I was a flight attendant for 17 years. I had to deal with drunken and unruly passengers – but my colleagues were sometimes harder to handle.

• Pierre-Yves Monnerville worked as cabin crew for major airlines for 17 years.
• He's had to kick people off planes for being too drunk, but always tried to defuse altercations.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Pierre-Yves Monnerville, who spent 17 years working in commercial aviation. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I've worked as cabin crew for two major airlines for 17 years. Some of my colleagues had confrontations with passengers on a regular basis, but that very rarely happened to me.

I think it's ultimately a matter of personality. Unlike some of my colleagues, I wasn't there to play police with the passengers – I always tried to defuse tricky situations.

It can be really easy for small things to spiral out of control when you're on a plane. Refusing to fasten your seatbelt, for example, is an actual legal offense, so any flight attendant who wants to flex their authority can easily escalate the situation.

When people didn't want to follow our instructions, I would always try to talk it out. I'd often tell passengers "I don't come to your office and tell you how to do your job."

Smoking and alcohol are often involved in my worst experiences

Some things, like smoking in the toilets, are very serious because a few stray sparks could endanger the entire aircraft.

I once had to deal with a passenger who'd been caught smoking in the bathroom. My first priority wasn't to punish him, but to find the cigarettes and make sure we weren't all in danger.

After that, I tried to deal with the passenger's behavior as gently as possible, while still conveying the severity of his actions. I said: "Do you realize you could get in big trouble for this? Smoking on a plane doesn't just get you a fine – you can actually go to prison."

I told the captain what happened. He ultimately decided against calling the police, which was fine with me. I didn't need to wreck somebody's holiday over a stupid mistake.

Alcohol was also the source of many problems with passengers.

We were flying from Spain to London and a dispatcher asked us with we were comfortable taking a passenger who was "a bit drunk."

I asked my team. It affects all of us, so it's not a decision you can make alone, but we all said it was fine.

When he came onboard, I took him aside and explained to him that we were doing him a favor by allowing him on the plane, so he had to do us a favor and behave. He said it wouldn't be a problem.

Shortly after we started moving towards the runway, we realized the situation was worse than we'd thought. The passenger was too drunk to even fasten his seatbelt.

I called the captain and I said: "I'm sorry — I'm no longer comfortable. Let's take him back."

That was a really big decision. We'd already started heading towards the runway — and time on the ground costs an absolute fortune. But it wasn't fair to put my crew at risk.

Luckily, the captain backed me up. When we returned to the airport, we found out we'd been misled by the dispatchers. It turned out the man been in the airport for two days — and they were desperate to get rid of him.

If situations ever got really out of control, we had a pair of handcuffs onboard to restrain rowdy passengers. I never actually used them, but there were a couple of occasions when I was definitely ready to do so.

On one occasion a passenger started behaving really aggressively for no clear reason. We found out he'd mixed a prescription drug with alcohol that hit him really hard, but in the end he simply fell asleep.

In those kinds of situations, it really helped to have some life experience. I definitely got better at coping as I got older.

My fellow crew could sometimes be harder to deal with than passengers

Sometimes, I found my fellow crew members much more annoying than any of our passengers. Some of them could be quite judgmental, narrow-minded, and even bigoted — and that definitely affected their treatment of their passengers and their colleagues.

Although they were sometimes rude and unruly, I actually enjoyed dealing with passengers. I think I had the right personality for the job: I've never had a problem being polite to people — even when they're not polite in return.

That's why, for most of my career, it never really felt like work. As a child, I was obsessed with planes, so this was truly my dream job.

I decided to stop flying in 2020 and now run my own clothing label called Unapologaytic, and work as a fitness and fashion photographer.