Wanton intercourse. Sordid bets, And the cockpit sharks whose lewd behaviour is uncovered for the primary time: What REALLY goes on behind-the-scenes in your flights, by an insider who’s witnessed (and joined in) with each debauched element

My arms are curled around the waist of the handsome man in front of me. Behind are a gaggle of six women. We’ve been downing shots for the last couple of hours and, even though it’s 2am, we’re in no mood to go to bed.

Again and again we shimmy across the dancefloor in our conga snake to the Vengaboys’ We Like To Party, kicking our legs out to the side and roaring with laughter.

But this is not some raucous hen party – we’re a British Airways crew and in six hours we’ll be staffing a flight out of Alicante back to London. Legally we should have stopped drinking two hours ago – the ‘bottle to throttle’ rule prohibits alcohol for at least eight hours before operating a flight – but no one’s going to tell on us.

In fact none of us got to bed that night. Or not to sleep in any case. When I left the party to freshen up in my room, I saw the (very married) captain kissing the most attractive cabin crew member as they entered the hotel lift. 

Later, on board our early morning flight, there are grabbing hands and suggestive comments in the cockpit, aimed not just at my pretty colleague but at all of us.

This was the late 1990s, when frankly anything went. But it seems alcohol, sex and stopovers are still a toxic mix in the BA world.

Last month I shuddered to read that a 31-year-old British Airways pilot has been arrested over claims he secretly filmed sexual activity with 16 women, including air stewardesses from a range of carriers without their permission, then posted the videos on pornography websites.

A British Airways spokesman has said that the individual is no longer employed by the company.

Regardless, the allegations are deeply concerning – but they don’t surprise me. Aged between 24 and 36, his alleged victims were the same age as me when I was cabin crew, and while I never joined the captain (or his first officer) in bed, many of my ‘hostie’ peers did.

Sex between the captain and his crew was totally usual back then and not all of those pilots treated the women with respect or even basic politeness.

How did they get away with it? So many of the old school ‘cockpit commanders’ of British Airways flights were a stickler for hierarchy on the plane and used it to project an aura of authority that some women found enticing.

Did others feel coerced? Quite possibly. In those days, it was much harder to tell ‘the boss’ where to go when he made sexual advances.

I began my career in 1989 at the age of 20. I’d applied to British Airways but got turned down – at the time applicants needed to be fluent in more than one language – so instead I took a job with Japan Airlines (JAL), which didn’t have the same rule.

With hindsight, that role was terrific: three times a month we’d fly to Tokyo from London, often on a flight path over Siberia with a stunning view of the Northern Lights. 

The Japanese pilots were completely respectful of their crew and passengers, and the most outrageous behaviour I ever saw was when they let their hair down in the karaoke bar, belting out Rhinestone Cowboy.

At the end of each flight most of the leftover alcohol would get poured away and though, occasionally, I’d be given a just-opened bottle of fizz to take to my hotel room, as a rule the crew barely drank and behaved impeccably.

As unfathomable as it sounds, I got bored of working for JAL. I’d swoon over the sushi and cherry blossoms now but I was young back then and felt I’d had my fill of the long-haul lifestyle.

I reapplied for British Airways cabin crew and this time – fluent in Japanese by now – I got hired.

My pay dropped down from £2,000 to £1,000 a month – with perks and per diems (daily allowances) raising it, but not by much – yet to my mind the kudos of working with the British flag carrier airline more than made up for it. At least in theory.

Immediately it felt like a different world. Not only was the pecking order stricter – the captain and his first officer always boarded the plane before crew so, from the very first step, you were aware of their superiority – but now, at 23, I was required to turn a blind eye to behaviour I’d never encountered before. 

I worked in business class and I was the one who hung up the officers’ jackets and got their drinks.

Very quickly I learned the mantra ‘a happy captain means a happy flight’, which also meant learning not to complain about the predatory, boozy, handsy behaviour of a large number of the men who were in charge of the cockpit. If he flirted, then I had to grit my teeth and flirt back.

With JAL, you’d often come across the same crew. But British Airways is so vast, it was rare to fly with the same colleagues twice.

I often wondered whether the worst-behaved captains used this to their advantage, essentially knowing they’d have a new woman to target at every stopover.

The hierarchy didn’t just put these men above us, incidentally, but above all the passengers too – no matter who they were.

On one flight we had Nelson Mandela on board as a passenger, not long after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Even so, the captain and his first officer insisted they got served their drinks before him.

Sexual harassment in the cockpit was par for the course. Yes, there were female first officers and the lewd behaviour stopped when they were in the cockpit but they were a rarity. When the pilots were all male, the focus was very often not on the job at hand but on the cleavage of the stewardess looking after them.

I was regularly asked, ‘Are your breasts real?’ and ‘Can I feel them?’ Many of the captains seemed quite obsessed. I was never really offended – I’d tell them where to shove it – but other colleagues were and would exit the cockpit looking upset.

There’s nothing like being on an early Heathrow flight to Nice, walking into a cockpit and having your bum goosed on the way out. I do so hope it doesn’t happen now.

In some ways I get the arrogance: these were men who had trained for years and were trusted to fly hundreds of people safely. Still, I did an internal eyeroll every time they insisted we call them ‘Captain’ or ‘First Officer’ – when we were on the ground as well as in the cabin.

Then there were the stopovers. There was a definite camaraderie among the crew, despite – or perhaps because of – the challenges.

We’d all meet in the hotel bar for drinks, the pilots too, and we’d always have alcohol. Then we’d go on for a meal together and, if we got in too late for that, we’d get room service in someone’s bedroom.

Of course that would very often turn into a party – and I fully admit to being an enthusiastic party girl.

I lost count of the number of ‘truth or dare’ games I played in people’s rooms. On one stopover in Stockholm, after losing when drinking shots, I had to walk down to the hotel reception in the nude, ask for another bottle of wine and walk back up to the room. Fortunately the receptionist didn’t bat an eyelid.

On another stopover in Rome, as usual I was one of the last women standing in the captain’s suite. After midnight, it was pretty obvious that the captain and cabin crew manager were about to get it on, even though both were married. I think he even had his hand in her bra.

Against my better judgment I ordered them another bottle of Chianti, made my excuses and left. 

The next morning in the cabin she looked utterly bedraggled and when I went into the cockpit to deliver coffee, the captain stopped me and said: ‘We have a problem.’ It was then he turned around and showed me the love bites on his neck. ‘What do I do? I’ve got to go home to my wife like this.’

Affairs are still rife among the crew, I’m told. People get on the plane and leave their brain at home. They genuinely think they’re single again. Everything I witnessed was consensual but there were real predators too.

Everyone knew who they were and even though we didn’t get to fly with one another often, word would get around about the pilot you wouldn’t go into the cockpit with on your own. 

Depressingly, I hear the same is true today and that women are still swapping names among themselves.

There were the tightfisted pilots too. When I was flying, the captain held the purse strings during stopovers and was in charge of the meals budget. One particular pilot (he wasn’t alone by the way) would always make the crew pay for their own meal and flagrantly pocket the per diems.

At one restaurant the captain only told us to cough up for our own meals after we’d finished eating and even had the gall to get one hostess to fork out an additional euro for her cola.

A colleague handed it to him, saying: ‘If you’re so poor, here you go.’ He pocketed it. She was so outraged by this that the following morning she insisted on preparing his on-board refreshments – and spat in his coffee.

The crazy drinking games meant we got barred from certain hotels. Savvy hotel managers put the crew on the same floor because if they didn’t they knew someone would end up running naked down the corridor or take the lift stopping at every floor in their bra and knickers or underpants.

Once, in Amsterdam, the captain dragged us all to see a strip show in the red light district, which was vile. I still remember texting my boyfriend saying: ‘Guess where I am? Watching a sex show with my BA crew.’

People talk about the Mile High Club but I’m not so sure it’s as popular as people assume.

What I do know is that if someone is locked in the loos for a long time, it’s more likely to be a cabin crew member throwing up after a heavy night than having sex.

We saw lots of celebrities and gossiped among ourselves about them but the captains were never bothered and didn’t want to meet them. Some were miserable and rude. Others, such as supermodel Helena Christensen, were lovely.

One of the Oasis wives was on a flight in business class and wasn’t happy her Louis Vuitton bag had to be stowed away from the emergency exit area. I popped it in an overhead locker and when I returned it to her, it was wet. I apologised. 

The captain told me to tell her it was coffee… it was sewage. It’s rare but it can leak from service lines which run above the overhead cabin panels.

Today I’m a thoroughly boring, 56-year-old married mother of two grown-up kids and hung up my uniform some time ago.

Sometimes, yes, I look up at the planes coming into Heathrow over my house in west London and fantasise briefly about where they’ve been. But I have no desire to be on those flights.

I do miss the parties – but I don’t for a second miss running the gauntlet of the sex-obsessed tyrants in the cockpit.

All names and identifying features have been changed.

As told to Samantha Brick