For a few weeks now, the “gender madness” has been in full swing at Austrian Airlines. The use of colons makes media releases more difficult to read and passengers are no longer ladies and gentlemen, but passengers. The gender endeavors are also going in a completely different direction, because on tickets one simply turned “woman” into “Miss” and security cards in the Embraer 195 show a completely clichéd image of man and woman.

Female people who bought an AUA flight ticket on the carrier's homepage in the past few weeks could not believe their eyes. Instead of “Ms. XYZ” they were addressed as “Miss XYZ”. This was also done in the travel documents. This was pissed off by a 67-year-old lady and she wrote a pounding letter of complaint to Austrian Airlines, asking, in a friendly but firm manner, that this should be changed to a woman, because she did not want to be dubbed “a waitress or housemaid like she used to be”.

However, Austrian Airlines, which outwardly had fallen into gender madness, did not give priority to the business class passenger. After more than six weeks, she still had received no response, despite initial restrictions. Only after Aviation Direct had sent an inquiry to the media office did the AUA try to answer the complaint. They apologized. Despite repeated inquiries, the press office did not provide an explanation as to why they had now used “Miss” instead of “Frau”.

Safety cards show clichéd images of men and women

The representations on the latest security cards on the Embraer 195 fleet should also be a proverbial “grabbing the toilet”. The images on the front clearly show a woman who, for example, shows a child an oxygen mask. All activities that require little effort are represented by a female person.

If you turn the safety card, a woman illustrates how to take the brace position or how to crawl on the floor to the emergency exit in the event of a fire. A man then takes over the opening of the quite difficult exit window. He opens the 17,5 kilogram door in the pictures and escapes on the plane. It is noticeable that he sits casually on the plane with his shirt unbuttoned and no tie. Outside of the machine, he suddenly wears a tie.

The representations on the E195 security cards do not fit the gender claim at all, because they imply that difficult tasks (opening the 17,5 kilogram window) are men’s business, while putting children on an oxygen mask, for example, is what should be more for women . Either you use women or men all the time, or you shouldn't pretend that women can't move 17,5 kilograms. It should be remembered that the majority of flight attendants are female and can open these windows or doors at the emergency exit with total ease. In the case of older machines with airstairs without an electric drive, these must also be pulled up by the often female flight attendants with muscle power. Is this a problem? No, because you learn something like that in training and passengers get this explained by the flight attendants when they are briefed on the tasks in an emergency.

In principle, it would make no difference whether the illustrated representations show a man or a woman, because the vast majority of passengers look at the security cards out of boredom, if at all. But if you take part in the “gender madness”, then you should refrain from using terms such as “Miss” or clichéd images of men and women on security cards. Incidentally, the Austrian Airlines media office did not comment on the images on the E195 safety cards.