Attendants object to ‘Flightplan’

They may have put up with being depicted as featherheaded flirts or even carry-on counting fascists, but flight attendants draw the line at the way they come across in Jodie Foster’s new hit movie.

Three flight attendant groups are calling for a boycott of “Flightplan,” which debuted at No. 1 last weekend, claiming that the depictions of a flight attendant and air marshal are outrageous and disrespectful.

In the thriller, Foster’s character, Kyle Pratt, awakens mid-flight to find her 6-year-old daughter missing. A search is launched, an announcement is made, but the girl does not turn up. As Kyle becomes increasingly upset, the plane’s crew begins to suspect that Kyle is unbalanced, which seems to be confirmed by the fact that no one saw the girl board. According to one attendant, the girl is not on the passenger list.

But --spoiler alert -- that attendant turns out to be part of a nefarious plot concocted by the federal air marshal who is “handling” the incident.

“With security concerns what they are, it is not a good time to release a film with a terrorist in the position of flight attendant,” said Corey Caldwell, a spokeswoman for the Assn. of Flight Attendants. “There has to be a layer of trust between the passengers and the crew, to ensure good communication during times of emergency, and a film like this undermines that trust.”

The groups calling for the boycott -- the AFA, the Assn. of Professional Flight Attendants and Southwest Airlines flight attendants represented by the Transport Workers Union Local 556 -- represent more than 80,000 flight attendants at 23 American-based airlines.

According to a statement, the groups were also troubled by the depiction of the non-villianous flight attendants, who were “rude, unhelpful and uncaring.”

Early in the film, flight attendants are seen rolling their eyes over a family with boisterous children, with one telling another something like: “It’s OK to hate the passengers.”

Foster took the role, she said in a recent interview, in part, because she liked how the script showed “how unhelpful people can be,” especially in situations in which a mother is upset.

But at a certain point in the film’s narrative, when even Kyle begins to doubt whether her daughter has boarded, the crew’s concern is appropriately with other passengers -- one attendant is seen calming tensions between American and Arab passengers.

According to Caldwell, all of this is overshadowed by the fact that one of the flight attendants turns out to be a terrorist.

Flight attendants, she said, are used to getting bad play in films -- from the oversexed “Coffee, Tea or Me” ideal to grim-faced matrons who view the passengers as unruly children.

“We have faced misconceptions for 75 years,” Caldwell said. “We could get over the rudeness, but the evilness, to be the villain, that is not acceptable.”

A Disney spokesman said the studio is sorry that flight attendants are unhappy.

“There was absolutely no intention on the part of the studio or filmmakers to create anything but a great action thriller,” the spokesman said. “We are confident the public will be able to discern the difference between fiction and the incredible job real-life flight attendants do on a daily basis.”