Mood of Calm Marks Burbank Airport on Strike’s 1st Day : Travel: Polite picketers, philosophical passengers help ease local impact of flight attendants’ walkout. American’s agents scramble to reroute stranded flyers.

It easily could have turned ugly: harried pre-holiday travelers, unhappy striking flight attendants--all with definite, though conflicting, goals.

But at the Burbank Airport, the overall mood Thursday was one of relative calm.

There was the expected logjam at the ticketing counter as employees of American Airlines scrambled to reroute passengers to other airlines. And some passengers were concerned about contacting relatives who were scheduled to pick them up once they reached their destination.

Still, for all the hassle, travelers in Burbank seemed to take the strike in stride. And, though obviously determined to win their demands, the striking attendants might have been the most polite picketers the city has ever seen--the only thing they didn’t do is hand out packages of peanuts.

“Ain’t we got fun?” said Gloria Goble of Burbank, who was traveling with relatives to Springfield, Mo. “I’m not going to get worked up about it. I’ll save my blood pressure for something else.”

The relatively smooth handling of the strike in Burbank could be related to the fact that American Airlines has only four flights scheduled out of the airport daily, all to Dallas. In Dallas passengers can catch a connecting flight to any location American flies to, American Airlines officials said.

Thursday, all four flights flew out of Burbank, but only one carried passengers. The empty flights continued on to Dallas to be “in position” for other scheduled flights, said Don Bedwell, an American Airlines spokesman. The planes also carry mail and cargo.

American agents either rescheduled travelers with other airlines that fly out of Burbank or shuttled travelers to LAX or Ontario to catch flights.

“We just want to convey the fact that customer service is still a priority,” said American General Manager Lynda Johnson, as she checked Southwest Airlines flights at a computer terminal.

“We will do everything we can to handle our customers as efficiently and professionally as possible.”

Meanwhile travelers were doing things on their own to make the delays easier to bear. In the line in front of the American counter, writer Ken Marchant, attorney Martha Evans and product quality analyst Darin P. Tiernan passed the hourlong wait trading quips and cracks about the strike, the dependability of substitute airline crews and their bad luck.

“You can whine and cry or you can make it OK,” said Evans, who was on her way to Houston for a hearing Friday morning. “At least these are polite pickets.”

“I must be some-kind-of-stupid getting into the air with a bunch of (angry) employees,” joked Marchant as he waited to be rerouted. “I just want to know if the pilots are (angry).”

Tiernan had planned his “one extended vacation this year” specifically to avoid the original strike date.

“Then they bumped it to the 18th and I still got screwed,” he said.

Some speculated that people in Southern California have grown so accustomed to calamity recently that a strike simply fails to get the blood racing and the ire up the way it might have in the past.

Or maybe the calm had something to do with the goofy hats worn by otherwise uniformed ticket agents at the nearby Southwest Airlines counter. While American Airlines employees were in the throes of a crisis, Southwest’s agents were celebrating “fun hat day.”

“We take our hats off to customers,” said one agent wearing a floppy flower print hat with a large gaudy gold broach in the middle. One of her co-workers sported a Keystone Kop police helmet.

But there definitely were some who were perturbed by the scene, such as the mother with three children pushing carry-on luggage through the airport. “I’m, like, really stressed. Could you talk to somebody else?” she said with a nervous smile.

And while travelers appreciated the rescheduling, many said American Airlines officials reassured them on the phone that flights were not going to be canceled.

“We called up to the last minute and they said it was fine and to come,” said Janice Jones, who was traveling to Orlando with her husband Gerald to see their 5-month-old grandson Zachary and their 4-year-old granddaughter Ayasha. “We got here and they canceled it. We wish they would have been more honest with us. We feel that they already knew.”

The Jones’ ended up being placed on a shuttle to Los Angeles and then flew Delta Airlines to Florida.

Outside Terminal A, which houses American Airlines, and at other locations, about 25 flight attendants walked in small groups carrying picket signs.

Carola Schroeder, a flight attendant for nine years, and Julie-Anne MacGregor, who has worked for American for 10 years, said they were prepared to strike “as long as it takes.”

“I’m sure most of us would like for this to be over now,” MacGregor said. But the attendants said their raises were much less than company officials allege and, because attendants are being asked to pay more for medical benefits, even that increase would be virtually canceled out.

“I’ve been offered a 1% pay raise,” MacGregor said.

Because it is not uncommon for flight attendants to be married to American Airlines pilots, the strike is “a double-edged sword,” Schroeder said.

“My husband is a pilot. If flights don’t go out, he doesn’t get paid,” beyond a minimum base salary that pilots earn, she said.

In conversations among themselves and with interested travelers, they questioned the ability levels of substitute attendants. The substitutes have been trained in eight days to perform the duties they learned in a 6 1/2-week training course, updated with frequent in-service training, the attendants said.

“Eight days?” asked one passenger with a look of concern. “Oh my God!”