Fly Girls, which premiered last night on the CW, follows five young, hot Virgin America flight attendants as they travel the world, attend glamorous parties, and never once have to clean up turbulence-related puke. Anyone who has been on a plane in the last, say, 40-years has reason to be dubious about the “reality” of this reality-TV show. First of all, flight attendants rarely look like movie stars, and secondly, where were the screaming babies and disgruntled passengers? So we went to the source, an actual United flight attendant, to get his thoughts on the show.
“I really liked it!” he began (we’re not using his name at his request). “A lot of it was funny and accurate.” He specifically pointed to the terminology the flight attendants use, such as IFB, for in-flight boyfriend (see the video clip), and to the passenger antics, which included numerous men making passes at the ladies. “It sounds staged the way they’re saying it on the show, but people do actually say stuff like that garbage. Fairly regularly, you get some intoxicated or annoying passenger trying to pick up your flight attendant. The guy complimenting her on her walk, the way that one girl got asked out to a cocktail party — that does happen,” he told us.
So what wasn’t as realistic? “They leave out a lot of the details, and they make it seem really glamorous. They’re like, ‘You can get on a plane and go anywhere!’ Well, you have to do that standby, so you have to be willing to wait around all day.” He also pointed out that not all flight attendants are so, er, attractive. “Virgin is maybe an exception, but at United, we have this super professional attitude, and so we have some older ladies, and a lot of them are burnt out and annoying,” he said. In all, though, he enjoyed the show, and plans on watching the rest of the season. “It doesn’t take a lot to set a passenger off, and so I’m looking forward to see if they’re going to deal with that,” he concluded.
