In an industry where seniority is everything, Suzanne Chong Kee reached a most meaningful milestone last month when she celebrated 50 years of service.

That Chong Kee sits at No. 10 on the employee seniority list (out of a pool of some 5,500) speaks both to the staying power of Hawaiian Airlines’ most venerable employees as well as to Chong Kee’s own steadfast devotion to her work.

A scheduler, Chong Kee has seen the airline grow from a small interisland operation into a major international carrier.

“I’ve been part of the growing process,” she said. “I drew up the routes. Every single flight we have today, I’ve had my finger in it.”

Chong Kee grew up in Kuliouou and Aina Haina and attended Sacred Hearts Academy. She met her husband, Dennis, at the old Capitol Drive Inn on Waialae Avenue, where the Sacred Hearts girls and Saint Louis School boys used to meet before school.

They both attended Pasadena City College, where Chong Kee enrolled in a stewardess training class.

“I thought being a stewardess was the ultimate job in the whole world,” she said.

The California smog didn’t agree with Chong Kee’s allergies, so she returned home a year later and found work at Hawaiian Airlines as a stewardess, taking interisland routes that none of the more senior stewardesses wanted and sleeping in the overhead hat racks during overnight cargo trips.

Chong Kee married Dennis in 1964, and before long became pregnant with the first of their three children.

“You couldn’t have kids and fly in those days,” she said. “They terminated you, clipped your wings.”

Chong Kee wound up back at Hawaiian less than a year later, this time in reservations, manually processing thousands of reservations and hand-writing tickets that she herself would hand-deliver to agents at the gates.

When the company adopted its first computerized reservations system in the early 1970s, Chong Kee was dispatched to Texas to upload the airlines flight schedules. Her experience working with the early system put her on the path to her current job as a scheduler.

These days, Chong Kee generates monthly color-coded flight schedules of her own design. To the uninitiated, the schedules look like colorful kitchen backsplashes. To Chong Kee they communicate the smooth movement of scores of individual daily flights, each carefully plotted to ensure proper maintenance intervals, crew changeover, coordinated connections, gate availabilities and other critical and easily disturbed considerations.

Chong Kee is looking forward to the day when she and Dennis can while away their days together watching their six grandchildren grow up. But that day is not yet on the schedule.

“I’m not comfortable passing it on yet,” Chong Kee says.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.