A version of the following article appeared in the Wednesday, October 21, 2026, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.
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After starting at Piedmont Airlines in 1963, Charlotte-based Carol Fair is retiring as American Airlines’ most senior flight attendant
Carol Fair, who started her career at American Airlines’ predecessor Piedmont Airlines, is retiring next week after more than 63 years on the job. (Photos courtesy of Carol Fair)
by Ted Reed
After an astounding 63½ years on the job, Carol Fair’s final trip as a flight attendant on Monday will be fitting.
Fair, 83, will work an American Airlines London-to-Charlotte flight. She selected it because she worked the first Charlotte-to-London flight ever, operated by Piedmont Airlines, where she began her career.
That June 15, 1987, inaugural flight to London, Fair recalled in an interview on Monday, symbolized her career arc from small aircraft to large Boeing jets.
“I was so excited, I didn’t sleep the night before,” she said. “I went from a DC-3 to a 767. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
It’s been a long run for Fair, who will end her career as No. 1 on American’s seniority list out of about 30,000 flight attendants. (She is effectively the most senior, she said: Two women with higher seniority have not officially retired, but they no longer fly.)
A celebration is planned for her arrival at Charlotte’s airport at 4:40 p.m. on Monday, when Flight 733 arrives from London. The celebration is expected to include a water salute, an honor that is common in the airline industry, especially for veteran pilots’ final flights, but rare for flight attendants.
“It’s time,” Fine said. “I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I made No. 1 out of 30,000. You can’t go any higher, so I might as well hang it up.”
Her honors include membership in both the North Carolina and Tennessee aviation halls of fame as well as a recent Sullenberger Aviation Museum exhibition that features her career.
Fair at an exhibit that opened last year at the Sullenberger Aviation Museum. (Photo courtesy of WFAE)
According to her plaque in the Tennessee hall, “Fair became a flight attendant with Piedmont Airlines in 1963, soon after the airline began hiring female stewardesses. She is a dedicated advocate for flight attendant rights and a goodwill ambassador for the South’s beloved former ‘Route of the Pacemakers,’ Piedmont Airlines. Featured in magazines, newspapers and television interviews, Carol gives speeches about Piedmont’s marvelous history. She was also inducted into the North Carolina Transportation Hall of Fame in 2008.”
Said Fair: “I’m notorious.”
Fair lives in Johnson City, Tenn., and flies out of Charlotte, where American has a flight attendant base.
In 1963, after graduating from high school in Johnson City, she went to the airport to look for work and met with the Piedmont station manager.
“I needed a job,” she recalled. “When the station manager said, ‘What could you do for me at Piedmont?’ I said I could answer the phone, empty trash, write tickets, make coffee and whatever. He said, ‘If you can make coffee, then go to Winston-Salem and get a job as a stewardess. There’s a flight going to Winston-Salem in a half hour. Get on it, and you can interview there.’ I said, ‘I’ve never flown.’ He said, ‘It’s a free trip. I think you’ll enjoy it.’”
Initially, Fair was based in Roanoke, Va. She flew on a twin-engine Martin 404. An out-and-back trip would take her to Norfolk, Va., with a half dozen stops each way. She moved to a Knoxville, Tenn., base and then to Atlanta because she wanted to fly on Boeing 737s.
In 1989, when Piedmont merged with USAir, the Atlanta flight attendant base closed, and she moved to the Charlotte base. She often drives three hours to and from her home for flights.
Before being hired at Piedmont, Fair noted, she was turned down at American. “They said I wasn’t American material,” she said. Funny how things change.
Today, American Airlines operates three daily departures to London. Piedmont, founded in Winston-Salem and known for Southern gentility, began to connect a few flights in Charlotte in 1979 and opened a new Charlotte terminal in 1982. Thanks to Piedmont, the airport, now the 11th busiest in the U.S., enabled the growth of the city, now the 14th largest in the U.S.
Fair primarily flies international. She feels the quality of passengers is higher than on domestic flights: “They are vented better,” is the way she puts it. She usually flies with senior flight attendants, some longtime friends. Today, only a few dozen Piedmont flight attendants remain, she said. As for the pilots, she said, “I’ve been flying a lot longer than some of them have been alive, but if I need help, they back me up 100%.”
Commercial airline pilots must retire from flying at age 65. There is no mandatory retirement age for flight attendants.
In Johnson City, Fair lives in a 23-room mansion, a pleasure that is magnified because she grew up poor. In 1969, she married “a lovely man,” but he died of an illness in 1975. “We had a long time before we could get married because of the rules at Piedmont,” she said. (At the time, many airlines prohibited female flight attendants from marrying and imposed strict appearance standards.)
“We were about ready to start our family when he got sick and died,” she said. “There went my children.” She subsequently met Haitian piano player Felix Guignard, who was her life partner for 48 years. He died in 2025.
“Both of my boys left me well off,” she said. “I worked hard, and I invested, and yeah, I can retire. I hate to retire, but when you get to 83, it’s time to let the younger ones in.”
Since her days at Piedmont, Fair has been friends with Meba Thompson, who started at the carrier in 1969 and retired in 2002. They often flew together. Today, Fair often sleeps over at Thompson’s south Charlotte home rather than make the drive to Johnson City. Thompson has been among the organizers of Fair’s final flight celebration.
Thompson said her friend “bought a house that looks like Tara,” the plantation in “Gone with the Wind.” “It is filled with antiques from all over the world. It’s beautiful, but you have to like antiques.
“Carol put in her resignation a few times, and she kept pulling it back,” Thompson said. “She is very tearful about this. But she knows it’s time to go.”
Ted Reed covers the airport and airlines for The Ledger. He is a former Miami Herald and Charlotte Observer reporter. He is the co-author of “American Airlines, US Airways and the Creation of the World's Largest Airline.”