How important are hot flight attendants?

By danwarne, May 12 2011
How important are hot flight attendants?

From the elegant glamour of Virgin Atlantic's flight crew advertising to the wet t-shirt Girls of Ryanair calendar, there's no question that airlines positively discriminate in favour of the best-looking cabin crew.

But American Airlines has landed itself in trouble after running an internal competition for flight attendants to enter themselves in a company beauty contest (though American Airlines protests that it was a flight-attendant created site to profile how to wear new items of uniform correctly).

The 'Face of your base' competition was designed to find the best looking staff for a company photo shoot, with the design of a 'hot or not' style website where members of staff to vote on each other's appeal.

Union officials said the competition undermines the real work of a flight attendant -- ensuring safety in the air. American Airlines asserts that this was a typical union negotiating tactic.

"This campaign just transported us back 50 years to the days of girdles, weight-checks and single, female-only stewardesses having to quit when they were married, pregnant or reached the ripe old age of 30," Association of Professional Flight Attendants' Laura Glading said.

Online commenters who said they were "AA staff" defended the contest, saying "The face of the base contest is not about beauty ... it's about representing the new uniform and wearing it appropriately."

It seems that the union's outrage is not necessarily shared by airline staff generally -- there's a Facebook page called "Ridiculously Good Looking Flight Attendants" where flight crew post pictures of themselves on the plane, and at home wearing considerably fewer clothes.

10 Mar 2011

Total posts 526

Your poll results are interesting so far. Given that options 1 and 3 are pretty much saying exactly the same thing, it appears that readers here so far prefer to fly with attractive cabin crew. Okay... I can respect that, afterall, it is of course, nicer to have attractive cabin crew. I just fail to believe that people are happy to have attractive cabin crew and bad service, which is basically what the results are showing. To me it doesn't matter how good looking they are if they provide bad service. I'd rather have an average looking crew that provides outstanding service!

Virgin Blue - Velocity Rewards

12 May 2011

Total posts 66

Thats why i love virgin, they employ very nice flight attendents, and give a damn about safety compared to Jetstar and Qantas. Virgin definately is the best, and makes you feel safe :)


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