Sex In the Sky? Bikinis Rule the Runways at This Mexican Airline

Ever since I was a young reporter on the staff of the Sunday magazine of The Washington Post, I've known that sex sells.  So for that matter, do kids and dogs.  Put an attractive woman on the cover of a magazine or a picture of an adorable child or puppy, and people will pause to notice.  And maybe even buy.

(National Lampoon parodied this truism with its famous cover of a darling dog with a pistol pointed at its head on the cover.  The cover line read in big type, "Buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog.")

Now comes a discount Mexican airline, VivaAerobus, with a calender featuring cheesecake shots of attractive female flight attendants.  Launched with a YouTube clip that's attracted 75,000 views in the two weeks since it was posted, VivaCalendario is a step back in time, to an era when airlines in the US used sex to sell their products.  Continental Airlines used to promise, "We really move our tails for you."  (And the next line in the chorus of the airline's ad jingle was, "We make your every dream come true."  Imagine an airline promising that today.) In 1967, a first-person book by a flight attendant titled "Coffee, Tea or Me?" became a best seller in a dozen languages.  (One revelation: Spanish men ARE really the best lovers, according to the book.)  In its early days, Southwest Airlines got noticed when it put its female flight attendants in hot pants. 

The women of VivaAerobus pose in tiny bikinis and even a reflecting jacket (well, not MUCH of a jacket) worn by ground personnel who work on the tarmac.  Passengers can buy the calendar for $10 at the airline's ticket desks or on board flights, and the proceeds benefit a Mexican children's cancer institute, so you can feel noble about your purchase.

The marketing idea clearly comes from one of the investors in the airline, Ireland's Ryanair, which for a couple of years has sold its own calendar of flight attendants posing fetchingly, including a shot of a  brunette in a white bikini lying on her back over the enormous tire of an aircraft with a smudge of grease on her tummy. 

For the sake of flight attendants, I only wish their jobs today were as glamorous as those highly stylized shots suggest.  Most US-based attendants have endured pay cuts even as their retirement accounts evaporated and management stretched the number of hours they had to work.  With the exception of JetBlue, Southwest, and Virgin America, there's not a lot of joie de vivre among airline employees, though, of course, every airline has its exceptional workers who do treat passengers as valued customers.

For my part, I'll take the flight attendants of the US Airways flight that had to ditch in the Hudson River recently.  They are in their 50s and may not win a bikini contest against VivaAerobus' pin-up girls.  But they hustled passengers safely off that Airbus, and that kind of professionalism trumps centerfold stats in my book any day.

So what about this airline VivaAerobus?  Well, today it's offering $49 flights from Austin, TX, to Cancun.  That's only five times the price of the calendar.