The Airplane - Jay Spenser [119]
This would change with the new decade. TWA, United, and American all inaugurated all-air transcontinental services before the milestone year 1930 was out.
Ellen Church was an Iowa farm girl working as a nurse in San Francisco. In love with aviation, she took flying lessons and also worked on aero engines in her spare time. At the airport one day, the young woman entered the offices of Boeing Air Transport and asked to be hired as a pilot. Undeterred when that suggestion was rebuffed, she next proposed that the airline hire registered nurses to attend to its passengers in flight. Both the professional training of the nurses and the fact that they were women would implicitly reassure nervous travelers, she pointed out.
Aviation’s first stewardesses flew with United in 1930. Other airlines quickly followed suit and public perceptions of air travel changed for the better.
Boeing
Boeing Air Transport decided to give this idea a try, and twenty-five-year-old Ellen Church found herself leading a group of eight young, unmarried nurses who became history’s first stewardesses. On May 15, 1930, aboard a Boeing 80A trimotor biplane, Church crewed the first airliner ever to carry a stewardess.
At that time, copilots generally left their seats to pass out box lunches or reassure nervous passengers. Occasionally there was a male steward. The addition of dedicated and professional female cabin staffs worked wonders psychologically. Passenger comfort improved and the experience of air travel became at once safer and more inviting in people’s minds. Other airlines followed suit with female flight attendants of their own, although the requirement that they be nurses quickly fell by the wayside in light of this public acceptance.
Before there were stewardesses, there was occasionally a male steward, as on this Fokker F VII trimotor of the late 1920s.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
The Boeing 247 of 1933 was sleek and modern, but Boeing did not get its interior right. Passengers disliked having to step over the front and rear wing spars that invaded the cabin, blocking the ten-passenger airliner’s aisle in two places.
Douglas had a better idea. It designed its competing series with the fuselage set higher relative to the wing, giving the DC-2 and DC-3 uninterrupted aisles. More than just creating a more inviting environment, it made it easy for the stewardess to deliver meals, dispense chewing gum to clear ears as the airplane climbed, and otherwise see to the comfort of her charges.
The versatile DC-3 flew day and night and served any route with equal ease. With just two stops, it could cross the United States in fifteen hours eastbound or seventeen hours westbound. Greater wing loading gave it a better ride than its predecessors, although it too was highly subject to turbulence. Operations in bad weather, particularly winter icing conditions, made for white knuckles in both the cockpit and the cabin. Nonetheless, the DC-3 put aviation on the map. With its entry into transcontinental service, the public came to view flying as the premier way to traverse the nation.
The airline industry came of age with the Douglas DC-3 of 1936. Each DC-3 had one stewardess and up to twenty-one passengers.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
The next great leap in passenger comfort was the Boeing 307 Stratoliner, history’s first pressurized airliner. A technological wonder, the 307 cruised above most of the weather at 20,000 feet (6,100 meters). Anvil-shaped thunderheads often went higher than that (indeed, some tower far higher than any jetliner flies today), but Stratoliner crews could see and steer clear of those. Here was an airplane built to cruise in sunny or starry splendor even when the earth below was enveloped in clouds.
From the passenger’s perspective, the Boeing Stratoliner fundamentally redefined air travel. Derived from the