Grinnan, who grew up in a family of US Airways pilots, said she still loves being a flight attendant. She met her husband, Greg Holden, when he worked as a US Airways gate agent. She enjoys the extraordinary camaraderie among her co-workers and meeting new people.
But Sept. 11 brought fear to her job. She heard the reports of what happened on the hijacked planes, how flight attendants simply doing their jobs ended up with their throats slit.
_____Graphic_____
•
Security Update: How Washington area airports are working to meet federal security requirements
|
| |
_____Live Online_____
•
Wednesday, 11 a.m. ET: The Post's Steven Pearlstein will be online to talk about hidden kickbacks in the economy and the legal attacks against them.
|
| |
_____Multimedia_____
•
Video: Passengers Prepare for Tighter Security
•
Video: Reagan National on 9/11
•
Video: New Security Measures
•
Graphic: TSA Uniform Proposal
•
Graphic: New Security Checkpoints
|
| |
|
She likes that the new, reinforced cockpit doors would make an attack more difficult, if not impossible, but they don't do much for her or her colleagues.
Almost a year after the attacks, she said, she has little extra training to fight off a hijacker. She knows now she should resist instead of cooperating, but she's not sure exactly how, beyond what she learned in about 10 minutes of lessons in how to scream "No!" while blocking an attacker with her elbows.
"I think the plane could land safely," Grinnan said, "but I don't feel any more personally protected."
Last fall, Grinnan spotted two men boarding her US Airways jet in Orlando, bound for BWI. The plane was nearly empty, with only seven passengers on the jet built to hold 140.
The two passengers looked of Middle Eastern descent, she said. Only five days had passed since the Sept. 11 attacks, and word was coming out that the hijackers had taken flying lessons in Florida. She and another flight attendant noticed that the men switched seats.
When Grinnan asked to see their itineraries, she noticed they had one-way tickets that had been delivered to a hotel room. The men were Pakistani and appeared to speak little English, and their visas were about to expire. They stuck to themselves. They had ignored the flight attendants' greetings.
"I just didn't feel comfortable," said Grinnan, who was serving as the head flight attendant.
So she asked the pilot to have the two men removed from the plane.
She worries that people will accuse her of racial profiling, but she would do the same thing today. It was their expiring visas and one-way tickets delivered to hotel rooms, not their skin tone, that made her nervous.
"I don't consider myself prejudiced at all," Grinnan said. "But the volume was on high. You looked everyone in the face. The cockpit was still vulnerable, and I was there to protect it. Everyone was nervous."
Today, Grinnan still finds herself noticing Middle Eastern passengers more than others, something she considers a "necessary byproduct" of four planes being hijacked by men of Middle Eastern descent.
"I don't feel threatened" by them, she said. "I just feel I need to be aware if they're on board."
She senses a new vigilance among her passengers. She can't see much of the cabin from the flight attendants' jump seats near the cockpit. On flights into and out of National, where passengers must stay seated for 30 minutes, people are quick to push the service call button if someone has left his or her seat for the bathrooms.
But they're also back, she said, to viewing her foremost as the provider of pillows and Cokes. "I really thought the flying public would become kinder and gentler, that they'd look me in the face and think, 'That's someone who could be killed' or 'That's someone who could save my life,' " Grinnan said. "But they haven't."
Life since Sept. 11 has brought frightening economic changes as well. Arlington-based US Airways, badly hurt by National's three-week closure and the nationwide drop in air travel, closed its MetroJet operations based at BWI, where Grinnan worked. When she was transferred to flights out of National and Dulles, her 15 years gave her less seniority among the more experienced Washington-based flight attendants.
Instead of enjoying layovers on the beaches of St. Croix or Florida, she now mostly flies the shuttle back and forth between Washington and Boston. She is back to working weekends. Her employer recently filed for bankruptcy protection.
She said she doesn't spend much time dwelling on whether she is truly safer than she was a year ago. She can't, she said, and still do her job well.
"There comes a point," she said, "when you have to settle back into a groove and trust that the government has done things to protect you more."
Staff writer Sara Kehaulani Goo contributed to this report.
