My use of "she" wasn't a gender statement so much as something I had to do in order to get around a grammatical constraint. I had to choose he or she in my sentence*. Since flight attendants are more often than "she" than "he" (and definitely on Singapore Airlines), I chose "she".

One of the major causes of death in survivable accidents tends to be not finding the exits and succumbing to smoke and fire. This probably happens to people not paying attention to the safety demo.

Kudos to you.

I agree. Management investing in the staff would be awesome. I think that's one of the central issues on North American carriers. Flight attendants don't feel as if management cares. So many layoffs and paycuts over so many years. Hard rosters. I don't blame them for throwing up their hands and going "meh".

.

.

You do need to clean out the filter in the dishwasher periodically or it will gunk up, but I've found that's about it.

Well put. One big issue with US carriers is that it is a tough industry that has had a lot of layoffs and pay cuts. I can understand if employees aren't massively motivated.

Fair dinkum again.

I don't think they need to be drop dead gorgeous. In fact if you look closely the percentage of actually drop dead gorgeous flight attendants on Asian carriers is about the same as on any other carrier (if you factor in aging).

Fair dinkum. However methinks in Italian you'd normally translate Leotardo as "late lion", not "retarded lion".

In Italians "tardo" means late (specifically in the masculine singular). It may well be slang for stupid but the main meaning is late.

While most people so, You actual don't have to rinse unless the plates have chunks of food on them (and in that case just dump the chunks in the bin instead). The dishwasher is built to handle all that greasy stuff and all the food remnants left on the plate. One dishwasher repairman told me he often gets calls for…

Many Asian airlines don't have to adhere to age discrimination laws, so they can bring in new, young talent on a regular basis. A rotating staff also allows them to keep payroll costs low while unionized flight attendants earn tenure and can't be fired when they no longer rock the skirt.

You mean Ascension? That was a miniseries. Probably also a backdoor pilot but I don't know if it will take off (heh).

Thanks for linking. You can count on the Beeb to typically get the facts traight. :)

Packet switching?

I'm sure they regularly get asked about horoscopes. I'd have a hard time controlling my eye-roll of disdain.

Where do I start? Thanks to overwhelmingly idiotic news coverage of aviation, it seems to be one of those fields where lots of people "know all about it". I grind my teeth a lot...

The only places apart form io9 that offer such cogent and intelligent discussion are specialized forums such as the Tech Ops board on Airliners.net. For sure these places are hard to find, especially in essentially unmoderated forums.