Air Bitches
By Richard Torregrossa

Flying Is No longer a Hoot. Just Ask Hooters Waitress Kyla Ebbert. But Is There a Solution? You Bet There Is.

Travel in its heyday, say in the 1960s, was smart and stylish. As a man who wears a suit, even when he attends a sporting event, I like to travel in style, but
today that’s virtually impossible.

Unless of course you’ve got the scratch to pay four to six grand for a first-class ticket.

And even first-class today has no class. I recently flew first-class from Los Angeles to New York on American Airlines. I know what you’re thinking: swanky leather seats with lots of leg room, free champaign, actual food instead of the simulated variety they serve in coach, otherwise known as slum class, and attractive flight attendants.

Not quite.

You’re forgetting one thing.

The grossly over-weight traveler in cargo pants, a ratty T-shirt, and stinking sneakers who plopped down next to me with a big grin on his face as if he’d just been awarded some kind of prize.

And he had.

Although he’d paid a fraction of what I paid for my ticket, he was “bumped” to first class for a reason mysterious to me and known only to the airlines. Maybe he had a zillion frequent flyer miles. Maybe he knew somebody at the check-in desk. Maybe he just got lucky. I don’t really know. And I don’t really care.

The guy—let’s call him Eric—couldn’t drink the free booze fast enough. I don’t think we were over Cleveland before Eric was rip-roaring drunk and prattling on about “how freakin’ cool this is,” referring to one or more of the first-class perks. He got a real kick out of the little kit with free shaving cream and a tiny tooth brush.

But it gets worse.

Eric removed his shoes and socks and proceeded to stretch out as if he was in his own living room. His eyes rolled into the back of his head as he dozed, blubbering unintelligible words and noises that sounded like they came from a big-game animal rather than a human being.

Drool dripped from Eric’s gaping mouth like a piece of dental floss. He was a repulsive sight, but I am a tolerant man, or at least I try to be, but I drew the line when he kicked off his shoes and socks and put his big smelly feet up on the seat in front of me.

This is first class? This is the experience for which I forked down my hard-earned money? I think not. I signaled to one of the flight attendants. I decided that you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Somebody must stand up for probity and decorum.

But did she respond? Vaguely. When I signaled to her again, she snapped, “I’ll be with you in a minute, sir.”

She uttered the word “sir” with such distaste you would have thought it was an evil hex. Finally, the Air Bitch ambled over, but instead of speaking, she gave me one of those plastic “what do you want” smiles that aren’t really smiles at all. They’re expressions of transparent annoyance, as if my petty needs could not be nearly as important as whatever it was she was doing—gossiping with her colleagues in the galley or primping in the bathroom mirror.

I explained to her that I thought Eric’s demeanor violated the sense of decorum one expects in first class. She reluctantly agreed, woke Eric, and told him to put his shoes and socks back on. She shot me a look as if to say, “happy now.”

Yet when Kyla Ebbert, a Hooters waitress, boarded a Southwest Airlines flight last week in a short skirt and tight top the Air Bitch Police threw her off the plane. In this case The Air Bitch was a man. Air Bitches are not gender specific.

The Air Bitch Police escorted her off the plane on the grounds that her attire was too revealing. How about a policy of escorting people who are smelly, slovenly, and ill mannered?

A compromise was later reached when Kyla agreed to adjust her outfit and enshroud herself in a blanket. It was either that or catch a later flight dressed in a manner that satisfied Southwest, not really an option. She was on her way to a doctor’s appointment.

Southwest has the legal right to refuse service to its customers. When you buy a ticket you agree to that.
But you would have thought that the geniuses who run Southwest would have let this one slide because of the potential adverse publicity.

But no. They chose to make an issue out of it. So now the Air Bitches seem even bitchier than ever before.

Kyla Ebbert’s outfit, pictured here, is no more revealing than anything worn on the red carpets these days. So you must ask yourself, “What were they thinking.”

That’s the problem. They weren’t.

Don’t the Air Bitches would have more important matters on their mind than censoring the attire of sexy young women who cause jealous reactions from older prigs—things like catching terrorists, speeding up the check-in lines, improving airport security, and making sure their aircraft is cleaned properly, which in my experience it rarely is?

Just because airlines today are experiencing economic troubles that is no reason for the rampant rudeness passengers receive from Air Bitches.

Kyla Ebbert is just one example. And she’s suing. And I hope she wins.

Of course passenger treatment is far worse in slum class than it is in first class and sadly it’s very common. Everybody I know has a horror story about the abuse they’ve suffered at the hands of the Air Bitches.

One woman I know was too ill to deplane on a short layover in Dallas before flying on to Los Angeles. The Air Bitches wanted her off the plane until it went on to its final destination. Why? Because they wanted to get off the plane to smoke a cigarette but they are not allowed to leave the plane if passengers are still onboard.

When this particular passenger curled up in a fetal position swathed in a smelly airline blanket, trying to get some rest in the hopes of feeling better, they spitefully vacuumed around her, making her environment a noisy hell, as if out of some perverse need to inflict revenge.

“She asked the cleaning person to vacuum ‘around her area,’ and pointed to me,” says the woman. “She did it because she was pissed she couldn't get off the flight to smoke a cigarette.”
The Air Bitches resent you for the simplest things. Try asking an Air Bitch for a pillow. I tried that on Jet Blue a few months ago and you would have thought I’d asked her to donate a kidney. The Air Bitch gave me a pillow that an obese businessman had been sitting on.

And Jet Blue is one of the newer airlines that touts itself as offering superior customer service. Superior customer service? They were the airline that kept people on the tarmac for eleven hours without proper bathroom facilities, access to water, and other necessities.

The Jet Blue Air Bitches practically threatened mutineers who wanted to get off the damn plane with death by firing squad if they so much as moved from their seats.

This incident was widely reported in the press and ever since Jet Blue has been sending out apologies, special offers, and other public-relations gimmicks in an effort to convince people that it has changed its ways.

The reason for the eleven-hour delay on the tarmac was a self-serving one. If that Jet Blue flight had returned to the gate, it would not have been credited as an on-time departure, an all important element in how airlines are ranked.

Even if the jet is sitting on the tarmac for an entire day, waiting to take off, it is listed as an “on time” departure, according to FAA rules.

The Jet Blue fiasco caused the FAA to institute a new law—a jet cannot be on the tarmac for more than three hours. If it exceeds that limit, it must return to the gate, giving passengers the opportunity to deplane for food, water, and whatever else they want to do—like hit the bar to ease the stress of the hellish treatment they’ve unwillingly endured.

But something tells me they’ll eventually find a way to circumvent this rule too.

Airlines often blame foul weather for flight delays. That’s just one excuse, and one that is hard to refute. But they have other, less credible excuses because there’s only so much blame an airline can heap on unpredictable weather patterns. But that’s another issue.

The key point here is that the very people who can make the flying experience better make it worse. I am referring of course to the Air Bitches.

In the movie “Catch Me If You Can” Leonardo DiCaprio pretends to be a pilot and in one scene he is squired through an airport with a bevy of dishy stewardesses, as they were called in the good old pre-feminist days, who are smiling and full of joy for not only their job but for their customers.

If you are a young reader, this might come as a shock to you, so be warned, but there was a time when flight attendants were actually polite. It’s not just a make-believe Hollywood thing.

They were also stylish. And young. And pretty. There was not one bad attitude among them. Unlike today.

In another scene in “Catch Me If You Can,” these very same stewardesses are shown onboard treating travelers as if they weren’t bothersome pests but actual paying customers whose presence they valued and appreciated.

There will always be bad weather, mechanical breakdowns, and scheduling foul ups that will cause flight delays. With a little patience, we can accept these imperfections, as I suspect most travelers do.

But what we cannot accept is the behavior of the Air Bitches. They are the personnel closest to the customer and this propinquity gives them an opportunity the anonymous corporate apparatus does not have—an easy way to mollify the grumpy traveler who’s been sitting in a noisy airport lounge next to some jerk talking in a pompously loud voice on his cell phone.

And it’s easy to do. It’s called a smile, a genuine smile. Get one.

Pleasant manners would also be welcomed. If you want to use a meaningless technical term, then call it “customer service.”

But it’s even more than that. What we’re talking about here is style. Style with a capital “S”—that special something that has been lost in the airline industry for decades and needs to return, if only to help their economic woes.

I say get rid of the grumpy old Air Bitches whose asses are so big they can’t walk down the aisle without slamming into the poor guy who’s stuffed in a cramped end seat and replace them with the retro slim stewardesses who took personal pride in not only their job but in their appearance and in their demeanor.

Now those would be friendly skies indeed. And more lucrative ones for the airlines.

—Richard Torregrossa is the author of Cary Grant: A Celebration of Style, Foreword by Giorgio Armani
http://www.richardtorregrossa.com/

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