A Dallas-based Dating service that offered an aviation twist to the age-old dating game remained closed today after federal agents seized its records last week.

Captain Date promised well-bred young women dates with high-earning American Airlines captains and first officers. But because the service did little or no fact checking, the girls wound up paired with lowly regional pilots, freight dogs, and in one case a $9/hr flight instructor who ate nothing but Heinz Baked Beans for a year.

Some men were pilot wannabes; many were married already, and one had two wives at home in Utah. The few actual American pilots turned out to be furloughed guys with really, really high seniority numbers, who were paid by the company to create the illusion of more pilot members.

"You could call it being a gigolo," admitted one former Fokker 100 FO, who begged us not to use his name, "but when Arby's turned me down for not being typed on Fryolator, I was desperate."

"They screened out only a very few, obvious phonies and losers," Assistant US Attorney Mindy Greenbaker told reporters. She could only remember the name of one dating-service reject. "Dennis Kucinich."

The other side of the equation was just as bad, Greenbaker told the press. Captain Date promised "lissome, sweet-natured, heiresses and debutantes. That's not what the pilots got. Some of these gals had crack habits; a couple looked like East German women athletes."

Why were the pilots so slow to report being taken advantage of? It might have been embarrassment, law enforcement sources report. "It wasn't just pilot licences and trust funds that were phony," a source close to the investigation told us. "Most of the "girls" were referred to Astro Date by Dr. Bollinger's sex-change clinic in Fort Worth."

Captain Date founder Frank Lorenzo was unavailable for comment.

FMI: alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pilots