9/11, 20 years later: remembering Betty Ann Ong, the flight attendant who alerted a nation
- Ong, a third-generation Chinese-American, was declared ‘a true American hero’ for her call reporting the hijack of American Airlines Flight 11
- Friends and family succeeded in having San Francisco rename a Chinatown community centre in her honour
The deadly terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, prompted an outcry around the world: “We are all Americans.” Washington’s policies realigned around fighting terrorism and bilateral relationships strengthened or crumbled depending on where other governments stood. In the latest in a series about the legacy of September 11, Jodi Xu Klein recounts the memories of Betty Ann Ong, the Chinese-American flight attendant who raised the first alarm about the hijackings that day.
On a spring day in 2002, Cathie Ong-Herrera received a call from the New York City Medical Examiner’s office. At the base of where the North Tower of the World Trade Centre used to stand, she was told, a two-inch thigh bone and some soft tissue had been recovered and identified. They matched the DNA of Cathie’s younger sister, Betty Ann Ong.
These were all that was left of Ong, a 45-year-old Chinese-American flight attendant who was the first to alert authorities of the attacks of September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 lives were lost.
Five hijackers took control of American Airlines Flight 11, one of four hijacked planes that day, and the Boeing 767, heading out of Boston and intended for Los Angeles, detoured instead to New York. During the last 25 minutes of her life, Ong, using the aircraft’s emergency line to speak to ground crews, calmly provided information about the hijackers and injuries to passengers and crew. When the jet crashed into the North Tower at 8:46am – the first of two planes to fly into the towers – at 755km an hour (470mph), Ong, along with the other 10 crew members and 81 passengers, died.
But her early, vital and detailed account of what was occurring helped the US government realise the extent of the day’s attacks by al-Qaeda. The Federal Aviation Administration took the unprecedented step of grounding flights nationwide.
In 2004, Ong was declared “a true American hero” by Thomas Kean, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission.
