From ‘Sky Girls’ to labor heroes: New doc celebrates flight attendants

On graduation day in 1956, Patricia Banks was excited to start a career as a stewardess. Airlines came to the Grace Downs Air Career School in Manhattan to recruit candidates. Though she was a top student in her class, she received no offers. An instructor pulled her aside and told Banks the carriers would never hire her because of her race.

Banks sued Capital Airlines, alleging discriminatory hiring practices. In 1960, she became one of the airline industry’s first Black stewardesses. Now in her late 80s, she shares her story along with other barrier-breaking crew members in “Fly With Me,” a new PBS film about the flight attendants who helped transform their industry - and society as a whole.

“It is very exciting to think how much these women were responsible for changing their own profession, but also the ripple effects that go beyond the airline industry,” said Sarah Colt, who co-directed the film with Helen Dobrowski. “They were really on the cutting edge of a second wave of feminism.”

The directors’ interest in the topic stemmed from a book Dobrowski found in her local library outside Philadelphia. “We were both riveted by it,” Colt said of “Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am,” by Julia Cooke.

During the research phase, they discovered that many key figures who challenged the airline industry’s racist, sexist and ageist policies were still alive. They tracked down Banks in Brooklyn, not far from where she attended stewardess training school. The film closes with a tribute to Barbara “Dusty” Roads, who led the charge against American Airlines’s mandatory retirement age for women - 32. She died in November, after a 44-year career with the carrier.

“Pat and Dusty, they’re sort of the first wave of these women who were standing up for their rights,” Colt said.

During a screening at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on Tuesday night, Casey Grant, a retired flight attendant featured in the film, said she didn’t set out to become a pioneer when Delta hired her in 1971. She just wanted the job. As one of the airline’s first Black crew members, she was surrounded by prejudice. But her priority was to keep passengers safe.

“You didn’t understand the impact of it,” Grant said. “You did what you had to do. You were professional, and your focus was on the safety of the passengers.”

The film will debut Feb. 20 on PBS’s “American Experience” and can be streamed online. Here are some highlights.

The first flight attendant was a nurse

The documentary opens with the early years of aviation, when flying was a harrowing and dangerous experience. The planes flew under 10,000 feet, unable to escape heavy turbulence. The cabin air, which was neither pressurized nor circulated, reeked of hot oil and cleaning products used after passengers got airsick.

Ellen Church, a registered nurse with a private pilot’s license, dreamed of becoming a pilot, but carriers only hired men. So, she pitched Boeing Air Transport, a forerunner of United Airlines, the idea of placing nurses on planes. The women could use their medical training to care for ill passengers and their charm and beauty to distract them.

In 1930, Church became the world’s first flight attendant or, as they were known back then, “Sky Girls.”

‘20 mannequins in a row’

After World War II, aircraft design vastly improved. The carriers no longer needed nurses; they wanted beguiling hostesses who would dote on the passengers, especially those of the male persuasion. The airlines, which were regulated by the government, also used attractive crew members as a selling point.

To get hired and stay employed, the women had to follow strict beauty guidelines. (The airlines were less interested in their educational pursuits or flight experience.) They had to be a certain height, weight and hip circumference, and wear red lipstick and three-inch heels. Their hair length could not exceed their chin bone; eyeglasses were not allowed.

In “Fly With Me,” Kathleen Heenan, who flew for Trans World Airlines for 12 years, said she could not identify herself in a graduation photo. She and the other flight attendants resembled “20 mannequins in a row,” she said.

“We were so lucky to get some really great, personal photographs,” Colt said in an interview with The Washington Post. “Kathleen Heenan had this incredible album of her travels for TWA, when she was going all over Europe as a young kid of 20-something.”

The airlines were equally ruthless about weight. According to the documentary, some airlines would weigh the flight attendants monthly. One clip shows women deplaning and stepping onto a scale. If they gained a single pound, their employer would place them on probation. They had three chances to lose the extra weight. If they failed, they would receive a pink slip.

Grant said she would try extreme methods to maintain her weight, such as diet pills, laxatives and starving herself. The flight attendants would share their strategies with each another.

For the flight attendants, maintaining their Barbie doll figure wasn’t enough. They couldn’t have a Mr. Ken at home, either. Marriage status could end their career, as Celeste Lansdale Brodigan learned. United fired her after discovering her secret marriage four years after she joined the carrier in 1962. Her colleagues in Miami protested by showing up to work wearing wedding rings. Brodigan successfully sued the airline and spent 35 years with the company.

One of the more egregious rules was the mandatory retirement age of 32 or 35 years old, depending on the carrier. American Airlines eventually added a clause that grandmothered in employees hired before November 1953. Roads was protected by this exception. Even so, she lobbied Congress to address the discrimination.

To bring attention to the cause, Roads would bid for Monday flights to Washington, D.C., when she knew lawmakers were returning to the capital for the workweek. At a news conference in 1963, she trotted out eight women, equally divided between younger than 32 and older than 32. She proved her point: Their ages were indecipherable and irrelevant.

Hot pants and paper uniforms

During the jet age, the airlines raised the bar on style, replacing their prim attire with more fashionable and coquettish looks. The flight attendants from this era described the uniforms as very exposing. Ad campaigns that relied on innuendo also led to a rise in sexual harassment.

Several carriers dramatically shortened hemlines and dropped necklines. Southwest flight attendants wore hot pants. In a 1965 ad for Braniff International, a flight attendant reveals her chic uniforms designed by Emilio Pucci. The campaign was called “Air Strip.”

TWA created a thematic wardrobe based on “international” characters, such as Olde English Wench, Italian Toga and French Cocktail. The uniforms were made of paper and vulnerable to ripping.

A “Fly Me” ad by National Airlines further sexualized flight attendants. Undra Mays, a Black flight attendant with National, used the campaign to her advantage.

In an interview, she describes the discrimination she endured by the pilots, who tried to remove her from their flights, and the other flight attendants, who would lock her out of the hotel rooms the women had to share during layovers. She would often sleep in the lobby in her uniform.

After she reported her grievances to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the airline invited her to participate in the ad campaign. The text, “Fly Me. I’m Undra,” accompanied an image of Mays flashing a subversive smile.

The revolutionaries

If you didn’t know the names of these flight attendants before the film, you will remember them after.

In addition to Banks, Brodigan, Mays and Roads, there was Mary Pat Laffey, who sued Northwest Airlines over equal pay for stewardesses and male “pursers.” Jean Montague filed a discrimination complaint against American Airlines for requiring flight attendants to retire at age 32. Patricia Ireland entered the ring with a complaint about Pan Am’s discriminatory health benefits policy. (The male employees had full coverage for their families; the women did not.)

“We were fighting for civil rights in the sky,” Grant said after the screening, which reduced her to tears. “It was a movement that I was aware of and am very proud of.”

At the Smithsonian event, which coincided with a nationwide protest by thousands of flight attendants, Ireland said the movie reminded her of how hard it was for her generation of flight attendants. But she said the film also illustrates the power of activism, and can act as a catalyst for future movements.

“I think [the film] will encourage more people to be active,” said Ireland, a former president of the National Organization for Women. “There was nobody in the airlines who had less power than a stewardess. And yet the stewardesses together pushed through a lot of change and made a big difference.”