Fresh Loaf

By Sonia Clark
(photo by Joeff Davis)

Barbara Moody was a flight attendant for Delta Airlines for 45 years before retiring in December. Now she’s a professional pet sitter.

Her career choice was inspired by the flight attendants she saw as a high school student in Hawaii. “They all looked so glamorous. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”

Moody graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1962: “I went to college, graduated, went home, changed clothes and went to work for Delta.”

Her first flight was on a Convair 440 to Charleston: “One of the passengers had to tell me where the [cabin] light switch was. The passengers knew the plane better than I did.”

On the difference between pets and passengers: “People sometimes cannot accept that they are one out of 300. Pets don’t talk back and you can come to some kind of mutual agreement with them.”

In 2002, Barb volunteered for military charter flights to Kuwait. Once, while a plane was still on the ground in Kuwait, sirens went off indicating incoming fire. Barb and her fellow crew members had to don gas masks.

Although she was given the option by Delta not to fly anymore, Barb continued to fly after the 9/11 attacks because she did not want to give terrorists the satisfaction. “I was angry about what had happened, but I wasn’t going to change the way I lived.”

What Moody misses most about being a flight attendant: “Being able to go to dinner in a foreign city.”

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Tags: Barbara-Moody, features, flight-attendant.