendant who apparently exchanged angry words with a passenger:

“If the flight attendant did indeed speak the words alleged afterwords [sic] and rant and rave…then she obviously lost the very composure she was hired to have…. I have found that a little tact and diplomacy on my part goes a long, long way to making my own job much easier. ‘Busy’ or not, unprofessionalism is unacceptable, and you don't speak to people that way. Period…. I am always amazed by the (fortunately few) FA's on power trips. We know who they are, and as unpleasant as they are for the passenger, imagine the nightmare of working three days with these people in that close proximity!”

By contrast, his comment on March 17^th of this year, rendered here exactly as posted, makes him seem to have hardened: “I hate to be bag nazi when i work a flight, but I feel if I am not, then I am letting down all those who cooperate and thry to help out as well.”

In every account I’ve seen, other flight attendants are appalled by his behavior – “unprofessional” is the common description – and the great injury it has done to their good names. They seem to be in general agreement that no amount of provocation can establish an excuse for Slater’s actions. So how has the industry’s bête noir become America’s man of the hour?

I submit that the popular appeal of Steven Slater’s psychotic episode proves that the new model of public discourse in America is the tantrum. Our cable channels have devolved into little more than protracted, program-length tantrums about politics and culture and people we just don’t like, and such institutionalized outrage has become a standard that suborns individually outrageous behavior. When we make angry people our heroes, personal restraint equates to weakness.

Maybe Slater is such an online darling because bad manners suffuse so much of the online community. Emboldened by username anonymity in increasingly rude web interactions, civil discourse has been replaced by the instant gratification of in-your-face exchanges calculated to give offense. Immune to the idea that maturity is measured by one’s ability to delay gratification, too many ouchy, self-absorbed people are just one indignity away from behaving disgracefully in person. But only the immature throw tantrums, or admire those who do.

Steven Slater’s actions cost JetBlue plenty: $25,000 to replace the emergency slide, plus lost use of the aircraft while the work is underway. The airline has also distributed $10,000 worth of flight vouchers as an apology to the passengers aboard his flight. It’s reasonable to assume that the carrier will act to recover its losses from the “hero” who caused them.

Add the potential civil judgment to the other costs incurred by Slater himself: loss of a career and a possible felony record for malicious mischief, reckless endangerment and trespassing. His defenders say the charges are too severe, considering – no doubt – that he was provoked. And, that they find it entertaining. But this was no wacky prank. Beyond the loss to JetBlue, there is the manifestly unsafe act of deploying the emergency slide while the plane was at the gate, an explosive, 3,000-p.s.i. event that took six seconds or less and placed ground crews at risk of injury or death. Thankfully, no one was injured and, fortunately, Slater’s emotional shortcomings were revealed in an episode other than a genuine emergency in which the emotional demand would have been exponentially greater.

I think it’s only fair and probably unnecessary to say that Steven Slater is an aberration in a profession otherwise worthy of our esteem. When his 15 minutes of fame is over, we can get back to remembering flight attendants Donna Dent, Doreen Welsh, and Sheila Dail, who earned the world’s admiration and gratitude by guiding 150 passengers to safety as US Airways Flight 1549 floated helplessly in the frigid Hudson River. Or we can appreciate the everyday heroics of the Lufthansa flight attendant in this video, who used a pillow fight to raise coach passengers’ spirits.

There are heroes great and small in every walk of life. But in his or any other, Steven Slater is not one of them.