Sex Appeal And Airlines Don’t Mix Well

Some would say that for men, there is nothing better than airplanes, fast cars, and beautiful women!  However, events in the Airline Industry have shown true that sex appeal and airlines don’t mix!  The practice of mixing sex appeal with airplanes began with putting personalized decorations on fighting aircraft. The first recorded piece of nose art was a sea monster painted on the nose of an Italian flying boat in 1913, and by World War II was in full swing with painting of beautiful women we now refer to as “Vintage Nose Art”.

Nose Art, while begun for practical reasons of identifying friendly units, evolved to express the individuality often constrained by the uniformity of the military, to evoke memories of home and peacetime life, and as a kind of psychological protection against the stresses of war and the probability of death. The appeal, in part, came from nose art not being officially approved, even when the regulations against it were not enforced. Because of its individual and unofficial nature, it is considered folk art, inseparable from work as well as representative of a group. It can also be compared to sophisticated graffiti. In both cases, the artist is often anonymous, and the art itself is ephemeral. There was true sex appeal in nose art, and for those who love aviation, it worked!

Airlines Forget Nose Art And Go With Eye Candy

In the past decade, Airlines have tried to bring in a sense of sex-appeal to their advertising and events.  Theoretically this would appeal to male passengers, and though good in theory, it has never been successful.  Could it be that men are more worried about the sexiness of GE Turbine Engines, the smell of jet fuel, or the sheer amazing feats in engineering?

In 2003 Hooter’s, a company known for mixing sex-appeal with hot wings attempted to mix sex appeal with airlines, and founded Hooters Airline.   The airline initially offered limited commercial routes, but offered Flight Attendants dresses the same as they do in the restaurants.  Though the airline officially ceased operation in 2006 with the excuse of high fuel costs.

On August 10th 2012, a Vietnamese Airline, has been fined for an in-flight bikini dance show that featured beauty queens strutting their stuff in the aircraft’s aisle. VietJet Air, a low-cost carrier of Vietnam, says it staged the event to help celebrate its Aug. 3 inaugural flight between Ho Chi Minh City and the tourist center of Nha Trang. The “Hawaiian-themed” dance lasted about three minutes and featured five women who all are contestants in a local beauty pageant. The video shows passengers taking video of the dance. Later, dancers come down the aisle to mingle with passengers at their seats.  “It was the first flight to a beach town, so we came up with the idea of getting a number of girls in bikinis to dance and make passengers happy to improve our customer service,” a VietJet Air official was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail of London.

The show didn’t go over well with Vietnamese regulators, however. Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam (CAAV) fined the airline 20 million Vietnamese dong – or about $960.  Maybe airlines are just better off leaving out the sex-appeal factor after all!