Ellen Church

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Ellen Church, around 1930

Ellen Church (born September 22, 1904 in Cresco , Iowa , † August 22, 1965 in Terre Haute , Indiana ) was an American pilot , nurse and the world's first female flight attendant .

Life

Youth and education

Ellen Church was born in the small town of Cresco, Iowa. After graduating from Cresco High School, she studied nursing at the University of Minnesota , where she graduated in 1926. She then moved to San Francisco and worked in a hospital. Desiring to fly since childhood, she took flying lessons in her free time and obtained a private pilot's license .

Boeing Air Transport

In 1930, Church applied to the airline Boeing Air Transport (BAT), which was founded in 1927 and later became United Airlines , as a pilot . At the time, however, the airline only hired male pilots. However, at that time, following the example of other airlines, BAT wanted to introduce (male) flight attendants as the third crew member alongside the pilot and copilot . Here Church saw her chance. She negotiated with Steve Stimpson, BAT district manager in San Francisco, and suggested that he use nurses instead to take care of the passengers. Their main argument was that this would help to allay passengers' fear of flying .

"Mr Stimpson, if people imagine women casually living in the air, choosing to work there, would it have a good psychological effect in helping rid the public of any fear?"

"Mr Stimpson, if people imagined women were to live casually in the air and chose to work there, wouldn't that have a good psychological effect in relieving the public of any fear?"

- Ellen Church : Original sound
Boeing 80A

Stimpson was able to convince the BAT management of the idea. They hired Ellen Church as chief stewardess for a three-month probationary period and commissioned her to recruit seven more nurses as flight attendants. Church and Stimpson coined the term stewardess . The requirements for the applicants were high: they had to be registered nurses, single, younger than 25 years old, weigh no more than 52 kg and be no taller than 1.63 m. In addition to taking care of the passengers, the stewardesses had to bring the luggage on board, screw down loose seats, refuel the aircraft and even help the pilots push the aircraft into the hangar. The salary offered was very attractive at $ 125 per month. Church managed to recruit seven more nurses and train them for their job. The team was called The Original Eight .

Cabin of a Boeing Model 80, 1929

On May 15, 1930, she was the first (female) flight attendant to fly in a Boeing 80A from Oakland , San Francisco to Chicago, 1,600  miles (about 3000 km) away . At a cruising speed of 125  knots and with 13 stopovers, the flight lasted 20 hours. The pilot on this flight was the aviation pioneer Elrey B. Jeppesen (1907-1996).

Ellen Church and her team's probationary period was successful. Passengers liked the service and other airlines followed BAT's lead. Three years later, 100 flight attendants were already working for three companies; at the end of 1935 there were 197 flight attendants and eight airlines. Up until the beginning of World War II, training as a nurse was a common requirement for working as a flight attendant. After that, so many nurses were needed in the army that this requirement could no longer be maintained.

Ellen Church had to stop working on board after 18 months due to her injuries in a car accident. She returned to the University of Minnesota, where she had already studied, and in 1936 became supervisor of pediatrics in charge of pediatrics at Milwaukee County Hospital.

Second World War

After the United States entered World War II , Church served as a captain in the United States Army Nurse Corps , a special medical division of the American armed forces, where she helped evacuate wounded soldiers from Africa and Italy by air. Because of her professional experience working in the hospital and leading the stewardesses, she was called to train evacuation nurses for the D-Day invasion of France in 1944.

After the war

After World War II, Ellen Church moved to Terre Haute , Indiana , where she worked as a nurse director at Union Hospital. In 1964 she married Leonard Briggs Marshall, President of the First National Bank in Terre Haute.

On August 27, 1965, she was killed in a riding accident. She was buried in the Highland Lawn Cemetery in Terre Haute.

Honors

Air Medal
Boeing 747 "the Original Eight"

For her services in World War II, Ellen Church received several military awards:

The regional airport in her native city of Cresco ( ICAO code : KCJJ) was named after her Ellen Church Field .

In memory of the educated Ellen Church team of flight attendants United Airlines was a Boeing 747 the name of the Original Eight . The fuselage was labeled with the names of the eight first flight attendants: Ellen Church, Ellis Crawford, Inez Keller, Margaret Arnott, Cornelia Peterman, Harriet Fry, Jessie Carter, Alva Johnson.

literature

  • Niels Klußmann, Arnim Malik: Aviation Lexicon . Springer-Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-540-49096-8 , pp. 90 .
  • Martina Sram: Up in the sky: Your way to become a flight attendant . tredition, 2019, ISBN 978-3-7345-5391-2 .

Web links

Commons : Ellen Church  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Passengers - Ellen Church. (No longer available online.) In: PBS . Archived from the original ; accessed on January 19, 2020 (English).
  2. ↑ a b Ellen Church and the Advent of the Sky Girls. FAA , accessed January 19, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b c d Ellen Church: The Flying Nurse. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original ; accessed on January 19, 2020 (English).
  4. ↑ a b c Ellen Church Marhall. (PDF) In: Indiana Commission for Women. Retrieved January 19, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Anna Baumbach: Ellen Church, the first stewardess in the world. In: aeroTELEGRAPH. April 3, 2016, accessed January 19, 2020 .
  6. ↑ a b c d e I'm Ellen, fly me: the birth of the stewardness. In: The Independent . May 21, 2005, accessed January 19, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Shane Nolan: United Airlines Celebrates 80 Years Of The Flight Attendant Profession. In: Aviation Online Magazine. Retrieved January 19, 2020 .
  8. ^ Cary Baird: New Book Marks Jeppesen's 100th Birthday. (No longer available online.) In: Airport Journals. Archived from the original ; accessed on January 19, 2020 (English).
  9. ↑ Ellen Church Field is Named After Cresco Native. In: Cresco Public Library. Retrieved January 19, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Boeing 747-122 - United Airlines. In: airliners.net. Retrieved January 19, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Church, Ellen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American pilot, nurse and first female flight attendant
DATE OF BIRTH September 22, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Cresco, Iowa
DATE OF DEATH August 22, 1965
Place of death Terre Haute , Indiana