Sexy Stewardess

Enjoy your flight.

She don't wear no pants and she don't wear no tie
Always on the ball, she's always on strike
Struttin' up the aisle, big deal, you get to fly
You ain't nothin' but a waitress in the sky

— The Replacements, "Waitress in the Sky"

In fiction, female flight attendants are invariably depicted as being young, attractive, and glamorous and having a-guy-in-every-(air)port sex lives.

The young and attractive part was Truth in Television for a long time, as airlines once insisted on specific physical standards when hiring women for the job, ostensibly for work reasons but in practice to please their male clients by having pretty staff. This is no longer legal in many Western nations. For instance, a series of US court decisions in the 1960s and '70s found airlines in that country liable for having grounded flight attendants as they aged, gained weight, got married or became pregnant. In addition, racial discrimination was prohibited.^note "Civil rights laws in the mid-1960s made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of age, sex, or race. Thus, the airline industry had to abandon its preference for hiring young women as well as its no-marriage and no-pregnancy rules and weight restrictions." https://www.prb.org/resources/the-changing-demography-of-u-s-flight-attendants/

In Real Life, flight attendants in the US were younger than the labor market average in 1980, with an average age of 30 (compared to the labor market average age of 35). But by 2007, the average age of flight attendants was 44, older than the labor market average of 41. This was due both to the civil rights legal changes and due to labor market issues such as the post-September 11 attack layoffs, which led to furloughing of newer (and usually younger) employees. In 1980, 18.4% of flight attendants were 16-24; in 2007, only 4.8% were 16-24. As well, there are more men: in 1980, there were 19.3 males per 100 females and by 2007 there were 26.4 males per 100 females.

In fiction, the Sexy Stewardess may be the main character, but will more often be the male hero's love interest, or will turn up in cameo roles (usually several at a time) to emphasize a given character's wealth or seductive potential. You can generally expect her skirt to be much shorter and tighter than most actual stewardess uniforms, along with high heels for shoes.

Compare Fanservice with a Smile, as well as Fair Cop and Hospital Hottie for two other "life and safety" professions that are commonly fetishized in popular media. For the Real Life history of the trope, see Analysis.Sexy Stewardess.

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Examples

Advertising

• Pan Am has reportedly made a joke ad out of this trope.
• Southwest Airlines had a series of ads in the 70s that featured these. Remember what it was like before them? You didn't have hostesses in hot pants.
• Taken to ridiculous extremes by the (mercifully) short-lived Hooters Air.
• This ad for Lynx body spray.
• "An airline uses its sexy stewardesses as a selling point, and flies decades back in time"
• Discussed with this British Caledonian commercial IN SONG. And yes, that is California Girls.
• Many Virgin Atlantic adverts with their Lady in Red stewardesses, such as this one filmed like a James Bond intro.
• In this Southwest Airlines commercial, the three fight attendants are swingers. You can tell by the silk scarves tied around their necks.

Anime & Manga

• Kanako Oomori from Cage of Eden. She is a beauty stewardess (and the most buxom character in the story) and for nearly all the story wears her flight attendant uniform.
• Episode 16 of City Hunter has Chiemi, an old friend of Kaori who is a beauty and ingenue stewardess in desperate need of help. In return, Ryo gets a date with Chiemi but he's in for a surprise when, on the plane, he finds out he's not the only one chasing after this beautiful lady.
• Gate Keepers makes a joke about this. The two female leads think they are going to get to play stewardesses... But they're given the uniforms of shoe-shiners instead.
• Minky Momo once transformed into one.
• Machiko from Miss Machiko in episode 31, for the joy of male students and co-worker, with Male Gaze and Panty Shot included.
• Sailor Moon transforms into a "cute stewardess!" with her Luna-Pen once.

Comics

• 2000 AD: A pair of attractive attendants come on the Brett Grayle in the first Damnation Station strip. Grayle later turns out to be gay, but does seem to be pleased with the attention.
• Alan Ford: Volume 443 has an attractive Japanese stewardess who's the pilot's girlfriend, but cheats on him with other passengers. Later he gets a new stewardess in Ingrid, a Bifauxnen scandinavian who openly flirts with the female protagonist Minuette, inviting her for sex after spiking the drinks of the other passengers.
• Eat the Rich (2021): Implied Trope. When discussing how Kitty married into the Hadleys, there's a flashback showing that she met Pip as a flight attendant throwing a sultry look at him. In the next panel, they're married.
• Iron Man: Tony Stark's private flight attendants are so sexy, they double as go-go dancers.
• Natacha (see image) is about the adventures of a sexy flight attendant.
• Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) #52, while doing a favor for an aging crime boss, a stewardess tries to seduce Spider-Man. Since this happened during the period he and Mary-Jane were back together, the results were quite humorous.
  Spider-Man: (from inside a large amount of webbing he's put up to keep the scantily-dressed "attendant" at bay} Just slip the food through the webs and no one gets hurt.

Comic Strips

• Tilly Clipper in the longest Nick Knatterton saga, "The Indian Diamond Suitcase".

Films — Live Action

• Austin Powers, after demanding "Bring on the Sexy Stews!", is informed by a miffed female flight attendant that they're not called that anymore.
• In the French movie Banzaï, the protagonist's Love Interest is such a stewardess. He convinces her to leave her job before they'd marry, since he hates going abroad. Then he is forced by his job to travel around the world, and run into his fiancée in Hong Kong....
• Three stewardesses in Boeing Boeing (see Theatre).
• In Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale hires young women to pose as sexy flight attendants to complete his impersonation of an airliner pilot and distract the police and FBI agents looking for him.
• The second cop of Chungking Express has a relationship with a flight attendant, and the girl who falls in love with him ultimately becomes one as well.
  • In a flashback scene, we see his then-girlfriend do her safety instruction routine over the usual voice recording ("emergency exits are located at the front and back..."), while at his place and with her top off. It's an obvious turn-on for him. You can watch it here from 4'45 onwards.
• In Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star Dickie realizes that he no longer wants fame, fortune or meaningless sex when he is propositioned by two sexy stewardesses, yet finds that he is not interested in sleeping with them. In a Shout-Out, they approach him by asking if he wants "Coffee, Tea or Me?" (Or "Us"), which was the name of a series of novels about two sexy stewardesses published in the 1970's (See Literature section).
• Down with Love: Ladies' man Catcher Block goes out with three separate stewardesses while trying to avoid interviewing Barbara Novak. Turns out the stewardesses all work together and none of them are particularly happy when they discover that he's seduced all of them.
• Halle Berry in Executive Decision.
• The flight attendants (one of whom is seduced by Ruby Rhod) in The Fifth Element.
• Getting Any ? by Takeshi Kitano.
• In Iron Man, Tony Stark's private flight attendants double as go-go dancers.
• The title heroine of Jackie Brown may be considered a double subversion, as the flight attendant is in breach of standard canons of beauty, but still sexy in her own way.
• One of these attempted to lure James Bond to his death in Moonraker.
• In Murder on Flight 502, Farrah Fawcett plays head stewardess Karen White.
• In Party Plane, the stewardesses double as in-flight strippers.
• Richard III. Robert Downey Jr.'s character is shown having hotel sex with a stewardess (who doesn't even remove her hat) who Ian McKellen jokingly refers to in the script as "Miss Pan Am 1935". Unfortunately their lovemaking quickly becomes Fan Disservice when her lover is murdered in the act.
• Tiffany and Claire from Snakes on a Plane—Tiffany even unbuttons her shirt. The other two flight attendants are Grace—who's nearing retirement—and Ken.
• Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Terminal.
• The Tobacco One stewardess in Thank You for Smoking.
• Played with in View from the Top: The flight attendant heroines, in one of their early jobs, are pretty much dressed like streetwalkers and eventually escape to a better airline. Depending on what you think of Christina Applegate, Kelly Preston and Gwyneth Paltrow, it might even be played straight.
• The flight to Delos (the resort of which Westworld is a part) has a couple of these. The twist? They're robots.

Literature

• The Coffee Tea Or Me novels, which were also made into a TV movie.
• Stanley Morgan's The Fly Boys series features the exploits of the staff of Glamour Airlines, an on-the-way-out airline renamed and revamped by a new owner on the principle that Sex Sells. The new uniforms "are silver lamé and sequins — and that's just the men... the hostesses are in candy-striped bikinis and see-through skirts."
• Two are featured at the end of Friday The 13th The Jason Strain, and were presumably hired by Caleb Carson simply for their looks. Jason hacks one to death, and stabs the other in the face with a broken bottle.
• A Harlequin Romance back in the 80s both played and subverted this trope. The heroine is a former stewardess who becomes a Ranger at the Grand Canyon, and when one too many people gets catty, she then proceeds to describe the average shift: very long hours on her feet while wearing high heels, walking back and forth (I forget the number of miles she quoted, but I looked it up at the time and found it was accurate), and some airlines did have rules forbidding stewardesses from sitting while on shift. When asked about the makeup, she points out that she is a natural blonde and has to wear sunscreen if she don't want to burn like cheap meat.
• The Left Behind series has Hattie Durham, a beautiful stewardess who starts the series in relationship with pilot protagonist Rayford Steele that is summed up in the opening lines: "Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched." She later becomes the consort of the Antichrist.
• In the original short story "Quantum of Solace", James Bond comments on how he wished he could marry a flight attendant. The trope is then deconstructed by the person he's talking to — Bond just likes the thought of a beautiful woman attending to his needs, which isn't what happens in a marriage.

Live Action TV

• Banacek: Banacek's Girl of the Week in "Fly Me — If You Can Find Me" is a sexy stewardess: one of the two very attractive flight attendants who were on the stolen plane.
• On The Bob Newhart Show, the Hartleys' pilot friend Howard Borden would make the occasional reference to the stewardesses he's romanced.
• Provenza and Flynn get taken for a ride by a pair of sexy stewardesses in The Closer episode "Layover".
• One of these, murdered in 1960, was the Victim of the Week in the Cold Case episode "Wings".
• Doctor Who. Tegan Jovanka, Australian companion of the Fifth Doctor. Actress Janet Fielding was actually too short to be a stewardess, so she falsely claimed that Australian airlines had shorter minimal height requirements.
• While at times downplayed and other times emphasized, the short-lived series Flying High had a trio of them. Even the pilot captain noticed.
• Frasier: Newly-hired radio psychiatrist Dr. Nora starts her first show by telling the first caller that she's a whore for having sex outside of marriage.
  Caller: I-I'm not a whore! I'm a flight attendant!
  Nora: Oh, you think there's no overlap?
• Cropped up a few times in the third season (and discussed in-depth in the final episode) of The Gruen Transfer with examples of this trope in advertising, in particular focusing on the efforts of two low-budget Russian airlines to tap into this trope (an ad with sexy stewardesses washing a plane in bikinis in one example, and a nudie stewardess calendar released by another).
• Discussed in How I Met Your Mother, when Barney says that every generation has one profession that young, impossibly hot women all flock to. Naturally, this one comes up, along with Hospital Hotties. According to Barney, here in The New '10s, they're all pharmaceutical representatives now. (Truth in Television, actually.)
• Leverage has done this a couple of times, both with Parker.
  • "The Mile High Job" had Parker disguised as one as part of a con.
  • "The D.B. Cooper Job" was actually mostly a flashback with Beth Riesgraf (Parker) playing the stewardess who talks to Cooper. She mentions that she frequently gets love notes from smitten passengers and wears a fake wedding band to ward off the more persistent ones.
• On an episode of the American version of Life on Mars, Annie assumes the identity of a dead flight attendant. Everyone who works with Annie is attractive (as is she), and most are fairly kinky, too.
• Lucifer. The episode "Stewardess Interruptus" opens with an airline stewardess in uniform entering the penthouse and playing up this trope for all its worth. Unfortunately Lucifer was about to kiss Chloe Decker, so a visit from one of his many, many, many, many, many paramours is NOT what he wants right then.
  Jana: This is your flight attendant speaking. [Removes hat] Please buckle up. [Removes scarf and jacket] Surprise layover in L.A. Thought we could...rack up some miles.
• The Lifetime Movie of the Week Mile High Escorts is about a small private airline in which, as the title says, the young, hot flight attendants are encouraged to make extra money by hooking up with their passengers.
• ABC's period drama Pan Am centers on the Pan Am stewardesses during the 1960s. All of them are beautiful and the show makes a point of how they were forced to appear and behave for the job.
• In The Partridge Family, Reuben's girlfriend Bonnie Kleinschmidt wears her short-skirted uniform even when off duty.
• The Persuaders!: Brett Sinclair's own private flight attendants were also obviously hired for their looks and their, er, friendliness.
• Saved by the Bell: In "The Fabulous Belding Boys", Mr. Belding is mad at his brother Rod is getting distracted from work by a steward whom Rod claims is a "10 out of 10" Head-Turning Beauty.
• SCTV - 'Monster Chiller Horror Theater' presented 'Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Stewardesses'. It wasn't really scary, but that didn't bother the host. (Note: there was an actual late-60s 3-D skin flick called 'The Stewardesses'.)
• Played with in Sex and the City where Miranda has no success in a speed dating event by saying she's a lawyer. Once she says she's a stewardess, the guy's immediately interested and she spends the rest of the episode in that persona, making up stories, etc. Then when she cuts her finger rather badly, the guy gets freaked out by the sight of blood and reveals that he's not actually a doctor but said so because he always wanted to date a stewardess.

Music

• "I'm Mandy, fly me." by 10cc
• "Air Hostess/I like the way you dress" by Busted.
• "Room Service" by KISS invokes this:
  My plane's delayed and I'm afraid
  They're gonna keep me waiting here till nine
  Then a stewardess in a tight blue dress says
  "I got the time"
• The above-quoted "Waitress in the Sky" by The Replacements is a cynical skewering of this trope.
• "Airline Amy" by "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Music Videos

• Edguy's "Lavatory Love Machine" is about screwing a stewardess in the lavatory of a crashing plane, so naturally a sexy stewardess appears in the music video.
• The video for Britney Spears' "Toxic".

Radio

• Cabin Pressure - Averted.
  Martin: For two very different reasons, neither Arthur nor Carolyn quite float my boat.

Stand-up Comedy

• A quick joke on a George Carlin record: "Please return the stewardess to her original upright position."
• One bit by Larry the Cable Guy is about there being more aversions to this in real life.

Theater

• In the 1960s farce Boeing Boeing, the hero is dating three international stewardesses who don't know about each other, since they all work for different airlines and are never in town at the same time. Unfortunately, the flight schedules get changed and all three turn up at once.
• In Cactus Flower, Julian describes to Harvey an anonymous airline stewardess for whom he canceled a date with Toni to see instead: "Spectacular looking. A Swedish blonde. Tall. Built. We went to her place, we had a few drinks..." Harvey is eager to find out what happened next, and is disappointed to hear that Julian he walked out on her after suddenly thinking of Toni. At the end of the play, Stephanie receives a phone call from "a stewardess from Swedish Airlines" (likely the same young woman) suggesting an evening date with Julian, who says to Stephanie: "Tell her I've been grounded." (The movie makes the stewardess Australian to preserve Ingrid Bergman's local monopoly on Swedishness.)
• April in Company.

Video Games

• Ace Attorney Investigations features one of these in its second case, namely Cammy Meele. It may be noted that she doesn't wear a bra (nor an undershirt or whatever).
• Doralice Prunelier in Fascination. She becomes a captain in the sequel Lost in Time.
• Final Fantasy XII is the first game in the series to feature airports, so naturally, it also features flight attendants. They sell you stuff and kick off a sidequest.
• Isabella from Melody definitely fits the bill. On her romantic path, she and the protagonist incorporate her profession into one of their roleplay sessions.
• Anesthesia's superstar persona in Rumble Roses XX.
• Cammy's blue Shadaloo outfit from Street Fighter Alpha makes her resemble one, or is it just the hat?

Web Original

• In a bizarre but fanservicey Rare Male Example, The Nostalgia Critic dressed up in a skimpy air-hostess uniform for the first TGWTG DVD menu.

Western Animation

• A group of these feature prominently in the American Dad! episode "Introducing The Naughty Stewardesses".
• Hello Nurse from Animaniacs play this role in two shorts, one with the Warner Brothers and another during a cameo with Slappy Squirrel.
• The first episode of Archer begins with the title character waking up in bed next to a stewardess he hooked up with the night before. The same stewardess pops up in the background of several episodes, including one where she silently reacts to a comment by Archer's ex-girlfriend Lana Kane about his fondness for Kinky Spanking.
• In the Futurama episode "Neutopia", Leela, Amy and LaBarbarba become Sexy Stewardesses when the Planet Express ship is changed into a commercial airline.
  Leela: There. It was hard work, but it beats posing in demeaning, skimpy modelling outfits.
  Professor Farnsworth: Ladies, here are your demeaning, skimpy stewardess outfits.
• Deconstructed in The High Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange. When Orange and the gang take a flight to Donkey Island to avoid being blended by famed blender manufacturer Mr. Juicy Fun, the cast takes some potshots at this trope.
  Pineapple: Miss, can I get some peanuts?
  Peach: I take offense to that! Just because I'm a lady doesn't mean I'm a sky waitress!
  Flight Attendant: Hey, ya' know what else is offensive? ...Calling the flight attendant the sky waitress!
  (later, while the plane is about to crash)
  Flight Attendant: Hey, and while you're at it, you can get yer' own peanuts and refreshments! This sky waitress is outta here!

Real Life

• Hooters Air!! Yes, you read that right. It's over, though, but from 2003 to 2006 was the airline of the Hooters breastaurant chain.
• Truth in Television insofar as during the 1960s and 1970s, stewardesses were required to be of a certain weight and attractiveness and were often fired if they got pregnant or gained weight. Even recently, some airlines got in trouble for discriminatory hiring practices.
  • A U.S. Army officer told an anecdote of training with some foreign officers who remarked on this and concluded that unattractive stewardesses, while visually displeasing, were a sign of the strength of America's freedoms. "Someday," one of them vowed, "my country will have ugly stewardesses too."
  • The practice continued in the U.S. until the end of the 1970s, and ended not because of any anti-discrimination laws, but because of airline deregulation. Prior to 1978, U.S. airlines were not allowed to compete with each other on ticket prices. Thus, they had to find other ways to compete with one another, such as the roominess of their seats, quality of their food, in-flight movies, frequency and availability of flights — and attractiveness of their flight attendants. (You'll note that modern U.S. airlines often lack meal service, when compared with airlines of the past; this is another casualty of deregulation, as most folks would rather pay less for a boarding pass than get served airline food.)
  • There are still some requirements that are legally justified because they are purely practical: A flight attendent must be tall enough to reach the overhead compartments (but not too tall so that they're forced to hunch over all the time), thin enough to fit in narrow aisles, fit enough to perform normal tasks and stand for long periods of time, etc.
  • A popular RiffTrax short, "Flying Stewardesses", has a lengthy segment about how the girls must stay attractive and in shape. Apparently it involves sailing.
• An Air France stewardess and flight crew were suspended after routine checking of internal CCTV from the flight revealed the stewardess had performed a striptease in the cabin, cheered on by captain, co-pilot and flight engineer. Apparently, the plane was on autopilot while the pilot and co-pilot's attention had been distracted. The recording, which is Not Safe for Work, has been posted on the Internet already.
• Ryanair releases a calendar each year featuring actual flight attendants employed by the company as calendar girls. Of course, this fits with their "no frills" approach so as not to spend money hiring actual models.
• These Viet Jet Air flight attendants perform a sexy Hawaiian dance in sarongs and bikini tops.
• For the visit of Britney Spears to Thailand, flight attendants from Nok Air made a welcome video with the music of... Toxic, obviously.
• Truth in Television, at least to an extent. To carry out their duties efficiently, flight attendants must be young and fit enough to perform the various physical acts the job requires, tall enough to reach overhead lockers, be well-groomed, intelligent and have pleasant personalities, all traits generally associated with attractiveness.

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