I flew on Hooters Air.
Once a year, I head to the east coast to visit family. This trip always involves briefly stopping in Maryland and then heading down to South Carolina. Due to a lack of cheap direct flights, this leg of the trip is usually done by car. For three years, however, there was a single airline with a direct flight from Baltimore to Myrtle Beach. That airline was Hooters Air.
To better understand the audacious marvel that was Hooters Air, you need to understand the restaurant first. During college, a big group of friends and I would head down on the 25 cent wing nights. The wings were decent at best, but for a bunch of college guys, 25 cents wings was a godsend to our wallets. And stomachs. Sadly, that was really the only redeeming quality of the place.
Hooters is awful. Hooters is sad. Hooters is a brick and mortar representation of creepiness and desperation that serves heaping amounts of hot wings and broken dreams. And they don't even have 25 cent wings anymore!
So now the only real reason to go is to ogle at the waitresses, which just makes you a creep. And not just any kind of creep, a special kind: the Closet Creep. One that's ashamed of his creepiness. The kind that needs his fix of staring at cleavage, but is too ashamed to just go to a strip club. It's like buying a copy of Maxim rather than growing some balls and just getting a Playboy. The worst part is that once they've entered the restaurant, they completely and utterly embrace it. They come out of their creep closet.
It's a lot like when a gay guy comes out of the closet: they've suppressed and hidden it for so long that when they finally come out... just super gay. Over the top fabulous. The guys who visit Hooters are just the same. They play the boring businessman role for years, but when they come to a Hooters... the inner perv just oozes out. Overwhelmingly creepy. Total sleazeball status.
An environment just seething with uncomfortableness obviously lends itself to an industry comprised of small, enclosed spaces where you're stuck for hours. An airline was the obvious next step.
With an owl as their mascot, it was almost cute to start an airline. Birds, airplanes, flying: the perfect recipe for an adorable logo repurposing. But with a name like Hooters it comes right back to creepy status. I'm a big fan of puns, especially when used for business names, but there's just something that irks me about a group of guys naming their restaurant after the private body parts of their female employees.
The thought of an airline run by Hooters has an obvious appeal: what better way to pass the time than to have a bunch of women in skimpy clothing at your beck and call! But in reality, it's really just a normal, crappy airline. Just, you know, with Hooters girls. I really thought they'd at least have chicken wings, but no, just Hooters girls. It's not like they were flight attendants or anything, either. They had actual flight attendants there, too. The Hooters girls just sort of walked down the aisles every once and a while.
I guess tiny orange shorts don't qualify you to hand out peanuts at 30,000 feet.
