Up in the Air: The Real Story of Life Aboard the World's Most Glamorous Airline

Although this is a book about life as a flight attendant with the world's most iconic and glamorous airline, Pan American World Airways, it is not just a chronology of airborne events. Instead it begins with Betty Riegel's description of leaving her home in the middle of the night, clutching her teddy and running with her Mother to an air raid shelter during war torn London. From humble working-class roots, growing up with a mother who struggled to make ends meet and a father away at war, she had always dreamed of bigger things.

After responding to an ad in the local newspaper, she secured herself an interview for the Pan Am training program and at just twenty-two years old was selected from thousands of eager young British women to begin a career that would change the course of her life. Betty said goodbye to everything she knew and boarded a plane to New York, a city full of noise, towering sky­scrapers, and promise.

Under the watchful eye of her "housemother," Dottie, Betty mastered the art of being the perfect Pan Am stewardess--everything from faultless et­iquette, geography, and safety to seamless makeup application, charming influential passengers, and preparing five-course Parisian cuisine at 37,000 feet. But no amount of training could have prepared her for the roller coaster of life in the air.

Betty's airline encounters include a white rhinoceros and a dance with an Arabian price in the first-class galley of a Boeing 707. Some of her off-duty adventures include dating Japan's "Elvis", going on an African safari date with an English big game hunter and learning from a London clairvoyant of the precise description of her destined husband

Up in the Air charts the grueling yet fabulous life aboard the most iconic airline there has ever been and how a young woman from Essex opened her eyes to the world and lived her dream.

About the Author
Riegel, Betty: - Betty Riegel, born in London, England during the war years of WWII, relates her story of fulfilling a dream to travel by first, flying for a regional British airline then becoming one of 17 women selected from the 1000 that showed up for one of Pan American World Airways' first recruiting trips to the UK. The book tells her story of her remarkable success in her 10-year flying career with PanAm, being promoted to Purser, Check Purser, then finally, to complete the cycle, becoming part of the recruiting team for PanAm. Following her PanAm career, she subsequently developed a successful travel business, being featured in an industry journal and following her retirement, began pursuing a college degree while in her 80's. This is the initial publication of the book in the US following its publication as a best seller in the UK, where it was variously featured in British newspapers as the book of the week and best of the summer reading and in Australia and New Zealand where the Reader's Digest Australia Inc. featured it in it's a hardcover issue of their Encounters publication as one of four selected books. She, and her husband, Kent, a retired President and General Counsel of a large international chemical company, now live in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania with their rescue dog, Peanut, and near their two sons, John Kent, Jr and Geoffrey. While continuing her college program, Betty also performs as a volunteer docent at the nearby internationally acclaimed Winterthur Museum and through the Internet, continues active and vigorous friendships with many of her PanAm colleagues.