Our Best: Cookie Babe Edition
From left, Staff Sergeant Bret Baker, Staff Sgt Jon Jackson, Airman Fauci and Staff Sgt. Ron Giannetti, doublecheck their shopping list.
Wall Street Journal
Senior Airman Amanda Fauci’s job is so sensitive she has nearly the same security clearance as a Secret Service agent. She sometimes goes on weeks-long classified assignments.
But on a recent mission, the 23-year-old was struggling. Her Texas-shaped sugar cookies made from prepared dough “blew up,” she says. She ended up making a new batch from scratch at home that night. The next day, she served them to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, former President George H.W. Bush and other VIPs aboard a Boeing 757 bound for College Station, Texas.
“There was a sense of panic there for a moment” when the initial batch flopped, says Airman Fauci, a five-year service veteran. Working on her time off is all part of “getting the mission done,” she says.
The Air Force is looking for a few good men and women like Ms. Fauci: flight attendants who staff Air Force One and 16 other luxury planes that ferry government dignitaries around the globe.
It’s not as easy finding recruits as one might think. The 150 members of the Andrews-based group and about 70 others stationed elsewhere — all Air Force enlisted personnel, trained in survival skills, aircraft emergencies and the culinary arts — take on duties that would make commercial flight attendants want to pull the rip cord.
For security and historical reasons, it’s up to them to plan menus, buy food and supplies, prepare meals, load luggage into the cargo hold and then, dressed in understated navy suits, tend to powerful and demanding passengers on trips that can last weeks. Though they sometimes get luxury accommodations in exotic locales, they are on call around the clock and endure unpredictable schedules, 11-hour flights and overnighting in tents in Iraq — not to mention vacuuming the aircraft cabins during fuel stops and washing many, many dishes.
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