The View | Airlines shouldn’t be ‘brothels in the sky’

Here is a pop quiz. I just flew from Hong Kong to the United States, and more than half the flight crew had grey hair. Which carrier was I on?

The answer is: not an Asian carrier. In this case, it was United Airlines, and despite the Facebook meme “Friends don’t let friends fly United,” the staff were just fine. They were better than fine: they were real. In contrast, on so many Asian airlines the cabin crew is young and comely, as if we are floating along in some 1950s cotton-candy cloud drift. It is surreal. And in demographic and economic terms, it is absurd.

There was a time in the United States when airlines put flight attendants out to pasture at the age of 32, or sooner if they got married. Few questioned the fairness of such policies in the 1960s. Well, paying customers don’t need to see someone old or unattractive, right?

Even the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission thought the airlines’ policy of preferring young, pretty and mostly female flight attendants was justified under the principle of “bona fide occupational qualification,” or BFOQ, which is the same principle that explains why fashion companies are not required to hire 500-pound supermodels.

According to historian Louis Menand, writing some years ago in The New Yorker magazine, a feisty 1960s congresswoman from Michigan, Martha Griffiths, challenged the BFOQ principle as it applied to airline staff.

“Can any Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner seriously believe that the business of the airlines would suffer if all of them hired flight attendants on the basis of their individual qualifications and ability?” Griffiths asked. “Do they really think for one moment that men or women make plane trips for the sole purpose of having a female—or male—flight attendant serve them lunch or give them an aspirin?”

This is not all she said on the matter. She added: “If you are trying to run a whorehouse in the sky - get a licence.”