Helen Davey

The recent very public emotional meltdown of a JetBlue pilot -- just weeks after an American Airlines flight attendant broke down in front of passengers waiting for take-off -- has many people wondering about the psychological health of pilots and flight attendants. What is going on with the employees...

"After this, nothing happened."
(Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow
Nation, on the disappearance of the buffalo)

On December 4th of this year, former Pan Am employees all over the world sadly acknowledged the twentieth anniversary of the death of their beloved company....

When my mother died two weeks ago, I turned to writing to make sense of it all. I was asking myself, "Does this mean that I don't have a Mommy anymore?" I wasn't expecting to find my answer so quickly, and I'm hoping I can give solace to others who...

There is exciting new hope on the horizon for the treatment of combat-related trauma, and I feel that I have had a front-row seat in watching this ground-breaking and hopeful solution to one of our country's most heart-breaking problems -- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the military. Let me...

As a writer, psychoanalyst and stewardess for Pan Am for twenty years, I've shared many personal feelings about my life in my blogs. My reason for doing this has never been so that you, the reader, will know about me. My goal has been to encourage you to think about...

I'm posting a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio interview that I did with Brent Bambury about my reaction to the new ABC series Pan Am, on Sunday nights at 10:00 P.M. My responses are based on the advertising I had seen on TV, on billboards, and in magazines, before I had...

As a former Pan Am stewardess from 1965 to 1986, I have eagerly -- yet ambivalently -- awaited tonight's debut of the new ABC series, Pan Am, on Sunday nights at 10:00 P.M. My ambivalence is a mixture of feelings of hope and dread.

My fervent wish has been that...

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I called my office, as I usually do, as soon as I woke up. There were 14 new messages from my psychotherapy patients since the night before, which was very unusual. As I listened to each one, they were all similar: "Don't worry...

On September 25 at 10:00 P.M., ABC unveils a new television series, Pan Am, which is meant to depict the lives of Pan Am stewardesses in the 1960s. I can assure the network that former Pan Am'ers will be watching en masse in hopes that the writers will be...

At the beginning of this series, I promised to explain why Pan American World Airways employees felt the world was theirs. The answer is simple: Pan Am was more than a mere company. We were a family -- a family that worked and played together all over the globe...

When last we met on The Huffington Post, two young couples -- the Lindberghs and the Trippes -- were in a crisis. A life and death crisis.

There they all were in the Sikorsky-38, an amphibian, attempting to land in Barranquila, Columbia in 1929. The problem...

As you recall, my last post ended with the marriage of Juan and Betty Trippe. Soon after, in 1929, the couple would join Charles and Anne Lindbergh on a pioneering flight to capture the world's air routes for Pan Am. Juan Trippe's dream of a global air...

Pan Am has a place of its own. You call it 'the world'; we call it "home."
-- From the chorus of a Pan Am advertising jingle (1970s)

In the trailer for the new television series Pan Am coming in September to ABC, the phrase "The...

Wherever we were in the world, we Pan Am stewardesses were expected to be able to think on our feet and often had to. Spread all over the world and far away from any supervision, there was nobody to ask when a crisis arose or things went awry. We were...

As I watch the news about the erupting chaos in Egypt, Libya and Bahrain on television, my present life as a psychoanalyst fades into the background, and my past life comes to the fore. Every part of me feels like I should be on a Pan Am plane in my...

Along with many other Americans, I spent much of Martin Luther King week watching documentaries on television about the civil rights leader. The one that had me glued to the set detailed Alabama Governor George Wallace's "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door," which was meant to stop integration at the University...

I wrote this article exactly nine years ago in December 2001, for the American Airlines flight attendant union publication Skyword, in hopes of reaching out to those flight attendants who were suffering in silence and wouldn't ask for help with their traumatic reactions after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. American...

When I think about my 20 years as a flight attendant for Pan Am, I struggle to put into words the universal feeling of love that the employees felt for our company. Our Pan Am world was vast and expansive, and we all felt at home in it, greatly enjoying...

In this post, I'm combining two ideas: 1) the philosopher Martin Heidegger's thoughts on the essence of technology, which states that in a technological world everything is treated as resources to enhance control and mastery of everything; and 2) the ideas of Arlie Russell Hochschild, who in 1983 published a...

In my previous blogs (here) I have attempted to both describe and explain why our Pan Am "family" has such devotion to our company and why many employees experienced such feelings of traumatic loss when Pan Am went out of business. Often in my twenty-year career as a...