Maggie Hill

Maggie Hill is one of the sixteen original flight attendants who helped launch Sun Country Airlines in 1982, following the collapse of Braniff International. A veteran of the skies with more than forty-seven years of flying experience, Hill spent seven years at Braniff and over forty with Sun Country, earning her place among Minnesota’s aviation pioneers.

A graduate of Roosevelt High School and longtime resident of Southwest Minneapolis, Hill’s career carried her across the United States and around the globe. She retired from flying in 2022, though her ties to Sun Country and its people remain strong. Known for her warmth, quick wit, and unshakable professionalism, she helped shape the airline’s unique in-flight culture: friendly, unpretentious, and deeply Minnesotan.

Beyond her flight career, Hill became an unofficial historian. Recognizing that the airline’s improbable birth was a story worth preserving, she sought out and recorded oral histories from the pilots, flight attendants, and founders who built the company from scratch. These interviews, collected over years, form the heart of Minnesota’s Phoenix.

Hill’s love for aviation extends into her home life. She has meticulously collected one of every flight attendant uniform ever worn by Sun Country crews, along with an archive of memorabilia chronicling the airline’s four-decade journey. Her artifacts are now part of the Minnesota Historical Society’s permanent collection.

Some of her favorite memories include the extraordinary charter flights she worked all around the globe, such as spending a summer in Amsterdam and a December in Germany, transporting Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation to Rwanda for humanitarian missions, and flying Joe Biden during the 2008 Obama/Biden Presidential campaign.

A world traveler and self-confessed bookworm, Hill brings a storyteller’s heart and a historian’s careful attention to detail to this project.