Come fly with me?

With a nod at the viewer, their clothes change and they’re sashaying through a hangar, caught by a showbiz spotlight and off to work in their Virgin Australia flight attendant uniforms’ little red dresses.

Without having carried any bags to the airport or had their ASIC checked, natch – turn up off the ferry in a floaty summer dress and it seems you breeze through into the hangar that all flight attendants apparently use before walking down the runway to their plane.

The one sop to this no longer being a Don Draper world? One of the pilots is a woman.

Now you’re flying, we’re told, as an A330 roars overhead.

As an ad, it’s glamorous, glitzy, and irresponsible. As an airline, Virgin Australia will get the passengers it advertises for.

The “now” is no longer the 1960s, and female cabin crew are not props for the glamourisation of flying. They’re real professionals who do a real job that has a real impact on the safety of every flight they operate.

Virgin Australia isn’t alone, of course, it’s just the most recent.

Air New Zealand took far too long to backtrack from the bikini-clad Swimsuit Illustrated model safety video that made many passengers feel uncomfortable, and saw others behave inappropriately.

Singapore Airlines recently shook up its Singapore Girl advertising, where there was more than a jasmine-scented whiff of troublingly pliable Orientalism, with at-your-service Asian women attending to the every need of a largely Western, largely male target market. Now, its crew members are presented as knowledgeable connoisseurs of inflight products.

By most in the industry – but, problematically, not all – flight attendants are now considered the trained safety professionals they are. Yes, they also serve you a drink, in the same way that a policeman will give you directions, or a firefighter will rescue a kitten from a tree.

Yet their primary purpose is to help passengers get to their destination safely. And, in extreme cases, to ensure it: by evacuating an aircraft in under 90 seconds, by fighting fires on board hours from a diversion airport, by ensuring that passengers are belted in so that ever-safer seats have a chance to save their lives in the event of an accident. Or, as one Asiana flight attendant showed last year, to physically carry passengers from a burning plane.

They’re real professionals who do a real job that has a real impact on safety.

The problem with using sexy cabin crew to sell a ticket is when passengers feel that the cabin crew member serving them a beer on the Sydney flight is the product they have purchased. It’s the Fly Me 1960s, all over again – but society, safety and security are not in the 1960s any more.

That’s a good thing.

Disruptive incidents are on the rise (see “Flight, Interrupted” in July 2014 Australian Aviation). Many of those incidents are to do with passengers refusing to follow crew instructions, sexually harassing cabin crew, or being disruptive in other ways.

A sign of how cabin crew are currently viewed: shortly after the rules on personal electronics were relaxed, an Australian technology publication (in an asinine complaint that a laptop-sized Microsoft Surface device to which they’d attached a laptop-sized style keyboard, and which together exceeded the 1kg limit, was, in fact, taken for a laptop and required to be stowed for takeoff) talked about “the air hostess”.

Passengers need to understand the true role of cabin crew, and to afford them the consideration due to any professional. The lack of that respect is an airline-created problem, and airlines must stop perpetuating it.

There is much about the Virgin Australia passenger experience to admire, as there is about many airlines aiming to be an airline of choice rather than just the cheapest option.

Using the “we have sexy air hostesses” as a sales strategy is as frustrating and patronising as it is antediluvian – and it attracts the wrong sort of passenger.