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Re: 'mile high club'

Posted by Masakim on December 04, 2003

In Reply to: Re: 'mile high club' posted by R. Berg on December 04, 2003

: : : This expression dates back to the days of the DC 3 and the beginning of private aviation. It refers to someone who has done the deed at altitude and used to be quite rare. Recently, I heard from an International Stewardess (sorry, flight attendant) that it not at all rare anymore -- happens all the time on night flights. Can this really be?????

: : I don't know. The only places I ever get to go are work and church. But I'm interested in seeing who will admit to firsthand knowledge.

: I've heard it used here in California, not this year but recently enough that I wouldn't say it's obsolete.

mile high club, the A fantasy club for which the only criterion of membership is that a person has been fortunate enough to have had sexual intercourse whilst flying as a passenger on a plane. First heard during the international flight boom of the early seventies and swiftly picked up by popular newspapers in the US and the UK. Still very popular (presumably people are 'joining' every day as air traffic steadily increases). Gays are also eligible, withh the captain's announcement 'we are now cruising at 30,000 feet' often causing amusement on US flights. One memorable British equivalent is the 'three foot six high club' whose members join by having sex during a British Rail journey (Nic Van Hear, 1980), although this club has as yet escaped the newspapers' attention.
From _The Slanguage of Sex_ by Brigid McConville & John Shearlaw
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Mile-high club. A notional 'club' evolving in the 1970s of those who have coupled sexually while in an aeroplane. The first recorded incident have taken place in 1916, when Lawrence Sperry, an aircraft designer flying a biplane over New York, lost control and crashed, although he and his lover lived to tell the tale. A more recent equivalent is the 'mile-deep club', whose members have followed their example while travelling through the Channel Tunnel. The Mile High Club had a bad press over the past couple of days. The arrest of married strangers Amanda Holt and David Machin, following their brief encounter in the business-class section of an American Airlines aircraft, was an unromantic ending to their sky-high liaison. _The Times_ (6 October 1999)
From _Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable_ by Adrian Room
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Jokes about the Mile-High Club, about balling pilots in the cockpit or passengers in the toilet. (J. Wells, _Come Fly with Us_, 1972)
The "Mile-High Club," in which membership is limited to couples who have had sex on commercial airline flights. (_TV Guide_, August 5, 1989)