Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

COED:
http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/exotic

   adjective
   1 originating in or characteristic of a distant foreign
   country.
   2 strikingly colourful or unusual.

It's the latter half of their sense 2 b:

   Outlandish, barbarous, strange, uncouth. Also, having the
   attraction of the strange or foreign, glamorous.

The "strip-tease" sense is probably from it being (I believe)
commonplace and possibly legally more acceptable for strippers to put
on the trappings of a Middle Eastern "harem" dancer, a la Salome, and
perform a version of the Dance of the Seven Veils.  Cultural, you see,
not smutty.

They've been able to for quite a while

   A modern Wandering Jew is he,
     A student of all races,
   And when there's nothing left to see
     In strange, exotic places,
   
   He homeward turns for fame to look,
     Quite sure that he will win it,
   And writes a most ambitious book,
     Without one new thing in it!

                        Cendrillon, "A Kind of Traveller",
                        _Scribner's_, 1880

But it seems to have become common around World War I.    

   Thus, in all the scorched and exotic places of the earth,
   Causcasians meet when the day's work is done to preserve the
   fulness of their heritage by the aspersion of alien things.

                          O. Henry, "The Shamrock and the Palm", in
                          _Cabbages and Kings_, 1915

   The native streets are as "characteristic" of China as any
   elsewhere, but in a few minutes it is possible to pass beyond any
   ofthem and find a settlement of Europeans or Americans where there
   is little to suggest the exotic locale.

                          Archie Bell, _The Spell of China_, 1917

   Mr. Hammond has turned this fantastic tale of just retribution
   into a little keyboard drama of tense effect, the massive chord
   progressions which typify the movements of the stone image
   climaxing into the stroke of justice, lending an added
   picturesqueness of the bizarre and barbaric by reason of the
   exotic harmonies, a sound evocation that establishes the exotic
   _locale_, which places the entire concept without the occidental
   pale.

                          _The Musical Quarterly_, October, 1922

   Mrs. Gelzer, whose tales of life in the Chinese quarter of
   Melbourne, "The Street of a Thousand Delights," were widely read
   and admired, has selected a less exotic locale as the setting for
   her first novel.

                          Spring, 1924, catalog at the back of
                          A.E. Beamish, _First Steps to Lawn Tennis_,
                          1922

Isn't that what the original comment meant -- the aeroplane might be going to
far-away places with different surroundings, unlike those of the place it took
off from?

In that context it would take exotic to mean "far away and different", as
opposed to, say, flying from Maidenhead to Basingstoke, or Bapsfontein to
Ventersdorp. If it flew from Bapsfontein to Basingstoke it would be going
somewhere exotic.