Revisiting Playboy's pictorial celebrating flight attendants.
As you jet off on summer vacations, think back on these ladies of the sky from Playboy’s May 1980 issue. The pictorial, originally titled “Perfect Attendants,” celebrates the friendliest cabin crew.
You can see them on the concourses of any of the world’s airports, striding along in pairs. Women of mystery. Birds in perpetual migration, their plumage turned out by a top designer. They exude confidence and poise. A select and proud group, they have been culled from literally thousands of applicants to represent their airlines in the highly competitive air-travel industry. They are, of
course, the flight attendants.
To the millions of travelers who buckle themselves into outrageously narrow seats every year, they are air travel. Far more so than the austere gentleman in the teardrop sunglasses who sits behind the closed cockpit door. He’s only the pilot. He doesn’t bring you food and drink. He doesn’t fluff your pillow for a quick nap on a night flight from Raleigh to St. Louis. And, most importantly, he doesn’t smile and wish you a “Pleasant flight. Welcome aboard,” that much-appreciated little reassurance that dries your palms and takes your heart out of overdrive. That’s the purview of the women with the wings.
We should clarify right away that there are male flight attendants. But, really, who cares? Not that a man can’t do the job, mind you. A man can do almost anything a woman can. But not with such grace. And certainly not looking so good while doing it. That’s the stuff that the fantasies are made of.
Fantasies? About flight attendants? C’mon! Any airline executive knows that what the weary male traveler wants most is a safe, pleasant, efficiently managed flight from A to B. Computers! That’s the ticket. Wire everything up so that a reservations clerk in Albany can book you from Tucson to Des Moines, rent you a room, call you a cab and tuck you in with the flick of a microprocessor chip and the world’s passengers will beat a path to your check-in counter. Alas, but not alack, that isn’t the case. Air travel at its best is infused with Hollywood-style glamor. People going places, doing things. And the figurehead of all that glamor is the female flight attendant.
Is there a more worldly woman than the one who just had breakfast in New York and lunch in Chicago and is about to munch sourdough bread on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf? Are there brighter, more articulate, more personable women than those the airlines themselves choose for just those characteristics?
Probably. But they aren’t all in a bunch, rounded up, tested, tried and trained and sitting on the other end of a call button.
So it’s no wonder that the sight of a particularly attractive attendant gliding down the aisle to your 23 F seat transports you far beyond the flight plan. The dynamics of the situation are unnervingly romantic. The two of you flying together to a strange city. Neither of you knowing anything about the other. There is so little time. Does she have a layover? Will she go out to dinner? No matter that the same scenario is rippling through the brains of every one of your fellow male passengers. Indeed, the competition. just makes the fantasy that much more satisfying.
The romance is not lost on the attendants, either. They are admired and sought after and they know it. It’s part of the glamor that brought them to the airlines in the first place. They do make a trade-off. A few hours of tough, demanding, often demeaning work for a chance to lead a lifestyle ordinarily available only to the superrich. They are paid well, they meet interesting people, they work with professionals and they visit places on weekends that most people save all year to go to on vacation. Says one flight attendant, “Sometimes I feel like a free-floating spirit. I lose sense of time zones, days of the week and even seasons. I’ve skied the breath-taking mountains of Aspen on Monday and bronzed under the Hawaiian sun by Wednesday. I’ve jogged the Ivory Coast of Africa at sunset and spent nights under a canopy of stars in Tahiti. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll spend my Lake Tahoe break in a hot tub, sipping champagne with a friend. Seemingly, dream vacations are just an integral part of my work as a flight attendant, and good sex on a layover merely icing on the cake.”
Not surprisingly, the romanticism is heightened by the prospect of very real danger. Airplanes, after all, have yet to be perfected. There is a definite “life on the edge” aspect to the career. But careful interviewing and training weed out those likely to be overcome by the vapors. A flight attendant with seven years’ service in her log told us, “Sure, emergencies come up. If you fly long enough, you learn what a certain airplane is supposed to sound like. If we hear a thump or a squeak that’s not supposed to be there, we may glance at each other and wince, but we keep on working. We live with that. It’s part of the job. It’s the peak experiences that are unforgettable, and they make up for the few ‘bad times.'”
Most of the time, however, those bad times amount to little more than a six- A.M. flight or an especially obnoxious passenger, both occupational hazards that are universally disliked by flight attendants but that can quickly be forgotten over champagne dinners in some exotic locale. Besides, the hectic pace of their schedules leaves little time for petty grumbling.
In fact, it was the numbing pace of the career that made this pictorial a difficult one for us. It’s been in the works for nearly a year, largely because our “models” had a frustrating habit of never being where our photographers were. Photographers who previously had considered themselves globe-trotting professionals threw up their hands as appointments were scheduled and rescheduled.
But that wasn’t the only problem. As early as last November, the story broke in the newspapers that we were about to do such a pictorial. There was wide-spread speculation that some of the attendants chosen could meet the same fate as some of the N.F.L. cheerleaders who posed for us a couple of years ago: early retirement.
In its story, The Wall Street Journal declared, “For PLAYBOY, even the sky isn’t the limit,” and went on to say that the airlines were “vague” about their reactions to the appearance of some of their employees.
That speculation about firings did cause several attendants to pull out at the last minute, but the publicity also brought forth a number of new models who, hearing for the first time about the proposed pictorial, now wanted to be part of it. In the end, we had far more flight attendants willing to pose than we could use. The process of selecting those who would appear was made very difficult, but it was enjoyable.
Frankly, we don’t see how anyone could object to the resulting pictorial or even be vague about their reactions. The flight attendants we have chosen are both bright and beautiful, unique in their outlook and lifestyle and hold special interest and appeal for the traveling public. Without such stellar representatives, no airline in the world would ever get off the ground.
