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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.'"