Hooters used to be known for two things: their chicken wings and their reasonably priced flights out of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
I’m gonna be totally transparent with you (the reader)… when I first saw this, I thought it was A.I. generated. Or I assumed that someone’s clever photoshop job had pulled one over on me. In this day and age, you can’t believe everything you see on the internet. That’s why I had to look into “Hooters Air” in order to confidently type out this next line.
The Hooters-branded airline was very much real.
From 2003 to 2006, the Hooters restaurant brand expanded into the airline travel industry with “Hooters Air.” Hooters owner Robert Brooks acquired Pace Airlines in late 2002, slapped a bunch of Hooters logos on the planes of the fleet, and traded out flight attendants for Hooters girls.
And guess what? Hooters Air did things the right way. Despite always being looked at as a “flying billboard,” they made sure that the experience during their flights was top notch. That started with offering low fares (mainly targeted at golfers traveling to Myrtle Beach) and removing rows of seats to increase every seat’s leg room to the equivalent of business class.
Hooters girls walked up and down the aisles of the plane during the flight providing hospitality to those flying Hooters Air, and the airline even opted to serve a complimentary meal to passengers on any of their flights that lasted over an hour.
Somehow, the low-cost airline was able to offer a first-class experience to all of their fliers.
Hooters Air had its headquarters in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, but it provided flights to a number of different attractive travel destinations, including:
-Nassau, Bahamas
-Fort Lauderdale, Florida
-Las Vegas, Nevada
-San Juan, Puerto Rico
-Gary, Indiana
Nothing like gathering the boys together for a weekend trip to GARY, INDIANA. That’s an actual location that Hooters Air exclusively flew to, by the way. I’m not making that up. In fact, just to be perfectly clear, I’m not making any of this up. I’m personally still floored that this existed – and I can’t wrap my head around it not being a booming success.
For those that don’t know, Gary, Indiana, was named the most dangerous city in America back in the ’90s and was commonly referred to as the “murder capital” of the United States for many years.
Hooters Air eventually fizzled out in 2006 after sinking around $40 million into the airline. Competing airlines began receiving revenue guarantees for routes that the Hooters airline flew, and rising fuel costs apparently also played a role in Hooters Air grounding all of their flights for good. It’s a real shame, and now all these years later, it almost seems like it was all some sort of dream, does it not? An American dream.
If you still don’t believe that it existed, I’ll direct you to this Hooters Air commercial from 2004. It seems to me that the only problem the Hooters airline really had was being way ahead of its time:
