She Calmly Reported the 9/11 Hijacking for 23 Minutes While the Plane Was Being Taken Over

At 7:59 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston’s Logan International Airport, bound for Los Angeles. There were 81 passengers and 11 crew members on board. The aircraft was a Boeing 767. The morning was clear and cool.Approximately twenty minutes into the flight, in the back galley of the plane, a flight attendant named Betty Ann Ong picked up a GTE Airfone. She was 45 years old and had been sitting in jump seat 3R at the rear of the cabin. She dialed the American Airlines reservations center.

The call was answered by Vanessa Minter, an agent at the airline’s southeastern reservations office in North Carolina.In a voice her listener would later describe as immediate, calm, and completely composed, Betty Ong said: “I think we’re being hijacked.”She kept the phone line open for the next twenty-three minutes.Betty Ann Ong had been born in San Francisco on February 5, 1956. Her parents were Cantonese immigrants from Kaiping. She had two older sisters, Cathie and Gloria, and an older brother, Harry.

The family lived in Chinatown, where her parents ran a small grocery store. At home, everyone called her Bee.She had become a flight attendant for American Airlines in 1987. For fourteen years she had worked transcontinental flights, mostly East Coast to West Coast routes. On the morning of September 11, she had volunteered for Flight 11 so she could connect in Los Angeles and fly to Hawaii on vacation with her sister Cathie.The hijacking began about fifteen minutes into the flight. Five men, led by Mohamed Atta, who was seated in 8D, seized control of the aircraft. They incapacitated the pilots, stabbed several flight attendants in the front of the cabin, killed a passenger in business class, and used what passengers believed to be Mace or pepper spray to keep others away from the cockpit.Betty Ong had been in the rear of the plane.

From the back galley, she made the call that would become one of the most important of that tragic day. Within two minutes, the reservations agent patched in her supervisor, Nydia Gonzalez, who then brought in Craig Marquis at American Airlines operations control in Fort Worth, Texas.For the next twenty-three minutes, Betty Ong did the only thing she could.She calmly reported her flight number and seat location. She described which crew members had been stabbed and where they were seated. She reported that the cockpit was not responding and that some kind of spray had been used in the forward cabin. Most importantly, she provided the seat numbers of the hijackers. Those details would allow the FBI to quickly identify Mohamed Atta and the others.She never panicked. She never cried. The recordings of the call reveal a measured, steady voice from beginning to end. Nydia Gonzalez would later testify that media reports claiming Betty was hysterical were completely false. It was, she said, the calmest emergency call she had ever received.Betty Ong’s call was the first clear confirmation to anyone in the federal government or the aviation system that America was under a coordinated terrorist attack.

The information she provided reached the FAA in real time and became critical intelligence that helped lead to the unprecedented decision to ground all commercial aircraft in U.S. airspace.At 8:46:26 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11, traveling at approximately 470 miles per hour, struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.The line went dead.Nydia Gonzalez stayed on the call for several more minutes. “Betty,” she said. “Betty, talk to me. Betty, are you there?”Betty Ann Ong was forty-five years old. She had been a flight attendant for fourteen years. She had been planning a vacation in Hawaii with her sister.In the final twenty-three minutes of her life, she made sure the world outside that airplane knew exactly what was happening.In 2011, the city of San Francisco renamed the Chinatown Recreation Center where she once played as a child in her honor. Her name is engraved on Panel N-74 of the North Pool at the National September 11 Memorial in Manhattan. The foundation created in her name continues to support physical activity, nutrition, and youth programs across the country.