Peter’s Principles

What right has Peter Greenberg to use his column for a diatribe against the young, enthusiastic and attractive female cabin attendants that once made flying a pleasure and less of the traumatic melodrama it has become (for which aging stewardesses are partly to blame)?

After thousands of words of rhetoric, Greenberg finally makes his point that in an emergency he’ll feel safe in the hands of an old, experienced stewardess (or steward?). But that is stretching a point, besides being his only one.

In the first place, an emergency situation exists less than a 10th of 1% of the time. Secondly, a stew with just a year’s service will have made over 150 flights and logged as many as a half-million miles. This surely is plenty of experience.

Moreover, would Greenberg deny a youngster her first job because 1) she’s attractive and eager and 2) another woman twice her age has held the job for 20 years, isn’t going to be promoted and won’t give up her job? Finally, hasn’t frequent-flier Greenberg yet observed that as cabin attendants age, they become complacent, bored, jaded, bossy, disinterested and totally reliant upon job security and union rules that prevent them from having been replaced a decade or so earlier?

OLIVER BERLINER

Beverly Hills