200 Air Smiles with every purchase

'The sheer bulk of farewells after a flight is unmatched. What I want to know is: how do the stewards train?'

I got off a plane from Rome the other day, and the air stewardess by the exit said "Goodbye" warmly, and gave me a glowing smile. I smiled back, touched. Standing next to her was an air steward, who also smiled radiantly at me and said, "Goodbye." I reacted to his evident fondness for me and smiled goodbye back, though I couldn't remember having seen him on the flight.

I got off a plane from Rome the other day, and the air stewardess by the exit said "Goodbye" warmly, and gave me a glowing smile. I smiled back, touched. Standing next to her was an air steward, who also smiled radiantly at me and said, "Goodbye." I reacted to his evident fondness for me and smiled goodbye back, though I couldn't remember having seen him on the flight.

The next person who spoke to me was my wife, who said, with no special warmth, "Did you remember the umbrella?", which I hadn't. I smiled wanly and said, "No problem. Just slip back into the plane and get it."

Unfortunately, there were still about 100 people to get off, so I stood in the first row of seats, waiting for them to file out, just in front of the stewards' cubbyhole, through which everyone was passing, and it was then that it dawned crushingly on me for the first time that when you leave a plane, it isn't just you that the stewards and stewardesses give a flashing smile to.

They do it to everybody else as well.

"Goodbye," warm smile, "Goodbye," warm smile, "Goodbye," warm smile, "Goodbye"...

Endlessly, hundreds of times, and each time as warmly and sincerely as all the others.

How do they do it? How do they achieve such superhuman, apparently effortless warmth and sincerity?

I know why they do it.

Someone somewhere has done a psychological test and found that people feel a lot better about flying BA or whatever if they are given a personal goodbye. And that makes sense. Whether we are leaving a hotel or a country, a shop or even a taxi, there is always a psychological boost in having a little ritual exchange of farewells, the "See you again" or the " Merci, au revoir"...

But the sheer bulk of farewells on a plane is unprecedented. The acting ability required for a couple of hundred warm farewells at the rate of one a second exceeds the acting ability asked of a waiter in a restaurant or of a guard on a train.

And what I want to know is: how do they train? How does an airline inculcate endless niceness in a steward at the end of a gruelling journey?

Do they station trainee stewards and stewardesses outside department stores and make them practise holding the doors open for people till they want to scream?

Do they make them stand smilingly outside London Tube stations and try to persuade people to take leaflets about a new pizza restaurant or a tattooing parlour?

It cannot be natural niceness that makes stewards smile warmly after a long flight, because, by the very nature of things, they have just been dealing, for hours and hours, with complainers and whingers. Any steward will tell you that the happily contented passengers don't get in touch with them much - they hear mostly from passengers who get their kicks from griping and groaning. So, at the end of a long flight, stewards must be cursing and seething inwardly, not looking forward to smiling warmly at hundreds of people, one by one.

Do you want to know what I think?

I think the stewards who say goodbye smilingly at the end of a flight are not the ones who were on the flight.

I think they send special stewards and stewardesses on to the plane, just before disembarkation takes place, to do all the smiling and farewelling, stewards who have been waiting, at the destination, to come on, while the travel-worn stewards go into a thankful corner to put on the frowns and scowls they have been looking forward to for so long.

You know that slight pause at disembarkation, when we all seem ready to leave the plane, but nothing happens?

I think that is when they are swapping the flying stewards for the smiling-and-saying-goodbye stewards.

I think that is why we tend not to recognise the smiling faces saying goodbye to us.

And I also think that the old lady who stands at the top of Winsley Hill, near my house, for hours on end and waves at the passing traffic with a big, unfading grin on her face is not loopy, in the normal sense of the word, at all.

I think she is a saying-goodbye air stewardess who cracked long ago and is condemned to spend the rest of her days going, "Goodbye," smile, "Goodbye"... smile... "Goodbye"... smile...