Betty Ong spent the last minutes of her life doing the job she had trained 14 years to do: staying calm, relaying facts, and giving authorities the information they needed to identify the men who had taken over American Airlines Flight 11 on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Ong, a San Francisco native who worked out of Boston’s Logan International Airport, was the No. 3 flight attendant on the Los Angeles-bound flight, assigned to the rear cabin. According to reporting by The Daily Wire, she was one of 11 crew members on board along with 81 passengers.
The last official contact from Flight 11 to air traffic control came at 8:13 a.m., when the pilots acknowledged an instruction to turn 20 degrees to the right. Sixteen seconds later, Boston Center controllers told the pilots to climb to 35,000 feet. There was no response. After seven minutes of silence, the plane had drifted so far off course that controllers began openly speculating a medical emergency or a hijacking was underway.
At 8:20 a.m., Ong picked up an Airfone and called American Airlines. Her voice, captured on the recorded line, confirmed the worst fears of the controllers who had been watching the blip on their screens.
“The cockpit is not answering. Somebody’s stabbed in business class, and, um, I think there’s Mace and we can’t breathe,” Ong said. “I don’t know, I think we are getting hijacked.”
She stayed on the line for more than 20 minutes. In that time, she described the scene from the back of the plane in real time — a passenger sobbing, flight attendants unable to reach the cockpit, the struggle in business class. She said that the No. 1 flight attendant had been stabbed, that the purser had been stabbed, and that no one could get up to business class because the air was too thick to breathe.
“And our number 5 — our first class passengers are — galley flight attendant and our purser has been stabbed. And we can’t get into the cockpit, the door won’t open. Hello?” she said at one point, checking that the colleague on the other end was still there.
Seat numbers that identified the attackers
Ong gave investigators something more than a description of the chaos. She passed along specific seat numbers of the men she believed were responsible. Men in first-class seats 2A and 2B had charged the cockpit and forced their way inside, she said. She also identified the person in seat 9B as involved. Those details, matching the flight manifest, helped the FBI and other investigators quickly put names to the faces of the hijackers.
Just after she hung up, someone switched off the plane’s IFF — the “identify friend or foe” beacon that lets radar systems track an aircraft. Flight 11’s position by then was known mostly by estimates.
A second flight attendant, Madeline “Amy” Sweeney, was also on the line that morning. Sweeney had not been scheduled to work Flight 11 — she was filling in for a colleague who had called in sick — and she reached her friend and service manager at Logan, Michael Woodward, through American Airlines Flight Service.
“Listen, and listen to me very carefully. I’m on Flight 11. The airplane has been hijacked,” she told him.
Sweeney relayed much of the same information Ong was giving to a different colleague: the cockpit had been breached, two flight attendants and a passenger had been stabbed. She described the hijackers as Middle Eastern men, noting that at least one spoke English very well. And she passed along three more seat numbers that might be tied to the attackers — 9D, 9G, and 10B.
She also described a grimmer detail: a hijacker had cut the throat of a business-class passenger, and the passenger appeared to be dead.
“I see buildings”
As the two women stayed on their calls, Flight 11 dropped rapidly toward New York City. Woodward asked Sweeney repeatedly if she knew where they were — by then the transponder was off and air traffic control had lost reliable tracking.
“I see water. I see buildings. I see buildings! We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low. Oh my God we are flying way too low. Oh my God!” Sweeney said, just before the line went dead.
Before contact with Ong was lost, she had one final request for the colleague on the other end: “Pray for us.”
American Airlines Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 a.m. Everyone on board was killed. The plane was the first of two to hit the Twin Towers that morning, followed by United Airlines Flight 175 at 9:03 a.m. A third hijacked plane, American Airlines Flight 77, struck the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., and a fourth, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks.
Much of what investigators would eventually piece together about the first hijacking of that day came directly from the two women in the back of Flight 11 — their voices recorded on the ground, their seat numbers checked against the manifest, their descriptions of the attackers used to build the case that would follow.
Twenty years later, the Airfone calls remain among the most detailed contemporaneous accounts of what happened inside a hijacked cockpit and cabin, and Ong and Sweeney are remembered among the first Americans to respond to the attacks — not with force, but with information, and with a calm that held until the very end.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/9-11-the-flight-attendants-who-spent-their-final-moments-helping-identify-the-hijackers-rhf-popup