May, 2005, Marks The 75th Anniversary of The UA Flight Attendant Profession

In 1930, Iowa-born Ellen Church learned that Boeing
Air Transport, one of UA's predecessor airlines,
was planning to hire male stewards to work on board
its Boeing 80A aircraft flying between Chicago and
San Francisco. She thought that a woman with
nurse's training could do a better job and proposed
the idea to Boeing Air Transport manager Steve
Stimpson, who convinced Boeing's executives, and a
profession was born.

When Ellen Church was hired, she assembled a top
flight team of seven nurses for the job. The
world's first stewardesses -- they were renamed
flight attendants in 1973 -- not only served
customers but loaded baggage, hauled fuel and
sometimes even pushed planes into their hangars at
night. A profile of Church and a timeline of the
decades-long flight attendant success story are
found in the current issue of Hemispheres.

Other airlines did not begin to hire flight
attendants until 1933.

One UA flight attendant, Iris Peterson, began her career in
1946 and currently ranks as the No. 1 flight
attendant in terms of seniority. In 1968, the same
year that UA stewardesses were first allowed to
hold the job if they were married, Peterson
participated in aircraft safety planning and was
instrumental in making 17 different safety items
part of the standard onboard equipment worldwide,
including the evacuation alarm on commercial
aircraft.