Flight Attendant Union Pushes Federal Mandate To Add Crew On Widebody Jets — FAA Says Staffing Isn’t The Safety Problem

The largest flight attendants union is looking to the government to require airlines to staff more cabin crew on widebody planes because that means more union dues safety, which seems like a solution in search of a problem.

"This is fundamentally a safety issue. Our union is calling on Congress and the FAA to require at least one Flight Attendant per door exit on widebody aircraft.” @FlyingWithSara

— AFA-CWA (@afa_cwa) May 15, 2026

Their proposal is to require at least one flight attendant per door on widebody aircraft, so that no door is “uncovered” by a cabin crew member in an evacuation. For instance, on American’s Boeing 787-9P:

• There are eight exit doors
  
• FAA-certified minimum staffing is seven flight attendants
  
• American actually staffs more than that, but if crew got sick and called out they wouldn’t have to cancel the flight.

Generally flight attendant minimums are based on number of seats on the aircraft (one per 50 seats, for planes with more than 100 seats).

The argument is that flight attendants are supposed to assess whether an exit is usable in an evacuation, open usable doors, deploy slides, and command passengers getting off the plane. They are supposed to stop people from taking bags and coordinate with the cockpit. But without one flight attendant per door, passengers may open an exit they shouldn’t or take bags (of course, just a week ago, passengers ignored flight attendant instructions evacuating with bags, as they always do).

However, the FAA issued an evacuation report in 2022, reviewing nearly 300 real-world evacuation events, and found the overall level of safety in emergency evacuations “very high” already.

• There are about 30 evacuation events per year worldwide
  
• In the U.S. alone there are more than 10 million scheduled passenger flights per year
  
• There were no evacuation-related fatalities in the U.S. over the ten-year period reviewed.

The FAA explicity concluded that their review “did not identify current flight attendant staffing is inadequate.”

In any case, where there are evacuation issues they tend to be communication, training, passenger baggage, blocked exits, and smoke and fire, not the number of flight attendants. In other words, flight attendant staffing is among the lowest-priority items for evacuation safety.

Moreover, famously in the evacuation of American Airlines Flight 383 in Chicago in 2016, one passenger was seriously injured and the NTSB attributed this to (1) delayed shutdown of the left engine and (2) a flight attendant’s deviation from procedure allowing passengers out the left overwing exit while the engine was still operating, with lack of crew communication a contributing factor.

The legislative effort by AFA-CWA is not a serious safety program. Flight attendants who consider themselves professionals should be embarrassed by this – and angry. It diminishes the significance of their role to make work, where safety is just a fig leaf, and the message is they’re only needed because the government says so – rather than because of their contribution to the airline. Sara Nelson should be ashamed.