When I was a lad of about 10 or 11, I augmented my study of the female form by secretly borrowing from my dad’s collection of Playboy magazines. This being the early seventies, the pictorials were often based on career girls who worked as models, go-go dancers, actresses or stewardesses.

There was something alluring about stewardesses (now called flight attendants) that piqued my young hormonal interest. Maybe it was the snazzy navy blue uniforms with the crisp-folded caps and shiny pin-on wings. Maybe it was the fact that they earned their living by flirting with passengers at 36,000 feet above sea level. This was, after all, the era of Coffee, Tea or Me?, Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones’ best-selling series of tell-all books, so I’m positive that I’m not the only American male who had a healthy fascination with stewardesses.

Did you know that “stewardesses” is the longest word you can spell using only the left hand in the standard keyboard position. “Lollipop” is the longest word you can spell with the right hand. Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?

After flying on five flights from Charlotte to Phoenix and back last week, I’m not sure if Playboy magazine could find half a dozen current flight attendants photogenic enough for a new pictorial.

On my USAir flight from Charlotte to Chicago, one of our flight attendants—and I swear I’m not making this up—was a grizzled Vietnam veteran. On his chest he proudly wore several medals he won in Vietnam, right alongside his shiny stewardess wings. I kept my eye on him, as he seemed like the type of war veteran who might have a Tet Offensive flashback if we hit too much turbulence over the jungles of Indiana.

I think his attendant partner on this particular flight might have been his mother. She basically used the drink cart as a walker as she hobbled up and down the aisle mumbling something about the cart being out of Tab.

Welcome, my friends, to the varicose-veined underbelly of air travel today. It seems as if someone or something has sucked all of the glamour and sexiness out of flying, and I’m not at all happy about it. And I don’t blame the geriatric flight attendants. They’re just trying to supplement their retirement income while getting free flights to Florida to see their friends.

No, the flight attendants are the least problematic aspect of this new era of air travel. The real bugaboos lie in the aging infrastructure of airports and airplanes, and the nasty attitudes of the people who run them. Since 9-11, every airport in the country has adopted new security measures, some of which are perfectly reasonable, some of which border on the insane.

In December of 2001, a deranged British national named Richard Reid tried to light a homemade shoe bomb on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami with a pack of matches. After being repeatedly told by flight attendants that smoking wasn’t permitted on the plane, an exasperated Reid showed them that he wasn’t trying to light a cigarette, but instead a bomb in his loafer. A scuffle ensued and the 6 foot 4 inch Reid was beaten by passengers and subdued with a combination of seat belts, headphone cords and valium.

I love this story, particularly the part where the passengers and crew descend on this moron with a post 9/11 fury that probably would’ve killed a smaller human being. What I hate about the incident is that Reid’s attempt is now immortalized every single day as thousands, if not millions, of air travelers have to take off their shoes and have them x-rayed before boarding planes. I imagine they could install x-ray machines that look inside your shoes as you walk by, but then frequent fliers would run the risk of having their feet zapped too many times.

Some airports handle this problem smoothly while others do not. In Phoenix, there was nowhere to sit down and put on your shoes after you retrieved them from the x-ray machine. Consequently, the floor was littered with poor souls struggling to put on their shoes and boots, wondering why they had forgotten to wear something easier to slip in and out of. Meanwhile, Phoenix Airport security personnel yelled at these people to keep the aisle clear for the hordes of shoeless folks to follow.

If the airport in Phoenix won the Rude Employee award, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport is the hands-down winner of the Please God, Get Me Outa Here award. Built during WWII, O’Hare is the second busiest airport in the world and accounts for over one-sixth of the nation’s total flight cancellations. On Sunday night, the airport was filled with anxious Thanksgiving travelers waiting for delayed flights. People joked with each other in a pleasant manner, all the while knowing that murder was not out of the question if it meant securing a seat on the next flight out.

When we arrived at O’Hare we discovered we had to take a shuttle bus from one terminal to another to catch our next flight. In a blinding snowstorm, our intrepid bus driver maneuvered around taxiing 747s and huge luggage carriers. And he managed to pull off this feat with no lights on the shuttle bus and no visible lanes painted on the tarmac.

That chaotic shuttle service is pretty much a microcosm for O’Hare as a whole. There is nothing about the place that seems the least bit friendly, up-to-date or safe. When we finally boarded our plane for Charlotte Sunday night, ghoulish-looking O’Hare employees came out to the tarmac to “de-ice” the wings and tail of our airplane. This process involves standing on elevated platforms and hosing down the plane with green, slightly glowing antifreeze. The entire affair had the look and feel of a cheap horror movie, where the props are made of painted styrofoam and the zombies are homeless people recruited off of the street with the promise of a hot sandwich and a ten-dollar bill.

Chicago is currently in the running as a candidate to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. The international community should tell the Windy City that it can have the Olympics if it tears down O’Hare and replaces it with an airport worthy of the 21st century.