Perhaps the most radical invention of the war years was the jet engine, which debuted in 1944. While still too novel to be of practical use during the war itself, jet technology—which ultimately tripled the speeds even of transport planes—became the cornerstone of military aviation development throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. It was military aircraft, not civilian carriers, that first possessed this awe-inspiring technology and heralded the onset of the “jet age” that captured Americans’ imagination. While some military inventions like pressurized cabins were quickly introduced into commercial use (1946), the jet engine remained military-only technology in the United States until 1958. This lag between military and civilian use firmly established that airplanes were now primarily products of the armaments industry. Throughout the cold war, aviation research and development depended primarily on the consortium of congressmen, military generals, and manufacturing executives that dominated the military-industrial complex.
Furthermore, as previously noted, airlines experienced yet another adjustment thanks to military decommissioning after World War II: a sudden glut of transport planes that the military offered at cut-rate prices. While the airlines possessed 397 aircraft at the war’s end, another 5,000 transport planes converted from military use, mostly C-47s, soon entered the civilian market.27 This sudden and dramatic increase in seat inventory forced the airlines to radically alter their business plans, leaving them little choice but to attract new customers. Aviation innovators like Juan Trippe of Pan Am embraced the new oversupply and introduced new pricing schemes, including a cheaper, less luxurious coach class and even more economical night flights. Trippe believed that his company’s future lay in democratizing access to air travel: “Air transport has the very clear choice of becoming a luxury service to carry the well-to-do at high prices—or to carry the average man at what he can afford to pay. Pan American has chosen the latter course.”28
These novelties led airlines to evolve from a solely elitist mode of transport to a product appealing to different types of customers with different price points. Of course, for most middle-class Americans, Trippe’s promise still rang hollow: the “average man” still found air travel prohibitively expensive—or a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence—until after deregulation in 1979. However, even in the 1950s, airlines were instituting multitiered pricing schemes and also gained approval from the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB, the government-run board that set prices for the industry) to engage in cut-throat pricing on a few select routes. Thus even cash-strapped economic migrants from Puerto Rico became consumers of air travel, since a San Juan–to–New York air ticket was now cheaper than passage by boat. They thereby became the first wave of economic migrants in history to arrive in the mainland United States by plane.29 New York’s newest airport, Idlewild (later renamed Kennedy), opened in 1948 and soon became an Ellis Island of the jet age.
In addition to democratizing air travel in key ways, airlines continued their efforts from the 1930s to attract more women and children. While businessmen remained the airlines’ core passengers, their spouses and families were increasingly coveted as a secondary revenue stream. Thus the postwar airlines sought to reinforce the proclivities of wealthier Americans to travel, especially fostering a passion for summer vacationing, while also expanding interest in the more customary winter sojourns to Florida or Cuba. Convention travel for spouses boomed, the airlines and other boosters began marketing hot climates like Florida for summer travel, and trips to Europe became status symbols for America’s growing upper and middle classes. A significant sum of these newly available travel dollars—by-products of America’s cold war prosperity—flowed from women (or at least spending choices they initiated) to the airlines.
Yet just as in the 1930s women and children first had to be convinced that air travel was safe and comfortable. The airplane’s role in World War II and Korea as military weaponry made this sales job more challenging. Potential customers were regaled with stories of pilots’ heroics from these wars, Hollywood films replete with dogfights and ghastly crashes, and news reports of the first combat missions for jet planes over Korea. The situation was exacerbated on August 7, 1955, when Boeing executives showed off their prototype of the 707 commercial airliner to a delegation of airline executives. Test pilot Alvin “Tex” Johnston, unbeknownst to Boeing personnel, had decided to send the plane into a barrel roll during the test flight. The sight of the first passenger jet plane flying upside down was an instant media hit, replayed often on television and reproduced in newspapers throughout the country. Yet, as much as this vision of adventuring masculinity and overpowering technology wowed the public, it also caused many to wonder whether commercial jet travel would be safe and comfortable.30 With former military heroes in the cockpit and jet engines perched under the wings, commercial aircraft by the late 1950s risked alienating customers by virtue of associations with the dangers and the heroic maneuvers of combat.
Airlines effectively had to conceal their machines’ muscular engineering potential (no more barrel rolls) and instead disguise them as cozy, warm spaces akin to the family living room. Designers thus sought to create a symbiosis between masculine and feminine elements, compensating for an exterior that projected mechanical power with an interior that was excessively luxurious and comfortable. If the plane’s technology and all-veteran pilot corps evoked militarism, then the cabin would have to evoke both domestic tranquillity and femininity.
Ads such as that shown in figure 8, from National Airlines in 1956, do more than place cute little girls and sharply dressed women in the fold of appropriate airline passengers. They also rewrite the relationship between technological innovation and masculinity. The cozy plane, with relaxed passengers sitting cross-legged in plush seats, even allows a fragile little girl to harmlessly saunter down the aisle—thanks to the technological innovation of radar. The plane is now a cross section of white America: young and old, male and female, all relaxed and enjoying the sight of the little girl as though sharing a joyful moment in a communal living room. Now that the DC-7 aircraft can detect turbulent air pockets by a radar system embedded in its nose, the little girl can roam the plane as freely as she would her own home. In the process, a piece of military hardware, the radar-guided plane, has become domesticated. The ad’s text affirms that the technology is actually feminine, as it christens the DC-7 the “Smoothest Sweetheart in the Sky,” thereby merging the identity of the mammoth aircraft with the fragile little girl. And hovering over this grand living room is the stewardess, playing ersatz mother to the little girl and doting hostess to the adults. She, too, along with the plane’s new technology, plays a vital role in feminizing the plane’s persona.
FIGURE 8. A 1956 National Airlines advertisement, reprinted in National Airlines, Annual Report, 1956. National Airlines Archives, folder “Archer, Bill: National Airlines Annual Reports, etc.” 1990-385, Historical Museum of South Florida, Miami, FL. Courtesy HistoryMiami.
Since flight attendants were the most obvious way to gender the cabin as a feminine domain, it became increasingly imperative for the airlines to hire women over men. In this sense, then, the cold war had profound consequences for stewards and stewardesses. It made stewards undesirable on account of their failure to embody domesticated femininity and to attract women and children as customers. Stewardesses’ work, meanwhile, increasingly resembled that of women at home rather than that of nurses or qualified safety professionals. As the airlines’ passenger base became more feminized—women went from 25 percent of passengers before the war to 33 percent by the end of the 1950s—so too did the flight attendant corps.31 The steward in his military-style navy uniform now seemed strikingly out of place.
GROUNDING THE STEWARD
In retrospect, the comments of Eastern CEO Rickenbacker from the first staff meeting after flight attendants unionized were prophetic. He bemoaned to managers: “You have had an election recently of your stewards and stewardesses. Why, I do not know, but I do know there are a lot of smart guys taking advantage of a lot of suckers.... They are going to ask for