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Blast From The Past! "Queen Of The Sky" Ellen Simonetti

theblogdoctor — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 23:20:08 +0000

At the beginning of the first session on the first day of my Blogging 101 class, I gave everyone a history of blogging and then told them how much it has changed in the last 10 years.

I also said how in the early days of blogging, bloggers would get in trouble with their day jobs for blogging and cited the case of a flight attendant who’d gotten fired for blogging. I did not have names and places as I only vaguely remembered that story.

Some of my class students gave me the Ah- I-am-not-sure-your-story is-real look, but the image of that beautiful flight attendant inside a plane wearing a racy flight attendant uniform was stuck firmly in my head even after all these years. So this weekend, a day before the last session of the class, I decided to try and dig out that story out from the news archives.

Lo and behold, I found her!

It was Ellen Simonetti, a (former) Delta Airlines Hostess who was relieved of her duties after Delta discovered her blog – Queen Of The Sky – with some racy photos (my photo collage of the same is below) of her inside a Delta flight on that blog.

"Party Much?" - Queen Of The Sky Ellen Simonnette's Blog Photos

Ellen’s story got a lot of coverage in November of 2005, which was when Delta officially let her go. Her story also set off a chain of censorship and scrutiny of bloggers by their employers at that time in 2005.

After she got fired, Ellen added the word “fired” to her blog’s tagline to read “Diary of a Fired Flight Attendant”. That blog has since been abandoned. Ellen went on to write a book that -at #1017825 in Sales rank in the books section on Amazon.com – doesn’t appear to have served well in the revenue department for Ms Ellen, but nevertheless stands testimony to the early days of blogging, when things were quite risky.

Ellen Simonette now lives in Austin, Texas and even has her own Facebook Page with 829 “Friends” (at the time of writing this post) and 70 “likes” including the “I don’t sleep enough because I stay up late for no reason” Facebook Page.

I visited Ellen’s facebook page with high hope of discovering some more awesome photos, but my hope were dashed when the page said that I have to be friends with Ellen first!

Should I send her a “Friend Me” request? What do you think?