The Maghreb to France flights from the crew side: the Paris diaspora cabins, the passengers, the Orly and CDG arrivals and why they are the hardest and warmest
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#1 Air Algérie, five years, Algiers, and Karim wrote the three Maghreb carriers compared. This is one specific thing the three share and nobody has written: the Paris flights, which are the spine of all three airlines and the hardest and warmest cabins in North African aviation.
The routes
Algiers, Oran, Constantine, Annaba to Paris (Orly and CDG), Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille. Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakech, Agadir, Tangier, Fes to the same French cities. Tunis, Djerba, Monastir to Paris and the regions. Dozens of daily flights across the three airlines, full year round, the diaspora going and coming between the two shores.
The passengers
The Maghreb diaspora in France, the largest in the country: the families going home for the summer with the bags, the grandparents visiting the children in Paris, the students, the workers, the weddings, the funerals. Three generations on every flight, French and Arabic and Kabyle and Darija in every row, the enormous luggage, the gifts, the food that travels in both directions. The cabin is a village.
Why they are the hardest
The bags, which are the most and the heaviest on any route in Europe and which the bins cannot hold. The boarding, which is slow because every family has a story at the door. The summer, when every flight is full and every passenger is tired. The expectations, which are the expectations of family: the meal, the seat, the help with the grandmother, as if the crew were cousins. And the French arrival at Orly or CDG in the evening with the queues.
Why they are the warmest
Because the passengers are the crew's own community. The Air Algérie crew are the diaspora's children and cousins; the passengers know it and the crew know it. The grandmother who is helped to her seat blesses the crew member in Arabic. The family with the wedding gives the crew the sweets. The student going home for Eid cries at the landing and the crew understand. The Paris flights are the airline's identity in the way the Hajj is Saudia's.
The crew side
Four sector days of Paris and back, or a night stop in Paris that is the Maghreb crew's second home (the crew hotels near Orly, the Barbès and the Belleville neighbourhoods on the layover, the family in Paris for half the crew). The pay in dinars or dirhams with the Paris allowance in euros, which is the income. The Paris route is the one the crew hold by seniority and the juniors do the domestic.
For the crew from elsewhere
If you fly a Maghreb to France route as a French or a Gulf crew member on a code share, you will see the cabin and not understand it. The Maghreb crew understand it. It is the village in the sky and it is ours.
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#2 Tunisair, and the Paris flights are our spine exactly as Nadia says: the hardest cabins for the bags and the boarding and the warmest for the passengers who are our families. The village in the sky is the line. Tunis to Orly in August is the whole airline.
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#3 RAM then Qatar, and I did three years of Casablanca to Paris before Doha, and the Qatar business cabin is easier than a July Casablanca to Orly with 180 families and the bags. The Maghreb crew who go to the Gulf arrive able to handle anything.
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#4 Casablanca, ground staff, RAM applied, and the Paris flights are the ones I board at the gate every day: the families, the bags, the stories at the door. Nadia has written what I see from the ground. Now I want the cabin.
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#5 Air France, and the Air France crews on the Algiers and Casablanca routes see the cabin and, as Nadia says, do not fully understand it. We respect it. The Maghreb crews on the same routes are the ones the passengers want.
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#6 Qatar from Alexandria, and the Cairo to Paris flights at EgyptAir have the same village: the Egyptian diaspora, the bags, the grandmothers. The Arab world's Paris flights are one cabin across four airlines. Nadia has written it.
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#7 Tunis, aspiring, and the Paris route being the one the crew hold by seniority with the juniors on domestic is the thing that tells me the shape of a Tunisair career. The village in the sky is the reason to want it.