London Layovers - 1983 to 1986

From 1978 to 1986 I worked for Trans World Airlines as what my gay English friends referred to as a Trolly Dolly aka a Flight Attendant.

Although I had various domestic and international routes, London was my most frequent destination.

We would arrive early in the mornings and be whisked away to our layover hotel, The Kensington Hilton. Although the crew would be tired from working the transatlantic flight, the time difference kept some of the younger diehards awake and alert. We would gather in the lobby lounge, which served as a breakfast cafe and later on as a piano bar. It wasn’t coffee or tea we ordered, but rather “crew tea.”  As we were not allowed to drink alcoholic beverages in uniform, and the fact that we didn’t want to go to our rooms and change and come back down, TWA crews for as far as one can remember had a pact with the hotel staff, that if we ordered “crew tea” we would be served beer in a teapot and drink it in cups and saucers.

The little buzz would help some get to sleep right away, but the layovers, from block to block, were a mere 24 hours (an airline term which delineated the time an airplane comes to a complete stop at the gate to when it begins to move, defined by an actual small rubber block that was traditionally placed at the base of the front wheel, a purely ceremonial act, as I am certain it could not impede a large Jumbo 747 or a Lockheed 1011 from moving).

The fact that I was an airline brat, with my father and all five of his brothers working for various airlines, I had always wanted to be a Fight Attendant since I was a young child. Furthermore, as I fell in love with photography in high school, I was determined more than ever to combine my love of travel with that of photography.

From left to right, my father holding me at age 3 months; my father Georges Samaha in Middle East Airlines uniform; and again, third from left, with three of his brothers at the Beirut International Airport, circa 1958.

With 35mm cameras being bulky and much too heavy to carry in my limited “crew kit,” I mostly used an Olympus XA, a professional grade point-and-shoot camera to photograph the neighborhoods close to the Kensington Hilton, namely Shepherds Bush, Notting Hill, Earl’s Court, and Holland Park, although not exclusively.

The selection of photographs I am presenting here are from 1983 to 1986, when my career and that of many others came to an abrupt halt, with the hostile takeover of TWA by a corporate raider who trashed the Flight Attendant union, cut F/A salaries by half, resulting in the Union walking out on a strike that lasted for several years.

Consequently I left the airlines and went back to university to study technical photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where I received Eastman Kodak Company’s very first scholarship to a photography student, and where I was recruited to test the prototype of the very first real digital camera and to evangelize it all over the world, including in London 1n 1991.