Courage in the Air

By Cathy Booth Thomas

"And that's when he bit me. Right there." Cristina Jones extends her hand to show the teeth marks below her thumb on her left hand, where alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid bit her in their struggle aboard Flight 63 high over the Atlantic last December. Hermis Moutardier bears wounds from her battle with Reid too. They're just not so visible.

One minute they were flight attendants who adored flying to glamorous destinations for American Airlines. The next, they were on the front line of a war. For Jones and Moutardier, that transformation happened the day two planes from their airline were used in the biggest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. They simply didn't know it then.

In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Jones, a single mother, tried to comfort her 7-year-old son Ian, telling him that the chances of something like that happening on one of her planes were "slim, so slim." It was harder to reassure herself. But she had to work and within two weeks was back in the air. Moutardier, in a chilling instant, remembered working with one of the crew members killed. A month after she returned to work, she suffered a panic attack so paralyzing that she didn't want to get on another flight. Her supervisor told her to go home, but Moutardier willed herself on board. "As a flight attendant, you learn to leave your feelings at the door," she says.

The flights each woman flew last fall were largely uneventful, but many passengers were scared and jittery. "Even if they didn't say anything, you could see it in their faces," says Moutardier. Others, Jones recalls, reacted to the attacks by being "really very respectful and cooperative." But as time passed, Jones says, "it went back to business as usual," with some passengers flouting the rules and behaving rudely. Attendants traded tips on how to distinguish potential terrorists from passengers with air rage.

Those tip-trading sessions proved useful on Dec. 22, when the two flight attendants boarded Flight 63 from Paris to Miami. Although both live in Florida, each holds French citizenship, speaks French fluently (Jones spent part of her childhood in Antibes, Peruvian-born Moutardier is married to a Frenchman) and flew the Paris route often. Flight 63 was jammed with 185 passengers that pre-Christmas Saturday morning. Baggage problems delayed takeoff from Charles de Gaulle Airport an hour, but everything seemed routine once the plane was airborne. Then a passenger aroused the flight attendants' curiosity. He was a "huge" man, 6 ft. 4 in. and more than 200 lbs. He refused to eat or drink anything, even water, odd behavior on a transatlantic flight that could last up to 10 hours. Jones had been cautioned by another flight attendant to be wary of passengers who didn't accept food on a long flight, so she asked the man three times if he wanted anything. "Usually I think, 'Yeah! Less work for me.' But something about him...seemed strange," she recalls.

Moutardier joked that maybe he was on a diet, but she too asked him if he wanted to eat. "I talked to him in French, assuming he was French. He said he didn't speak French. I wanted to be nice, so I asked where he was from, and he told me Sri Lanka." She didn't believe him. And she was right. For he turned out to be Reid, now 29, a British citizen who investigators believe was an operative in the al-Qaeda network.

About two hours out of Paris, with the plane cruising over the Atlantic at 35,000 ft., passengers began to report smelling smoke. Jones was back in the galley cleaning up after the meal service, and Moutardier, who was picking up trays, cruised the aisles looking for the source of the burning smell. She discovered Reid, seated alone by a window, trying to light a match. She sternly warned him that smoking was not allowed. He promised to stop, then began picking his teeth with the blackened matchstick. A few minutes later, she saw him bend over in his seat. "I thought, He's smoking," Moutardier recalls. "It got me mad. I was talking to him, saying, 'Excuse me,' but he just ignored me. I leaned in and said, 'What are you doing?'" As she pulled at him, he turned, giving her a glimpse of what he was hiding. What she saw terrified her. "He's got the shoe off, between his legs. All I see is the wiring and the match. The match was lit," she says. Twice she grabbed him, twice he pushed her away, the second time so hard she fell against an armrest across the aisle. I'm going to die, she thought.

Jones had seen and heard none of this--when Moutardier came running back yelling, "Get him! Go!" Moutardier was so flustered, she said nothing about the shoe and the match. Jones rushed out and quickly realized what was going on. Reid's back was turned away from the aisle, but "you could just tell he was very intent on doing something. I didn't talk to him or ask him what he was doing. I just knew it in my mind," she says. "I yelled, 'Stop it!' and grabbed him around the upper body. I tried to pull him up. And that's when he bit me." She screamed, and passengers started crawling over seats to restrain him. But his teeth would not let go. "I couldn't get my hand out of his mouth. I thought he was going to rip my hand apart it hurt so bad. It was surreal," she says. "I saw all these men coming ... and I knew I had to get out of the way, but he still had my hand in his mouth." Finally, when he let go, she calmly and professionally--no doubt in shock--put up the tray table next to him. Then she ran for the fire extinguisher.

Fearing the match would somehow ignite, Moutardier rushed back and got passengers to pass bottles of Evian to pour over Reid. Other crew members arrived on the scene. They brought plastic cuffs for Reid's hands, a seat-belt extension to tie up his feet. Passengers passed belts, headphone cords, anything they could find. (When the rerouted plane landed in Boston, Reid was so trussed up that the FBI had to cut him out of his seat.) A doctor on board was drafted to give him Valium, kept in the flight kit.

Even after Reid was restrained and sedated, he continued to taunt the crew. Moutardier says that whenever he heard the voice of a crew member, he would open his eyes and glare. When a flight attendant offered him water, he bared his teeth. "At one point, he wanted to get loose; he was rocking and praying. I got real scared," says Moutardier. No one knew if Reid had accomplices on board. There were no clear procedures to guide the crew of 12, so they improvised. They barred anyone from standing up without permission for the remaining three hours of the flight. Passengers who asked to go to the bathroom were searched and their pockets emptied. The crew checked the passports of male passengers. A flight attendant created a barrier in front of the cockpit and stood guard.

Passengers were asked to get to know their seatmates. A woman said she had seen Reid the day before at the airport--with another person. Crying and shaking, the passenger went around the plane three times with Moutardier looking to see if the other man was on board. At another point, when passengers started smelling smoke again, Jones walked the plane barefoot to see if she could detect heat from the cargo hold. "Most of it was instinct," says Jones, "and the knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks. I don't believe I would have grabbed [Reid] the way I did had I not known about Sept. 11. I don't know that the passengers would have come to my aid so quickly had they not known about Sept. 11. I have thought about those crews so much since December. They are my heroes. They're the ones who saved us. It's the knowledge of how they lost their lives that empowered us."

The attendants concede that the crew made some mistakes. They didn't retrieve Reid's shoes until 30 minutes after he was subdued. Then the crew's first reserve officer brought the shoes into the cockpit. Thinking there was a knife inside, he found instead a wire protruding--and a burn mark. Hastily, the crew put both shoes in a safe place reserved on all planes for bomb disposal. The FBI later reported that one shoe had enough plastic explosives to blow a hole in the plane's fuselage. "Yet nobody went and curled up into a ball in the corner. Nobody started opening up minis [of liquor] and said, 'I'm going to get drunk,'" says Jones proudly. "Everybody did their job."

Flying is in Jones' blood. Her great-grandfather was a test pilot. A picture of her mother in a solo glider hangs over the mantel in her home in Tampa, Fla. Jones, 40, began working for American in 1985. "I love airports, the excitement, the electricity, people going places," she says. "I would go to the airport even before I had a job and just hang out. I like the smell of jet fuel." But after Sept. 11, Jones started thinking about another career. She began taking college courses with the idea of getting her degree and becoming a paralegal. After the shoe-bomber incident, she desperately wanted to quit and found herself withdrawing from friends, spending most of her days sleeping. At night, she would have bad dreams and wake up anxious, believing she had heard footsteps in the house. "You'd think you'd have more of an appreciation for life, appreciate friends and family more, but I'm scared. I'm scared of the way things are, scared of the future, scared of my ability to provide for my son, scared about my career. I'm afraid all the time," she says. "Airports are stressful now. It's not the fun place it used to be." She tried seeing a psychologist but didn't find that the counseling helped. "She'd tell me I did a great thing," says Jones. "She felt I was handling it all well."

In March, Jones went back to work. On her first flight, to London, she thought she smelled smoke. "My heart started pounding, and I thought I was going to pass out," she remembers. "I went into the bathroom and started crying." She asked for domestic flights, thinking they might be less stressful, but the pay was lower so she went back to international routes. Crewmates treat her like a celebrity, asking her to repeat her story of the Reid capture, but passengers don't recognize her. After she asked a female passenger from coach not to use the lavatory in business class (new security rules require flight attendants to keep people from roaming), the woman called her a "f______ bitch."

Moutardier, 47, caught the flying bug early too, and she has longed to be a flight attendant since she was a girl. But she was married for the fourth time and pregnant with her second son before, at 36, she realized her dream. "Even if I knew that Richard Reid would be on my flight someday, I would still have been a flight attendant," she says, sitting surrounded by travel mementos in her Coral Gables, Fla., home. Since Flight 63, she has been on medical leave for injuries to her shoulder suffered in her scuffle with Reid. When the White House invited Jones and Moutardier to be the First Lady's guests at the State of the Union speech in January, Moutardier considered not going because it meant flying to Washington. Both women did attend, but Moutardier didn't fly again until July, when she and her 10-year-old son Patrice made their annual trip to his summer camp in the south of France. Moutardier was nervous, for herself and for her son. Patrice tried to reassure his mother. "Mom, if you saved 200 people, you'll save me," he told her. The crew welcomed her warmly, and the flight was smooth, but when she finally arrived at the apartment she and her husband keep outside Paris, Moutardier broke down in tears.

Their families also suffered. Jones found it difficult to explain to her son Ian what happened on the Paris flight, but she knew she had to explain the bandage on her hand and the marks from Reid's teeth that are still visible below her thumb. "I just told him that a bad man on my flight was trying to hurt people, and in trying to stop him, he hurt me." The 7-year-old said he was proud of his mom, but it was obvious he was also worried for her. In the weeks following the aborted attack, Ian began wearing a pair of military camouflage pants he had pulled from his costume trunk, and he punched newspaper pictures of Reid. "He was fighting the war there for a while," she says. The endless phone calls from the media, the airline, the flight attendants' union and the FBI further upset him, but Ian refused to discuss any of it. "Only recently has he told friends what I did," Jones says. Moutardier's 27-year-old elder son Oscar cried when he heard about the incident, but Patrice tried to act as if nothing had happened. Then his grades plunged from A-plus to F. "Finally he told me he didn't want to show emotion because he was afraid it wouldn't help me to recover," says Moutardier. "I told him, 'Patrice, it's O.K. Mommy cried. You can cry too.'"

Since the shoe-bomber flight in December, American Airlines has offered a self-defense course; neither Jones nor Moutardier has attended the training. But Jones has devised her own safety rules. Instead of walking from the front of the plane to the back when she checks to see if seat belts are fastened, she now walks aft to forward because "I can see better what people are doing with their hands." She scrutinizes passengers more closely. On an international flight, a man who spoke no English got up before the plane taxied into the gate, and started walking into the business-class section. "He was coming right at me," says Jones. Crew members made him sit down, but Jones, fearing a bomb, went further and--on her own--ordered a full aircraft interior search after passengers disembarked. "Now I'm more involved in the situation," she says. "I make sure everything is checked; bins are opened before takeoff. I'm proactive."

Moutardier, back from Paris, hopes to return to work in October. Both she and Jones may testify at Reid's trial, which is set to begin in Boston on Nov. 4, but Moutardier says she is determined to leave the incident behind her. "I'm putting a lot of positive thoughts in my head. I cannot live in fear. I'm stronger. We're all stronger," she says. "I'm gaining back my life, little by little. I know I was there that day, on that flight, for a reason. Now I need to get back to work because I'm doing what I love. I'll be perfectly..." She pauses as if willing herself to believe her own words, then finishes with a tentative smile, "...O.K."