Chicago – Beverly Reid, retired after 40 years as a flight attendant at United Airlines, recalls a rule in place until the 1960s that was meant to ensure the safety of passengers in an emergency landing.
Flight attendants were required to wear their airline- issued hats, which were fitted with long pins, during takeoff and landing. The official reason was to make it easy for passengers to identify crew members in an emergency, said Reid, of Des Plaines, Ill.
But the hat rule had another purpose, she said.
“In the event of an evacuation, you might have to use your hat pin to, um, encourage some passengers lined up at the door to exit the plane more quickly,” said Reid, making a jabbing motion with her hand.
While United now struggles to cast its bankruptcy problems into the history books, the guardianship of such airline lore and rare artifacts of commercial aviation hangs in doubt. The carrier, which employs 6,000 people in Colorado, is the largest operating out of Denver International Airport.
United’s archives, housed in a temperature-controlled vault in the basement of the airline’s headquarters in Elk Grove Township, Ill., contain documents and photographs covering the serious business of operating a globe-trotting airline.
The airline traces its roots back to 1926.
On the lighter side are stacks of employee newsletters passing along gossip about office picnics and who was marrying whom at the once-fledgling airline.
The United collection has been painstakingly maintained and expanded for the past 10 years by Barb Hanson, a 32- year United employee.
But Hanson’s position as corporate archive coordinator was recently eliminated as part of United’s bankruptcy- recovery strategy, which includes cutting jobs that don’t generate revenue.
Hanson left in February but returned to work part-time. Private donors came up with money to continue managing the museum-quality holdings until mid-July.
Hanson said she is grateful that the company “recognizes the intrinsic value of the archive holdings. We are working together, looking at options for conservation grants to help us preserve the past and inspire the future.” But it’s not certain what will happen to the airline treasures after July or whether new materials will be added to the collection.
United could simply lock the walk-in vault to prevent items from disappearing, closeting a wealth of historic information about the airline and forgotten giants in the industry.
United officials have ruled out donating the collection to museums or soliciting monetary contributions. All they have said is that the archives will be kept intact.
Among the most prized possessions in the archives is the heavily padded flight suit worn by pioneering airmail pilot Jack “Skinny” Knight, who became a legendary United captain.
As an airmail jockey, Knight always strapped on a parachute, a shotgun and a knife to protect himself and hunt for food in case his open-cockpit Swallow biplane went down.
There is also a wicker chair – no seat belts for passengers back in the 1920s – that was nailed to the floorboards of a Ford Trimotor plane.
The aircraft was flown on the route from Chicago Municipal Airport (renamed Midway Airport in 1949) to New York by National Air Transport, a United predecessor.
