Opinion Poll: What Would You Do In This Flight Attendant’s Situation?

You are a flight attendant. It is Christmas Eve, and there is chaos all around. The winter storm is almost nation-wide, and the delays have been maddening. You feel sorry for the ticket agents dealing with angry passengers. For most of the day, you have been dealing with passengers who are generally happy; between the time that they have made it on the flight and are going home, and the time they find out their luggage has been lost.
You are well rested. Despite full hotels the company had managed to secure rooms for you and your fellow crewmembers, but you heard other crews were not so fortunate. This 5-hour cross-country flight will bring all the crewmembers home. You promised your 6 and 7 year old kids that Santa would come through, that you would be home for Christmas… but you should have been home 3 days ago. Repeated cancelled flights and last minute scheduling changes has led to this unfortunate situation.
You are the in-charge flight attendant, there are six others on board. They are mostly new-hires, not senior enough to take these days off. Then again, you couldn’t get these days off either. You have been together for the past five days. Today in particular has been very long, this will be your third flight. Your duty time is about to run out. You already received an extension, but that too is running out.
You have been on this plane trying to depart for the past 4 hours now. The plane had been deiced, but weather came in. The pilots waited for the weather to clear, but needed to be deiced again. Then sitting in line to depart for so long burning gas, the plane needed to be refueled. Then deiced again. Once again you are in line to depart.
You look at your watch. That’s it. If you took off right now and the flight time was all timely, you would arrive 1 minute over your duty time. You would be knowingly violating company policy. You may also be violating federal air regulations as well, but you don’t know for sure.
You look up at a fellow flight attendant. She too is looking at her watch. She looks up, forces a smile, then quickly looks away. Does she know? The two pilots will be making their first and only flight of the day, but you and your six fellow flight attendants are all in violation. Nobody says a word…
You are called to the flight deck. The captain looks at you and tells you “Alright. Forecast weather at the destination is very good, so lots of guys diverting there. Dispatch tells me average hold time to land is about 45 minutes. Good thing we refueled, we can hold for hours if we have to. Here everything is shutting down. Some really bad stuff is blowing in from the west within the hour. Good thing we’re eastbound. Couple guys were asked to return to the gate, but apparently there are no gates to return to. Some arrivals have been waiting 30 minutes for ramp crews to move empty planes out of the gates. They aren’t letting any departures go. Heard some guys who were waiting for pushback, are now deplaning. Glad that wasn’t us. Now I don’t know what is going on, the runways look fine. They probably ran out of deicing fluid, or maybe someone crashed their truck on the ramp. Nobody’s letting me know.”
You listen to the roar as another aircraft departs.
“We’ll probably be the last plane to leave today. Four hours behind schedule, but it will be good to be home. Just wanted to update you on the situation before take-off. The passengers aren’t getting anxious are they? Is the crew still ready to go?”
The first officer looks over to the Captain and tells him they’re next for take-off.
What do you do?

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