The newspaper business may be in trouble, but if you find 10 great bodies, take pictures of them and line them up with the months of the year, you could be in business for a while. This is exactly what a handful of unemployed flight attendants from Mexicana airlines did, according to the Associated Press.
They lost their jobs when the carrier filed for bankruptcy and suspended operations, and the sexy calendar is an effort to “to call attention to their own plight and that of their airline – one of the world’s oldest,” the Associated Press reports.
The ladies sport bikinis, sunglasses and provocative uniform variations while making propellers, cockpits and other dirty-sounding airplane parts look a hell of a lot hotter.
Interestingly, the hotties shelled out their own cash for the project, investing around $8,000 to get the glossy delight off the ground. It seems this was money well spent: the first thousand were purchased before the calendar’s official launch last Thursday, and another run of 3,000 is in progress.
The uproar over TSA body scanners and pat-downs has hit every corner of the aviation world, from passengers to pilots. The vocal consensus, at least, is that nobody likes them, even though 64 percent of Americans support the practice and 70 percent don’t expect it to impact their travel. A friend of mine, flying today, tweeted that he made it through security at New York’s JFK airport in a mere nine minutes.
Nonetheless, flight crews have voiced vehement opposition to the scans, with one pilot becoming an overnight celebrity by refusing to submit himself to that or a pat-down. We all have to do it, though, so this has left me to ponder … what’s the big deal?
I’ve been particularly intrigued by the attitude of pilots toward body scanners. At first blush, it struck me as a privileged perspective: the top dogs on the plane felt as though they shouldn’t have to be subjected to the same scrutiny as the rest of us. Patrick Smith, resident pilot at Salon.com, wrote of the recent TSA change over crew scrutiny, in which “airline pilots will no longer be subject to the backscatter body scanners and invasive pat-downs at TSA airport checkpoints”:
For pilots like myself this is good news, though at least for the time being we remain subject to the rest of the checkpoint inspection, including the X-raying of luggage and the metal detector walk-through. Eventually, we are told, the implementation of so-called CrewPASS will allow us to skirt the checkpoint more or less entirely.
He continues:
Not everybody agrees that air crews deserve this special treatment. That’s not an unreasonable point of view, and I don’t disagree with it, necessarily. As security experts like Bruce Schneier point out, if you are going to screen at all, it is important to screen everybody, lest the system become overly complicated and prone to exploitable loopholes.
This made me wonder, what is the risk associated with not screening pilots as intensively? The only scenario that came to mind involved a terrorist incident. As I let my mind race, I constructed a hypothetical situation in which terrorists got on board a plane, took control and asked for demands of some sort – i.e., they wanted more than to cause death and destruction. In this situation, I suspected, counter-terrorist teams, such as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (1st SFOD-D, also known as “Delta Force”), would be called into play.
My thinking continued: if a pilot hadn’t been scanned, he could have brought a weapon … which could have been taken from him by terrorists. Would the special forces teams want to know if a pilot had been scanned?
As I continued through my hypothetical exercise, I could hear my platoon sergeant’s voice from close to 15 years ago, drilling me from across time: “Actions on the objective,” he used to say, “always spend most of your time rehearsing actions on the objective.”
You have to admit this about military training, it really sticks with you!
So, my first thought was whether, while rehearsing actions on the objective, the special forces teams would want to know every last detail of what was on the plane. My training falls far, far short of that, and my efforts to reach someone from 1st SFOD-D didn’t pan out (unsurprisingly).
I laid out my hypothetical for Shipley: during mission planning, would the operators want to know if the pilots had been scanned, at least to have a better sense of whether they’d carried any weapons on the plane?
The answer, quite simply, is that it wouldn’t be an immediate concern. I spoke with Shipley by phone today, and he said that whether the pilots had been scanned “would be a very distant ‘what if’.” He explained of the special forces teams, “They’d want to know who they [i.e., the crew] are,” as well as background on how long they’d been flying and any other information related to the incident. Also, Shipley said the teams would want to know if there was an air marshal on the flight. The role of body scans, however, would not be a major factor in planning or rehearsing an operation.
“There are some pretty good people in charge of those planes,” Shipley noted, “good bunch of guys and gals.”
Does it suck that someone else gets to go through security faster and more easily than you do? Yeah, it feels like an injustice. But, let’s be realistic: there really isn’t much at stake here aside from a sense of fairness. Let’s e smart about this, though. The airline industry – and the air travel experience – is fraught with inefficiency. If we can make the operation a little smoother by giving the crew an easier time of getting to work, let’s just bite the bullet on this issue.
Slater is the public face of Toktumi’s mobile communication app Line2. If you’re on a wifi-equipped plane, you can use Line2 to text while in flight. So, why Slater? Well, Toktumi’s latest contest involves in-flight insanity, so he as a natural fit. And, let’s be realistic – it’s not like he has much else to do. To enter the Mile High Text Club Contest, and see if you have a story that tops Slater’s, text your tale to 222-222-2222. Your contributions will appear on http://www.milehightextclub.com starting today. The deadline is December 3, 2010.
The winners will be decided by a panel of judges, one of which will be Slater. If you can win over the flight attendant who cracked under pressure, you may walk home with the grand prize: a weekend holiday shopping trip for two in New York City. Seven iPod Touch devices are available as second prizes, with 13 third-place winners receiving gift cards for six months of free Line2 service.
%Gallery-99568%”In order to spread the word that Line2 allows airline passengers to text from the sky, we hired one of the most famous guys in the airline business today, Steven Slater,” explains Peter Sisson, Founder and CEO of Toktumi. “After talking with Steven, I realized that despite his dramatic approach – which he regrets – he was making a statement about the need to return civility and common courtesy to flying.” It’s an interesting way to make that statement, I guess, given that Slater was far worse than the passengers he encounters. Sisson adds, “He’s a perfect judge for a contest concerning the current state of air travel.” He was a flight attendant for 20 years, and both his parents had long careers in the airline business.
Line2 has a laudable goal for the “Mile High Text Club” contest: the company wants to make in-flight texting the norm, to keep people from yelling into their phones … and ostensibly from creating another Steven Slater moment.
“Line2’s SMS texting is really useful while in flight,” Sisson says. “You can let people know about delays, make plans for the evening, or just pass the time texting with your friends and family while you fly.”
And, you can let them know when a grumpy flight attendant loses his mind, grabs two cold ones and pops the slide.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you don’t need a college degree to be a flight attendant, regardless of what arises in the interview process. This lumps them in with waitresses and parking lot attendants, other jobs in which a BA is considered over-education. Yet, 29.8 percent of flight attendants have at least a college degree, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, along with 317,000 waiters, more than 140,000 receptionists and close to half a million customer service representatives.
These revelations come on the heels of continued debate over whether a college degree is worth the cash it costs. Historically, a degree has been seen as a way to get ahead, but there are too many philosophy majors trying to cobble together livings as bloggers (guilty), making many wonder if higher education worth a price tag that can stretch well into six figures.
The BLS data reveals that 30,000 flight attendants have BAs or above, making it the job with the highest rate of BA degrees per worker on the list.
There’s only one airline that flies in and out of North Korea. From Beijing to Pyongyang and back, Air Koryo takes care of everything you need. Yet, unique characteristics of the hiring process lead to a vastly different experience from that found here in the United States. The planes are described as “rickety,” and one can assume there will be little more than the basics (well, this part is just like home).
The comment is not personal. North Koreans are schooled to believe that America and Japan are enemies, but that hatred is directed at the governments of those countries, not at individuals.