Carol Shares Her Story

   Carol truly loves to fly, and she’s been up there in the air for a good part of the last six decades.  Now 80, this Tennessee lady has been doing her job ever since she turned 19 and is now still going strong as a chief flight attendant and purser, ranked fourth in seniority among the nearly 30,000 flight attendants now serving passengers for one of the largest airlines in the world.

   It’s been a long and rewarding career that has included honors and accolades within the aviation community.   But it’s also had its share of frightening moments, like the September day in 2001 when she was called into the cockpit of a jet plane somewhere high above the Atlantic Ocean and told there had been an accident and they were not going to be landing in America.  

   “I started flying when I was right out of high school,” she begins with her story.  “I've been flying for 60 years and I’m now the purser on the flights I’m working. The difference between a purser and a regular flight attendant is that you have a little bit more responsibility on the flight. You are kind of in charge of all the paperwork and making sure the flight gets out on time. You have to be sure that all your flight attendants have what they need and that we getting the flight out on time because the company wants those flights out and of course our passengers do too!”

   With her high seniority rank as well as her many years of experience in commercial air travel, Carol has earned the right to work on international flights serving a  plane full of strangers from who knows where all over the world.  Which is what happened on a flight maybe 39,000 feet above the Atlantic bound from London to the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001.  Here is how Carol tells just part of that story:

   “On 9/11 I was the cabin service director on a flight coming home from London, but we never made it.  The pilot called me up front and he said there's been an accident in New York, there's a plane that went into the World Trade Center. And then while I was standing there the other one hit and I went back and I got my crew together.  And then the pilot calls me back up front and I said are we going back to London and he said no, we're going to Halifax, Nova Scotia. So that's where we went.  The pilot didn't make an announcement that we were going to Halifax until we were almost there.”

   Carol remembers that their plane was one of about 40 other jumbo jets parked nose-to-tail on the Halifax tarmac, and the plane’s crew and passengers were housed in Halifax for four days until allowed to fly the rest of the way to the airline’s home base in Charlotte, NC.  Now, more than 20 years later, she is still making the three-hour commute from Charlotte over the Blue Ridge Mountains into eastern Tennessee and her home in Johnson City. 

   As long a drive as that may sound, it’s up and over some of the prettiest landscape in America, and Carol has long ago learned her way home even though as she moved into her Seventies she began having some minor issues with memory.

   “I started using Prevagen about eight years ago,” Carol explains. “I watched it on TV so I talked to the druggist and he suggested that I try it.”

   “Prevagen has helped me keep up and feel confident in the workplace,” she adds.  “I was wanting to share my story, so that other flight attendants may experience some of the benefits that Prevagen has to offer.”