Many of the earliest flight attendants were nurses.
Flight attendants make our journeys through the sky safer and more comfortable. Yet they do more than just serve peanuts and soda; they’re trained to respond to safety and medical emergencies, necessary skills for cruising at 35,000 feet. However, modern flight attendants don’t have to have in-depth medical training the way the first American in-air staff did — the earliest commercial airlines equipped with flight attendants required their staff to be registered nurses.
The first flight attendants to board U.S. commercial flights were led by Ellen Church, a nurse who was also a licensed aviator. Unable to find work as a pilot due to gender discrimination, Church found another way into the sky by pitching airlines the concept of the “flight stewardess,” who could use her nursing skills to aid sick or injured passengers while also easing nerves at a time when flying was still somewhat dangerous and often uncomfortable for passengers. Boeing Air Transport tested Church’s idea in May 1930, hiring Church and seven other nurses for flights between San Francisco and Chicago (with 13 stops in between). In air, the attendants were tasked with serving meals, cleaning the plane’s interior, securing the seats to the floor, and even keeping passengers from accidentally opening the emergency exit door. After a successful three-month stint, other airlines picked up Church’s idea, putting out calls for nurses in their early 20s to join the first flight crews — standard requirements until World War II, when nurses overwhelmingly joined the war effort, leaving room for more women of all backgrounds to enter the aviation field.
Florence Nightingale is often recognized as the mother of modern nursing, though if her parents had their way, she never would have jump-started the profession as we know it today. At 16 years old, Nightingale became determined to care for the ill and injured, believing it was her calling. Her parents, however, opposed the idea, arguing it was a job inappropriate for a woman of their upper-class standing. Despite being forbidden from pursuing a medical career, Florence enrolled in a German training school for teachers and nurses, eventually returning to London three years later as a hospital nurse. When the Crimean War erupted in 1853, Nightingale’s path through history followed, with her innovative nursing techniques and quest to improve hospital cleanliness eventually seen as a game-changer in medical treatment — one that would even be recognized by Queen Victoria.
