Flight attendant Betty Ong spent the final moments of her life helping authorities identify the men who had hijacked the flight she was on — American Airlines Flight 11 — on September 11, 2001.
Ong, a San Francisco native who worked out of Boston’s Logan International Airport, had been on the job for 14 years and worked the rear cabin as the No. 3 flight attendant. She was aboard the Los Angeles-bound flight with 81 passengers and 10 other crew members when everything went wrong.
The last official contact from Flight 11 to air traffic control was recorded at 8:13 a.m., with the pilots acknowledging an instruction to turn 20 degrees to the right. Sixteen seconds later, Boston Center controllers told the pilots to climb to 35,000 feet, but received no response. After seven minutes of dead air, the plane had veered so far off course that controllers began to speculate that a medical emergency or hijacking had taken place.
At 8:20 a.m., Ong calmly picked up an Airfone to contact American Airlines, and confirmed officials’ worst fears.
“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.”
Ong remained on the line for more than 20 minutes, describing the violence unfolding inside the plane. Shortly after she hung up, someone turned off the plane’s IFF (“identify friend or foe”) beacon.
Male voice: Can you describe the person that you said—someone is what in business class?
Betty Ong: I’m sitting in the back. Somebody’s coming back from business. If you can hold on for one second, they’re coming back…
Okay. Our number 1 got stabbed. Our purser is stabbed. Nobody knows who stabbed who, and we can’t even get up to business class right now ’cause nobody can breathe. Our number 1 is stabbed right now. And who else is?
Male voice: Okay, and do we—
Betty Ong: 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?
Ong proceeded to give details about the hijackers — including their seat numbers — that helped investigators identify them based on the flight manifest. Men from first-class seats 2A and 2B had charged the cockpit and forced their way in, she said, and the person in seat 9B had also been involved.
Fellow flight attendant Madeline “Amy” Sweeney also made a call from Flight 11 that day. Filling in for a sick colleague, Sweeney had not been scheduled to be on that flight — but when it was hijacked, she too picked up an Airfone and called American Airlines Flight Service at Logan Airport, reaching her friend and service manager Michael Woodward.
“Listen, and listen to me very carefully. I’m on Flight 11. The airplane has been hijacked,” she said.
Sweeney proceeded to relay a lot of the same information Ong was giving to another colleague — that the cockpit had been breached and that two flight attendants and a passenger had been stabbed: “A hijacker also cut the throat of a business class passenger, and he appears to be dead.”
She went on to describe the hijackers as Middle Eastern, noting that at least one of them spoke English very well.
She also relayed three additional seat numbers that may have been connected to the terrorists: 9D, 9G, and 10B.
While the two flight attendants stayed on their calls, Flight 11 descended rapidly toward New York City. Before contact with Ong was lost, she made a final request: “Pray for us.”
Around the same time, Woodward asked Sweeney several times if she knew where they were, since by then the hijackers had disabled the plane’s transponder.
“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 could be heard saying just before the line went dead.
American Airlines Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 a.m., killing everyone on board. Much of what investigators learned about the first hijacking of September 11 came from the final calls made by Ong and Sweeney.
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