These may look like scenes from some sort of pin-up calendar but they're actually part images from ticket jackets used by PSA, an airline that criss-crossed western states from 1949 until 1988. It was the most popular way to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Oakland or Las Vegas — partly because it had so many flights per day but mainly because of its stewardesses. Back then, Pacific Southwest Airlines had the "best-looking stews" — that's how all my friends put it — and the company was not shy about exploiting that image. There were some who scoffed, saying that the ladies in the ads and on the ticket folders couldn't possibly be real "stewardesses." They had to be professional models. But whenever I flew PSA, I could believe those were real employees posing.
One time in the early seventies, when a bunch of L.A. comic fans decided to go en masse to a convention in Oakland, several insisted that we all had to fly PSA for that reason. One of them was even collecting ticket jackets. There were several different designs and both ways, he went through the plane asking passengers for theirs, hoping that one of the servers on our flights would be on one of them so he could get it autographed. He only got as close as one of the ladies telling him she'd posed for a folder photo but it hadn't been issued yet. Happily, she agreed to take his address and mail him a signed one once it was released.
Today, it sounds sexist and almost childish…and it must have been humiliating for women who were fully qualified to do the job that they got turned away because they weren't young and pretty enough. Folks were just starting to get sensitive about such things. It might help to remember that this was before the airlines were deregulated. Fares were the same everywhere so the only way in which a carrier could make the case that you should fly them instead of the other guy was to sell service and smiles. Above and beyond the fact that PSA had good-looking ladies bringing you peanuts, there was something friendly about the airline. Everything was colorful and everyone seemed to enjoy their jobs and act really happy to have you on board. American or United could get you to the same place at the same time for the same fee but they seemed so damned serious about flying the plane.
In the mid-eighties when PSA got caught up in a wave of airline mergers and disappeared into USAir, I felt a certain sense of loss. The grown-ups had won again. Today, Southwest Airlines has some of the same spirit, and the new Hooters Airline is reviving the concept of flight attendant as sex symbol. But I can't shake the feeling that even collectively, they don't equal PSA…and that no airline ever will.
Chris Laborde, a pilot and flight instructor, offers a wonderful website full of PSA history and memorabilia over at www.ilovepsa.com. If you remember PSA — or have a thing for women wearing short orange-and-pink skirts — fly on over there.