Fani Barudi: first Middle East Airlines air flight attendant in 1946

Fani Baroudi was 18 years old when she applied in response to a newspaper recruitment advertisement posted by Middle East Airlines who was searching for trilingual, presentable and “good looking” air flight attendants. Luckily, Baroudi could speak five languages including, Italian, Greek, English, French and Arabic and was supported by her liberal milieu as she comes from an Italian father and a Greek mother, who lived in Istanbul before moving to Beirut. Back in 1946, MEA had to design specially for Barudi the first costume of an air flight attendant. She recalls walking in the streets of Beirut dressed like an army service-person and people wanted to take a picture with her or ask about the nature of her work. “‘Travel is good, but can you stay outside the house and every now and then be in a different country’? They used to ask me,” she said. To be noted, that Barudi chose to leave her work in MEA after she got married to a Lebanese man. (Al Mustaqbal, 15 June 2015)