These three Brazilian flight attendants have the cure for the traveler's blues. Who's up for Carnival at 30,000 feet?
Exhibit A: Kyla Ebbert, a 23-year-old collegian, was nearly kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight in September for wearing clothes deemed too revealing. Days later she wore the offending outfit—a brief but hardly scandalous miniskirt-and-sweater combo—on the Today show.
Exhibit B: With Kyla in the news (and well on her way to a Playboy.com pictorial), 21-year-old Setara Qassim came forward with another Southwest story: She had been told by a flight attendant to cover herself with a blanket because her neckline was flying too low.
And this is on Southwest—an airline that did as much as any to sexualize the image of the stewardess in the Coffee, Tea or Me? era. In the 1970s Southwest air babes took their fashion cues from Barbarella and Nancy Sinatra, strutting the aisles in miniskirts or hot pants and patent-leather go-go boots.
There is a creeping prudery in the once-friendly skies, where men are publicly chastised for reading playboy and women are shown the door for breast-feeding their children. And we haven't even mentioned the indignity of removing shoes and belt, handing over tweezers and lotions and dumping soft
drinks. (Did you hear about the German who didn't want to surrender the liter of vodka he'd put in his carry-on? He chugged the entire bottle right there at the security checkpoint and had to be whisked to a hospital. Point made.)
Remember when flying was fun?
It still is—in Brazil. Of course it's still fun in Brazil, the land of Carnival and caipirinhas. A place where you can smoke in bars, dental-floss thongs are legal beachwear and the national team is (usually) the best in the world at the world's biggest sport. And the stewardesses will have you dreaming of the mile high club before the captain has closed the cabin doors.
Meet waitresses in the sky Sabrina Knop. Patricia Kreus-burg and Juliana Neves (above, from left). In 2006 they were among several thousand employees of Varig. Brazil's ailing national airline, where job security was not good. Out of chaos, beauty: The trio posed for a cover pictorial in Brazilian playboy that transformed them into national sex symbols.
With hospitality like this, jets to Brazil make good on the old Cunard cruise line promise: Getting there is half the fun.
