Sally the Flightpal

Sally the Flightpal 200 is a fictional character in the 2015 film Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant, portrayed by actress Rebecca Romijn. Sally serves as the main antagonist in the film, which concerns a flight attendant (Mark Feuerstein) who discovers that the airline company he is working for is trying to slash costs by having human flight attendants replaced with robots.

History
During a board meeting at Federated Airlines headquarters in Atlanta, Emily McCoy (Molly Shannon ) introduces Sally as a solution to eliminating human flight attendants and by extension, eliminate their rising salaries and benefits. When McCoy complains that the cup of coffee that Sally served her was too hot, Sally doesn't flinch when the coffee is tossed directly into her face.

Sally soon explains that her body is state of the art neoprene, stretched over a complex electronic framework. Her brain is a powerful microprocessor that's capable of 5 billion decisions per second. And her boobs are a perky 34c. McCoy then tells the board members that Sally was made by Techtronics Industries. McCoy adds that for a fraction of the costs of a human flight attendant, Federated Airlines could have every one of its planes fully manned by Flightpals within one year.

When the CEO of Federated Airlines, Stanley Warner (Henry Winkler) casts his doubts over whether Sally is better than their own flight attendants, the president and founder of Techtronics Industries, Bob Techtronics (Adam Shapiro) walks in. Techtronics comes up with the solution of allowing Sally to compete against Federated Airlines' single best flight attendant in a challenge of skills.

At an assembly meeting for the Fraternal Association of Federated Airlines Flight Attendants (or FAFAFA), the union's president (Marcia Gay Harden) announces Larry Gaye has been selected by the research committee as the one to go up against Sally in a performance test.

Down in Techtronics Industries' headquarters in Silicon Valley, Sally is undergoing a CT scan. Techtronics' VP (Bruno Oliver) assembled a crew to fine tune the Flightpal's hard drive, Stuart Nevins (John Yuan), Johann Kaminsky (Matthew Yuan), and Taequan Black (Darius Devontaye Green). Black warns Bob Techtronics that while the technical stuff pertaining to Sally will be there, great flight attendants have a certain human instinct that they don't quite understand yet. At the Federated Airlines Testing Center in hangar 26, Sally competes against Larry Gaye in a race around queue lines. They also compete to see you can serve the better cup of coffee as well as singled-handedly carry a tray of drinks while walking across a mechanical balance board. Sally later defeats Larry in hurdles over luggage and in a boxing match.

For the final event, Sally and Larry must offer passengers a choice of dinner between barbeque chicken and pasta primavera. But as a costumer service problem, the airplane is out of pasta and a more disgusting, non-edible entrée as an alternative. Larry eventually gives up when he couldn't think of any other possibly disgusting alternative. Therefore, Sally is declared the winner of the competition by a score of 61 points to zero.

Larry and his friend and co-worker Nathan Vignes (Danny Pudi ) soon deduces that Sally was able to virtually know his every move due to Isabella (Leslie Coutterand), a woman who seduced him and shared his secrets with.

On Larry and Nathan's next assignment for Federated Airlines, Flight 37 to Buenos Aires, they spot Sally now in full flight attendant uniform helping passengers put their luggage in the overhead aircraft bin. Larry later catches Sally and asks her if she could cover his dinner and coach duties with Nathan. Sally reminds Larry that she was assigned to First Class. Larry then pleads to Sally to "have a heart", which leads to Sally to again remind him that since she's a robot, she doesn't have a heart. When Larry asks Sally if she has to take everything so literally, Sally says "Yes!"

Later, while assisting Captain Bryce (Patrick Warburton ) and Captain Felder (Ian Gomez) in the cockpit after the airplane's fuel line is blown, Larry learns that the singles are crossed with the Flightpal, thus he is unable to stay in contact with ground control's radio. Larry overhears Sally on his headset asking a passenger Chardonnay or Cabernet Franc. Larry then attacks what he initially presumes to be Sally from behind with a service trolley. Nathan immediately informs Larry that he mistakenly attacked someone else only for Sally to enter the scene from behind.

After Sally asks Larry if she could help him, Larry response by lifting the bottom of her blouse to reveal a red button in the place of her navel. Larry presses the button to open up her access panel. It is there, where Larry presses down a switch on the side of the motherboard to shut the Flightpal off.

Portrayal and characteristics
Sally as evident by her beating up film's hero, Larry, in a boxing match, expresses hostile intent towards men. As previously mentioned, Sally's brain is described as being capable of five billion decisions per second. In reality, "Watson", an AI machine that was designed by IBM to answer questions, runs on a cluster of roughly 100 8-core processors. That means that it has approximately over 3,000 billion (equal to 3 trillion) operations per second.

Production
The project was first announced in November 2012, with Mike Sikowitz penning the screenplay. Mark Feuerstein and Stanley Tucci were the first to join the cast. Feurstein loved Sikowitz's script so much that he shepherded the project to the point of pre-production. Director Sam Friedlander added that his collaboration with Feurstein and Sikowitz was a real homegrown effort. He added how exciting and empowering it was to put something together outside of the traditional model. That according to Friedlander, gave them a lot of creative breathing room.

On March 8, 2013, it was announced that Jessica Lowndes, Jayma Mays and Rebecca Romijn were included to the cast. Feuerstein claimed that not only did he raise all the money himself, he had to beg and borrow to get the actors such as Rebecca Romijn to sign on. Stella Angelova was Rebecca Romijn's stunt double.

Mark Feuerstein told Danielle Solzman of the website Hidden Remote that his character, Larry Gaye, is the guy that's going to save all the other flight attendants from a robot flight attendant, played by Rebecca Romijn, who threatens to replace all of them.

In an interview with Rama Screen, Feuerstein when asked about going from playing a doctor on the TV series Royal Pains to playing a flight attendant "It’s very different to be on the set of a comedy where you’re looking to turn things as ridiculous as possible as opposed to a medical drama, where we’re trying to be as realistic and accurate as possible. But it was so fun to be on a set where on my first day of shooting, instead of trying to figure out how to perform an accurate rendition of a tracheotomy, I’m wearing a strap-on in a bathing suit because I have an erection from Rebecca Romijn who plays a robot flight attendant.”