True Tales of TWA Flight Attendants

If you liked Ann Hood’s Fly Girl and Julie Cook’s Come Fly The World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am, you’ll love True Tales of TWA Flight Attendants.

The golden age of air travel promised a life of glamour and adventure for beautiful, single, young women interested in exploring the world—and no airline offered more glamour or excitement than Trans World Airlines.

TWA provided an enviable jet-set lifestyle for flight attendants—and the opportunity to travel to exotic destinations like London, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong and Bombay. Flight attendants appeared on TV and in movies, and rubbed elbows with the rich and famous, from Elizabeth Taylor and John F. Kennedy Jr., to presidents and Popes, all while decked out in designer uniforms from clothing designers like Oleg Cassini and Ralph Lauren.

In the 1960s and 1970s, TWA accepted fewer than 1% of applicants to be flight attendants—making it tougher to get into than Harvard. Plus, a flying career offered the best education money could never buy.

TWA flight attendants could cook chateaubriand medium rare, deliver a baby at 35,000 feet, and survive a plane crash—all the while immaculately dressed from their never-a-strand-out-of-place hairstyles, all the way down to their mandatory high heeled shoes. But the glamorous lifestyle of a TWA flight attendant sometimes came at a cost.

True Tales of TWA Flight Attendants is a diary-style fly girl memoir with stories from hundreds of TWA flight attendants, and filled with a fascinating behind-the-scenes, never-before-seen look at the glamour, excitement, and struggles faced by young women as they traveled the world with TWA during this exciting time in airline history—from the golden age of air travel through the great stewardess rebellion and beyond.