Calm as Death Drew Near for Flight 11

July 18 -- On the morning of Sept. 11, American Airlines ground manager Michael Woodward received a phone call that immediately got his full attention.

"Listen, and listen to me very carefully. I'm on Flight 11. The airplane has been hijacked," said the voice on the other end. The caller was Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant on board American Airlines Flight 11, which had just been hijacked on its way from Boston to Los Angeles.

Over the next 25 minutes, Sweeney, a 13-year veteran with the airline, calmly relayed information to Woodward that would later be crucial in helping the FBI identify the men who hijacked the plane and flew it into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Another flight attendant, Betty Ong, who had been with American Airlines for 14 years, also called colleagues on the ground.

Seat Numbers Identified Hijackers

Flight 11 had taken off from Boston's Logan Airport at 7:59 a.m., with a light load of 81 passengers. There were 11 crew on board: a captain, a first officer, and nine flight attendants.

A few minutes into the flight, five men got up from their seats and made their way to the cockpit, soon taking control of the plane.

Sweeney and Ong were in the coach section of the plane. Using crew telephones, they made the calls to their colleagues on the ground, Sweeney to Woodward, a flight services manager at Logan Airport, and Ong to the airline's reservations line.

Woodward said Sweeney spoke "very, very calmly... in a way which was quick but calm." She gave him the seat numbers for four of the five hijackers, allowing airline staff to pull up their names, phone numbers, addresses — and even credit card numbers — on the reservations computer. One of the names that came up was Mohamed Atta, the man the FBI would later identify as the leader of all 19 of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Sweeney told Woodward the hijackers seemed to be of Middle Eastern descent and said they had gone into the cockpit with a bomb with yellow wires attached.