The Truth Behind the Southwest Airlines "Stripper Plane"

Gadling's Neil Woodburn relates a lurid story about a Southwest Airlines flight from LAX to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, each Friday afternoon, crammed with exotic dancers on their way to work the gambling Mecca's strip clubs for the weekend:

Every Friday evening, some time before most people have clocked out of work and begin heading home for the weekend, a plane takes off from LAX.

Like so many other flights at this time, this one is also heading to Las Vegas. It's not full of gamblers, however, but rather a disproportionate amount of silicone that bounces and jiggles through the warm, desert-air turbulence all the way to Vegas where, for the remainder of Friday and Saturday night, it will continue quivering away at $20 a pop.

This, folks, is the Southwest Stripper Plane....

No one really knows what time this legendary, perhaps even mythical flight leaves Los Angeles. Seats are reserved months in advance and few mere mortals are able to secure a reservation. A friend of mine claims he once found himself on this flight but can't seem to remember the details, as though some powerful force scrubbed his brain clean, leaving only a trace of glitter on his sweaty forehead.

Gadling is part of the Weblogs, Inc. blog network. Maybe the pittance that Jason Calacanis pays his indentured servants is not enough to reward or encourage fact-checking. But it takes only a few minutes of playing with the Southwest Airlines reservation system to discover that, except on particular high-traffic weekends, seats are available on all Friday afternoon flights to Las Vegas, not just from LAX but from Burbank, Long Beach, and Orange County's John Wayne airports as well.

There is a seed of truth from out of which grew this male fantasy of a pleasure plane packed with pulchritudinous pole-dancers. The strip clubs of Las Vegas do indeed receive an influx of transient dancers from out of town every weekend, and many of these dancers do spend the rest of their week somewhere in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. If you fly on any Friday afternoon flight on from any of the area's airports to McCarran, some of the passengers will be women on their way to a weekend of work as exotic dancers.

But mark this, horndogs: If you find yourself one one of those flights, sitting next to one of these women, she is not at her job yet. In a strip club you get to ogle and flirt and maybe even grope — because you are paying the dancer directly for the privilege. On the the plane, however, she is just another working stiff commuting to her stressful, emotionally demanding job, so leave her alone. She doesn't want to talk to you.

(You might not even know it: she's wearing street clothes, not a camisole and T-back thong, and she won't put her war paint on until she gets to the dressing room at Cheetah's. Without her glamour on, you might never give her a second look.)

(via Flight International)

Tags: strippers exotic+dancers sex+work los+angeles las+vegas southwest+airlines urban+legend sex