What happens over Vegas, stays over Vegas.
That's the tag line for Love Cloud, a start-up airline that allows couples to book a flight up to an altitude of at least 5,280 feet, where they can then, well, join the "Mile High Club."
"I want it to be romantic," company founder Andy Johnson told Las Vegas Weekly, "one of those bucket-list things that you did that you will never forget for the rest of your life."
Flights start at $800 and last anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour and a half. Inside Love Cloud's Cessna 421 Golden Eagle there's a custom bed and a music and mood-lighting system. You can have chocolates and roses and ... other things ... at the ready, and the plane is professionally cleaned after every flight.
Doesn't Love Cloud defeat the whole purpose of joining the Mile High Club? Aren't members supposed to risk being caught, to feel like they've gotten away with something, to be completely uncomfortable inside a lavatory?
Where's the giddy fun of boarding an airplane where the pilot knows exactly what you plan to do and doesn't care? Should you even be allowed to say you've joined the Mile High Club if it's a comfortable and encouraged experience? Someone has to stand up for the MHC's integrity!
Meantime, the Weekly also reports that Johnson plead guilty to reckless operation of an aircraft for flying with a suspended license in 2012 in Virginia, which he blames on ill-conceived efforts to keep a flight school afloat during the recession.
Johnson's not flying the Love Cloud plane; someone else is. He's just the guy on the ground with mile-high dreams. He calls Las Vegas "the city of second chances."
Johnson has gotten some unusual requests for Love Cloud, including someone asking if there would be a bunk bed. "I'm like, 'This is not a submarine,'" he said.
So you say.
The hope now is that Love Cloud takes off as a business. Johnson would like to expand, but it's not clear that a business model based on sex in the air will fly everywhere.
"Vegas is the place where people will do things that they normally would never do back home," he said.