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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."