Foot Pain in Aviation Is Normalised, Not Normal

“You’ll feel pain in your feet. That’s normal. You’ll be standing all day,” I was told on my first uniform fitting.
And because it came so casually, almost like a welcome briefing nobody questions, I did what most of us do. I accepted it. Kept quiet. Carried on.
And, in the beginning, it’s manageable. You work through it. Standing, walking, serving, smiling. Your feet are burning, your calves are stiff, your bunions start to bother you, and your toes slowly start doing their own thing…

At some point, after a 14-hour duty, it becomes uncomfortable enough that you decide to do what we all do: you google your symptoms.
Why do my feet hurt in heels after work
Burning pain ball of the foot standing all day
Toes numb in heels, what does it mean
Why do my calves feel tight after wearing heels
Can shoes cause back pain

And before Google tells you your feet are about to fall off, let’s look at the biomechanics of what’s actually happening when you wear ill-fitted shoes.
Your feet are your base. Every step you take starts there. And when that base is restricted, unstable, or compressed, your body adapts above it. In heels, your weight shifts forward. Instead of being spread across the whole foot, it loads the front. Your toes get squeezed. The small muscles in your feet start working overtime just to keep you balanced. At the same time, your ankle is held in a fixed position. It can’t move the way it naturally should.
So your body finds another way. You start shifting your weight differently. Locking one knee. Leaning into one hip without even noticing. Your pelvis adjusts. Your lower back holds that position for hours. Not once. Repeated, day after day.

That’s how something that starts as foot discomfort ends up as knee strain, hip tightness, and lower back pain. The problem often starts much lower down… your back is just where you finally feel it.

And yet, that’s another thing we normalise in aviation. “It’s because you are on your feet all the time. You get tired.”

But you’ve walked 15–20 thousand steps on a layover or on holiday. You know what tired feet feel like. This is not that.
This is pressure in the wrong places. Stability taken away. Muscles working harder than they should. Joints adjusting to something they were never designed to handle for this long, this often.

Then one day you realise your feet don’t even look the same anymore. Bunions becoming more visible. Certain shoes no longer fitting the way they used to. Becoming conscious of how your feet look in pictures from summer holidays.
There are ways to manage it. Orthotics, inserts, different types of support. I tried many of them. Some helped. Some were uncomfortable in their own way.
The thing is, if you keep putting your feet back into shoes that don’t fit you properly, you are not fixing anything. You are managing symptoms while continuing the cause.

Five years in, I sat in a podiatrist’s office and heard something I wasn’t expecting at that age: “Do not wear heels again. Not to work. Not to and from the aircraft. Not at all.”

That was the moment the foot pain stopped being “part of the job” and started becoming something much more personal. My health.

For a long time, there wasn’t much choice. The shoes were part of the uniform, and the uniform was non-negotiable. That has started to change. Some airlines now offer different styles that still meet grooming standards but give crew a bit more flexibility with shape, fit, and heel height.
I felt the difference even more when I moved into private aviation. For the first time, I could choose my own shoes (obviously still within grooming standards). I invested properly in shoes that actually supported my feet during a flight. Same job. Same hours. Completely different experience in my body.

There isn’t a huge amount of aviation-specific research looking at what years of ill-fitted footwear do to cabin crew. But we do know this: poor shoe fit is linked to foot pain, structural changes like bunions, and altered movement patterns. Heel height shifts the load forward and increases stress through the knees and lower back.

And this is where I want to say something very directly to the people making decisions about uniforms and footwear:
Crew do not care who designed the shoe. They care if they can stand in it for 10 hours without pain.
They are not there to walk a runway. They are there to take care of passengers.
And on the other side of the spectrum, if cost is the main driver, there are consequences. Not immediately. But over time, it shows up in fatigue, discomfort, injury, and performance.
The people wearing these shoes every day should not be an afterthought.
Bring them into the process. Let them properly test the shoes. Listen to what happens after 10 or 16 hours on duty. That’s where the real feedback is.

And for crew reading this: You don’t have to stay quiet about it. You don’t have to accept foot pain as something you just push through. Foot pain in aviation is common. It has been normalised. That doesn’t make it normal.

At some point, this career ends for all of us. And when it does, you should still be able to walk comfortably. To move freely. To wear what you want without thinking about your feet first.

That’s not too much to ask from a job that already takes so much out of you.

Ivana