COLUMN ONE : Rough Ride for Flight Attendants : After years of battling image problems, they say tough economic times have made things even worse. As struggling airlines seek concessions, passengers gripe about service cuts.

In her dozen years as a flight attendant, Angelica Eichinger has collected her share of war stories.

She kept passengers from panicking when an engine caught fire after takeoff. She called for an emergency landing after struggling to staunch the bleeding nose of a man whose artery burst.

And several times she has gracefully withstood verbal abuse from passengers who were angry because they couldn’t buy more liquor.

For these and other midair feats, Eichinger and her colleagues hunger for a greater measure of respect from their bosses and sometimes unappreciative customers. But such recognition doesn’t seem to be in the stars for the estimated 100,000 flight attendants working for U.S. carriers.

Despite three decades of favorable legislation and court victories, the soaring aspirations of flight attendants remain grounded by the brutal economics of the airline industry and biases dating to the “coffee, tea or me” era of 25 years ago.

Hard-pressed airlines are pushing attendants to work longer days, take shorter breaks, handle more passengers and do more cleaning up. Their salaries, which start at $13,000 at some major unionized carriers, lag far behind those of pilots or mechanics, with little prospect of catching up.

In fact, the average starting pay for attendants at major carriers is $14,496, compared to $26,180 for mechanics and $27,720 for pilots, according to the Future Aviation Professionals of America, a job bank for airline employees.

Flight attendants, 85% of whom are women, also see discrimination in the sometimes humiliating weight restrictions and appearance codes that apply to them but not to other airline employees. And they say they often feel taken for granted by passengers who do not realize the level of responsibilities they face. Attendants are trained to do everything from extinguishing on-board fires to providing first aid.

In short, flight attendants want to be treated like professionals. But they often face passengers who, Eichinger said, “don’t realize you’re there for their safety. They think you’re there just to smile and say, ‘What would you like to drink?’ ”

And for attendants who already feel scorned by customers, consumer anger over the recent five-day walkout against American Airlines has only made matters worse. It’s unbelievable “that a bunch of waitresses could shut down an airline,” sniped radio talk show host Howard Stern. “That’s like the shoeshine guys shutting down Amtrak.”

Moreover, some industry observers consider the job a low-status, dead-end career by design. The airlines’ minimum education requirements usually call for no more than a high school diploma and four to six weeks of training.

“It’s the same job, whether you’re 25 years old or 80 years old,” said John Hintz, a board member of the National Business Travel Assn., a group representing corporate travel managers.

Also, he said, many flight attendants “don’t clearly understand the financial constraints the industry is up against.”

Airline executives recognize that today’s flight attendants are more sophisticated, career-oriented and demanding than in the past. But, they say, employees must learn to adapt to a new era in which the carriers that turn a profit are those with the lowest fares and most productive workers.

“We have no choice but to try and find a way to get our costs down to a point where we can be more competitive with the low-cost carriers of the industry,” said Al Becker, an American Airlines spokesman. “The challenge is how do you adjust to competing with a low-cost carrier without undermining the quality of life and the lifestyle and earning power of your employees.”

The complaints of flight attendants sometimes reflect more than the frustrations of employees seeking a better deal for themselves.

“The kind of work they do, to be continuously nice to 800 passengers in a bunch, is . . . emotional labor,” said Arlie Russell Hochschild, a UC Berkeley sociologist who wrote about the psychological toll of flight attendants’ jobs in her 1983 book, “The Managed Heart.”

They are required to be extraordinary performers, Hochschild said. One main challenge is to make the flight “a comfortable, relaxed arena to get people’s minds off of crashes.”

“Part of the job is disguising that you’re doing the job,” she said. “Part of the job is to seem like you’re having a good time at your own party.” Consequently, attendants “feel starved for credit and for acknowledgment that there is work involved.”

On a daily basis, their jobs involve everything from helping customers board and preparing meals to lifting luggage and sweeping carpets.

Despite such humdrum duties and frustrations over how they are perceived, attendants say they fly because they enjoy the travel and flexible work schedules. Charles Chien, an American Airlines flight attendant from Manhattan Beach, plays the piano professionally when he isn’t in the air, arranging his concerts between flights. “There aren’t many other jobs that would let me do that,” Chien said.

Donna O’Neil, a USAir flight attendant, was attracted to the job nearly 20 years ago because she did not want to get stuck behind a desk working 9 to 5.

“It was wonderful to be a flight attendant,” said the 41-year-old Annapolis, Md., resident. “Sometimes, you would end up flying to an awful place. And then many times you found yourself in Acapulco, Mexico, for 20 hours.”

Eichinger, 37, a single parent from Whittier who works for American, says her usual routine--three days on the job followed by four days off--gives her more time with her children, ages 7 and 8.

On top of that, she said, “You talk to CEOs and movie stars. You get the diverse backgrounds of all your passengers. That makes the job.”

But over the years, attendants and their unions have objected to many airline management practices, particularly ones they consider sexist.

They cite advertising campaigns dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. When the now-defunct National Airlines came out with a “Fly Me, I’m Cheryl” ad, rival Continental replied with “We Really Move Our Tails for You” and hired Playboy bunnies as part of a promotion. (Even today, advertising from foreign carriers such as Singapore Airlines’ “Singapore girls” commercial continues to draw complaints.)

Weight restrictions also remain a sharp point of contention. For a 30-year-old, 5-foot-5 female attendant at United Airlines, for instance, 135 pounds is the acceptable limit.

“A lot of flight attendants start taking laxatives and weight-loss pills before weigh-ins because they don’t want to lose their jobs,” said Jill Gallagher, a spokeswoman for the Assn. of Flight Attendants, the largest of the attendants’ unions. Gallagher said pregnant women are particularly hurt by the restrictions.

Still, the occupation has come a long way since 1930, when Boeing Air Transport hired the first attendants, the “Original Eight,” also known as “skygirls.” All eight women were nurses, 24 or younger, and each weighed less than 115 pounds.

The industry established grooming and appearance standards and lifestyle restrictions: Marriage and pregnancy were grounds for dismissal. Some stewardesses, as they were known, were required to sign contracts agreeing to retire by the age of 32.

But with the equal pay and civil rights acts of the mid-1960s, circumstances improved. As many of the traditional employment restrictions disappeared, more attendants started seeing their jobs as long-term careers.

The average length of service for flight attendants has soared from about 18 months in 1968 to about nine years.

Deregulation of the airline industry, which began in 1978, launched a cost-cutting frenzy that still continues. Now American executives and their peers at United, Delta and other carriers are under pressure to squeeze more out of workers in order to improve productivity and match the low fares of fast-growing carriers like Southwest Airlines and Reno Air.

These efforts to cut costs and boost productivity have undermined the flight attendants’ bid for upward mobility in pay and professional standing.

The American Airlines dispute--triggered largely by management’s push for concessions on work rules and benefits, along with a pay offer that disappointed the union--underscores the economic tug of war confronting flight attendants. American estimates that it would save about $1 billion annually if its labor costs and productivity were similar to low-cost, low-fare Southwest’s, where workers tend to work longer hours and perform more duties--for about the same pay--than their peers.

The major carriers are “faced with a growing segment of the industry that has significantly lower costs,” said David Swierenga, chief economist of the Air Transport Assn. of America, an airline trade group. “Flight attendants are faced with becoming more productive or seeing their airline become uncompetitive and shrink.”

But workers complain that they continue to pay the price for the large amounts of debt the major airlines took on to finance the expansion of the 1980s.

Concessions and improved productivity have translated into more work and less or stagnant pay for many flight attendants. O’Neil, who works on USAir’s East Coast shuttle, estimates she is earning 20% less than she did in 1980.

O’Neil and her colleagues took the pay cut in 1986 when the shuttle’s previous owner--now-defunct Eastern Airlines--asked employees for concessions to turn the company around.

“It did me no good,” O’Neil said. “Eastern went into bankruptcy. When you give hard cash back, you will never recoup it.”

After labor talks failed with attendants earlier this year, Alaska Airlines reduced the number of attendants on some trips. Sandra Morrow says most of her flights are staffed with three attendants instead of four.

“Instead of doing two beverage services, you can barely get one done,” said Morrow, 38, whose union plans to return to the negotiating table next month after contract talks broke down in June over concessions.

Like most attendants, Morrow gets paid only for the time she flies--not for waiting at airports for the next plane. On a typical assignment, Morrow, who lives near Riverside, arrives for a briefing at Ontario International Airport about 5:30 a.m.--one hour before flight time. Then she flies to San Jose, then to Portland, Ore. She makes another round trip between the two cities before spending a night in Portland.

The next morning, she shows up at the airport at 5:40 a.m. for a flight to San Jose and returns to Ontario about 10 that morning.

On that schedule, over two days Morrow will only get paid for the nine hours and 12 minutes of flight time in addition to less than $40 a day for expenses.

“People think traveling and being in hotels and being in different cities is fun,” Morrow said. “But doing it every day isn’t.”

In the new era of low-frills service, irritated passengers can be troublesome.

“Customers take out their frustrations on the flight attendants for all kinds of things that go wrong that have nothing to do with the flight attendants,” said Peter Cappelli, an airline labor expert and management professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “They have to be the buffer . . . and it places emotional demands on them that few other jobs do.”

Take, for example, the Great Peanut Wars. As a way to reduce expenses, many airlines have cut back on snacks and meals, sometimes replacing peanuts with a less expensive treat such as pretzels. The result: People bark at flight attendants, demanding their peanuts.

Even new passenger services create headaches. Individual video players installed in some first-class sections allow travelers to choose their own movies. The trouble is that the units often don’t work, said Chien, a 10-year American Airlines veteran.

“And, of course, it’s my fault if it’s not working,” he said. “Whenever something goes wrong, the passenger sees it as my fault.”

Still, Chien said, such grousing isn’t as bad as the time he told one passenger caught smoking in the lavatory to put out his cigarette. The passenger slapped him.

Some customers “think that because they paid for their ticket that you are there to be abused,” he said.

Unwanted sexual advances, long a hazard of the job, seem to be taking a back seat to other evils, including work-related health concerns, attendants say.

On international flights, where smoking is allowed, attendants complain of sinus problems. On all flights, bad backs, aching feet and dry skin are common afflictions. They also worry about excessive exposure to radiation and germ-filled recirculated air.

Tough economic times portend a bumpy ride for flight attendants. They probably will continue to be caught in the middle between airlines pressing for concessions and passengers upset by declining levels of service.

“I think it’s going to be a real rough road,” said O’Neil of USAir. “It’s real scary.”