Don't kill the magic and be careful what you wish for....
"I began wearing hats as a young lawyer because it helped me to establish my professional identity. Before that, whenever I was at a meeting, someone would ask me to get coffee"
Bella Abzug
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.
Red Adair
By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body. And if at times you renounce experience and mind's heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space.
— Charles A. Lindbergh, 'The Spirit of St. Louis,' 1953
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return."
If we are not proud of our jobs, and of what our uniforms represent to the people who place their lives in our hands, then rather than throwing out the hats in themselves a symbol of that pride then maybe you should consider another career, this is more a question of dignity and respect than anything to do merely with hats. Sadly the dignity of our profession is being eroded and with that, our ability to protect and demand even our basic rights which effect moral, lifestyle health and potentially the accumulative effect of this, does effect safety. I believe Mr O Leary thinks along the same lines and some regarding the futility of hats and uniforms of hats, of course he also things Pilots are on the same level Mac Donalds managers and bus drivers....maybe you should join him.
The UK's Guardian newspaper wrote in June 2005 about Michael O'Leary: . "I am not a cloud bunny, I am not an aerosexual. I don't like aeroplanes. I never wanted to be a pilot like those other platoons of goons who populate the air industry."