Working for OSM Aviation / Norwegian Air Shuttle as a long haul 787 flight attendant will drain the life out of you, put you in a dire financial situation and overwhelm you with stress. If you take a job as a long haul 787 flight attendant with these companies understand you will be employed by the human resources company OSM Aviation and contracted to Norwegian Air Shuttle. Do your research on both companies. Here a sampling of what to expect from both.
1. They lie initially to get you to take the bait. You will be told you will work well over the guarantee of 55 hours monthly. This rarely happens which means your paychecks will be close to the minimum pay plus if you don’t fly often your per diem will not add up.
2. Norwegian’s scheduling process is a joke. There is no seniority or bidding system for monthly schedules. Some flight attendants will get multiple trips and high hours while others may only get one trip and below minimum hours in the same month. You have no choice in days, cities or cabin position. What they give you is what you get. There is no consistency from month to month and no effort to balance hours between all the crew members.
3. When not on your 8 days off you will be on standby whenever you do not have a trip assigned. This is similar to reserve at US airlines. Standby days at Norwegian are unpaid and do not count toward flight hours. If by chance you get called out you will have 90 minutes to get to the airport to check-in. This makes it impossible to get a second job because you never know if scheduling is going to call or not. However, they rarely call. In 2017 one flight attendant had 90 days of unused / unpaid standby days.
4. If they cancel your trip or sectors of a trip you are not pay protected. You will lose those hours, pay and per diem.
5. Any training days that are scheduled during the year are unpaid. They will tell you this is part of your guaranteed 55 hours.
6. If you are flown into your day off you will not be compensated for this unless it goes into it more than 6 hours.
7. If you speak a language other than English you are not compensated for that skill.
8. You will not have the ability to do trip trades on your own like most airlines in the US. To do a trip trade you are required to email Norwegian and hope they respond and approve the trade. The only way to get higher hours when they schedule you so low is to trade your standby days and day offs for someone else’s trip.
9. Many flight attendants have found their flight hours and per diem hours have been under calculated resulting in having to be back paid.
10. Currently for long haul 787 flight attendants the base pay maxes out at 4 years. This is unheard of for flight attendants at major airlines in the US.
11. Most of the layover hotels in Europe are not in the city centers but are close to the airports. You will have to travel usually 30 minutes to an hour by train or bus to get to the major sites and good restaurants. Some of the hotels are exceptional while others a considerably below standard.
12. The onboard service procedures are in efficient and changed frequently leaving crew members confused. Suggestions regarding ways to improve the service are ignored.
13. Both OSM Aviation and Norwegian Air Shuttle are extremely anti-union and are doing everything possible to delay getting a contract for the US based long haul 787 flight attendants who are part of the AFA union. The National Mediation Board is now involved.