by Gary Leff
‘Spicy Flight Attendant’ Cierra Misst, who used to work regional jets for Republic Airways which is an Express carrier for American, United and Delta, returned to social media after having her accounts banned as the result of complaints by other cabin crew.
Her advice posts are dubious, like buying on Tuesdays for the cheapest tickets, and assigning yourself a seat at the back of the plane to improve your chances of an upgrade. Her stories of inflight antics are equally questionable.
She’s even claimed that she worked a flight to Nashville, where the crew would overnight, where the passengers were all bachelor and bachelorette party groups. Everyone got handsy, several people joined the Mile High Club – including a new pilot.
This is simply implausible. My best guess, based on the airline and aircraft, is that this would have been a Republic flight operating as American Eagle from New York JFK to Nashville. That gets her a generously long flight for the best chance of this story being true. (Ignore some of the photos in her video, they’re clearly not all of the flight in question.)
- New York JFK – Nashville is about 2.5 hours on a Embraer 175. Let’s assume it took awhile to get into the mood, and also that there was no activity during the first and last half hour of the flight.
- There are two lavatories – at the front and the back of the plane. So from a pure efficiency standpoint multiple Mile High Club events would be possible (though these aren’t super large lavatories – degree of difficulty alone cuts against the likelihood this is true).
- Each pilot would have spent most of their time in the co*ckpit. Sure, maybe they came out for a bit, but enough time to set the stage for this?
- Probably each group of passengers was gender-segregated. And while it’s possible some of these incidents were same-sex, any opposite sex encounters would have been between people who had just met. Possible, but how many of these couplings would have happened so quickly?
People have been joining the ‘Mile High Club’ since 1916 when Lawrence Burst Sperry, inventor of the autopilot, took a Curtis C-2 Flying Boat off the coast of Long Island and spent time with a woman whose husband was off in World War I. They crashed the plane into the bay and were rescued – naked – by duck hunters. If they could manage the feat then anything is possible, but a sudden breakout of Mile High Club antics on a short regional jet flight that even includes crew and where no one was even trying to be surreptitious seems especially unlikely.
