We read a lot on this forum about cabin crews.

About their performance, their looks, their atitudes, their friendliness or unfriendliness, their age, the excellent or very bad service they provide, their uniforms... and so on, and so on.

First of all, there is good and bad in everyone of us. Everybody can be a hero, and there are a lot of people who act somehow heroically and selfless everyday: nurses, doctors, paramedics, policeofficers, firefighters...

But after the death of Uli Derickson - The heroine of TWA flight 847 - I would like to dedicate this topic to all flight attendants who honoured the profession by acting heroically in very serious, dangerous and bad situations and incidents their respective flights have encountered.

Let me name some of the heroic flight attendants that come to my mind! They all went far beyond the call of duty!!!

Let´s start with Uli Derickson, who was the purser of TWA flight 847 which was hijacked after departing Athens for Rome with more than 150 people onboard in June of 1985.
She took the lead in calming the hijackers, fellow crewmemebers and passengers and keeping a very bad situation from getting even worse!
She bought 5000 $ worth of fuel with her Shell creditcard, used her position as the hijackers German interpreter to conjure, mollify and trick them. She hid the passports of Jewish passengers and walked up and down the aisle and tried to keep the hijackers from hitting passengers. She was clearly in control of the situation, though certainly on the edge. She was able to convince the gunmen to let off women and children.
A true hero of not just one brave, selfless moment but through 55 hours of terror!
She said: "I just didn´t want to be helpless"!
She died in february at the age of 60! I have the utmost respect for her!

Same goes for Gabriele Dillmann, who was a young flight attendant onboard the Lufthansa Boeing 737 "Landshut" which was hijacked on its way from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt in november 1977. At the age of only 23, she acted as a guardian angel to the hostages through the 5 day ordeal.
This later brought her the honour of being called "Der Engel von Mogadishu"/"The Mogadishu Angel", which she personally never really liked! She never saw herself as a hero. But she truly was!
When the situation seemed to be desperate and hopeless, she pleaded through a very touching radio message for the German government to spare the hostages lives by following the terrorists demands, not knowing that help was on the way and their freeing was already planned! The same night the "GSG9 German special forces" stormed the aircraft, killing 3 of the 4 terrorists and saving all surviving hostages - the captain of the flight was murdered in Yemen!
Gabriele Dillmann is now married and lives in southern Germany, where she enjoys being an artist! She never came back to work as a flight attendant!

Neerja Bhanot was the senior purser on Pan Am flight 73, which was hijacked on a stopover in Karachi, Pakistan on its scheduled service from Bombay to Frankfurt, Germany and New York in september of 1986.
The entire cabin crew was very junior! All the flight attendants were Indian nationals and in their early 20´s. In fact they were all hired less than a year before the tragic hijacking. They were the first group of flight attendants being recruited by Pan Am in India to establish a Bombay Flight Attendant Base! This made Neerja Bhanot the senior purser at the age of only 23.
4 armed, brutal gunmen took over the plane on the ground in Karachi, with more than 300 people onboard. The flightdeck crew escaped through the cockpit windows, after being warned through interphone by one of the flight attendants. This left the Boeing 747 without pilots and Neerja and the other young flight attendants in charge of the violent situation. There was not much they could do, but calming passengers and hijackers. They also hid the passports of many Americans as they feared the hijackers would single them out. After 17 hours the APU went off and the aircraft dark and powerless. The terrorists obviously in shock and panic started to pray and then opened an unaimed gunfire in the cabin trying to kill as many people as possible, they also threw handgrenades. At this point Neerja Bhanot and some other flight attendants were able to open emergency exits, deploy evacuation slides and leading many passengers to safety. The hijackers attacked Neerja Bhanot, as she tried to shield three children from bullits. She was badly wounded, taken off the aircraft alive by her fellow crewmembers, but later died of massive bleeding.
Neerja Bhanot was posthumiously awarded one of Indias most prestigious awards and was the first woman ever to recieve it!

Michelle Honda, a flight attendant of 19 years for Aloha Airlines was working flight 243 a Boeing 737-200, that lost 18 feet of its roof and fuselage structure, while flying in 24.000 feet on its way from Hilo to Honolulu. During the rapid decompression the lead flight attendant was ejected from the aircraft to a watery grave, another flight attendant was badly injured, while Michelle Honda suffered bruises when thrown violently to the floor. During the flight and emergency descent, she was able to crawl up and down the aisle to render assistance to passengers, helping them with their lifejackets and calming those who were especially distressed. She was all by herself! She prepared the passengers for the emergency landing and later assisted to evacuate them and giving first aid. She must have been shocked and scared like all the others but amazingly kept her senses and did exactly the right things!

Wan Wen Hwang was a China Airlines flight attendant working on a Boeing 707, which was involved in a landing accident in Manila and met disaster in 1980. The aircraft caught fire and the cabin crew started to evacuate. Wan Wen Hwan stayed onboard the burning wreck and helped passengers out until her own uniform caught fire, she sufferd higher degree burns. She then ran to the forward exit, only to learn the the evacuation slide had already melted. She jumped out on the tarmac and survived. After recovering from her injuries she went back and continued to work as a flight attendant.

These are just a few examples of truly heroic flight attendants. Others include:

Beverly Raposa, the Eastern Airlines flight attendant, that saved lives after the first widebody airliner, an Eastern L1011 TriStar, flight number 401 crashed in the Florida Everglades.

Arthur Bradbury and Joanna Toff of British Airtours flight 28, a Boeing 737-200 which caught fire after an engine exploded during take-off in Manchester, England.

The cabin crew of the TWA L1011 TriStar that caught fire during take-off from JFK in 1993 (?) and who lead all their passengers to safety in less than 2 minutes.

The flight attendants of United flight 811, which lost its forward cargo door after departing Honolulu for Auckland, subsequently suffering a rapid decompression!

I could go on. I just wanted to share some of the true stories of heroic flight attendants, that amazed me in the past.

If you want to add any information on any of the incidents listed above, please feel free to do so. Also any other stories you may wanna share are highly welcome.

Thanks for reading and to all of you, the flying public and all my fellow flight attendants, SAFE FLYING and please stay out of trouble and be safe in your daily walk of life!

Best regards,

L1011Lover