8:43 a.m. September 11, 2001: Airline Reservations Office Loses Contact with Flight 11 Attendant Betty Ong

Employees at the American Airlines Southeastern Reservations Office in Cary, North Carolina, lose communication with Betty Ong, a flight attendant on the hijacked Flight 11. [American Airlines, 9/11/2001, pp. 20-22; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 5-6]
Ong Stops Responding to Questions – For about the last 25 minutes, Ong has been on the phone with a number of employees at the reservations office, and has been providing them with information about the trouble on her plane. [9/11 Commission, 8/26/2004, pp. 8] But now she stops responding to their communications. Nydia Gonzalez, one of the reservations office employees, continues questioning Ong. She says: “What’s going on Betty? Betty, talk to me. Betty, are you there? Betty?” Receiving no response, she asks her colleague Winston Sadler, who is also participating in the call, “Do you think we lost her?” On another phone line, Gonzalez immediately notifies a manager at the American Airlines System Operations Control center in Texas that contact with Ong has been lost (see 8:44 a.m. September 11, 2001). [American Airlines, 9/11/2001, pp. 20-22; 9/11 Commission, 8/26/2004, pp. 14]
Ong Asked Airline Employees to ‘Pray for Us’ – Toward the end of the call, Ong said repeatedly to the reservations office employees: “Pray for us. Pray for us.” [ABC News, 7/18/2002] Gonzalez will say in an interview later today that Ong’s final words, before the call ends, were, “Oh my God, the flight, it’s going down, it’s going down.” [Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/11/2001, pp. 1-8] But in a subsequent interview, she will say that before the call ends, Ong “started to cry” and then her final words were, “Oh God, oh God, what is going on?” [Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/12/2001, pp. 69-71] The reservations office employees have lost communication with Ong by 8:44 a.m., according to the 9/11 Commission Report. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 6] But according to a summary of phone calls from the hijacked flights presented at the 2006 trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the call from Ong began at 8:18 a.m. and 47 seconds, and lasts exactly 27 minutes, meaning it ends at 8:45 a.m. and 47 seconds. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006] Flight 11 will crash into the World Trade Center less than a minute after that, at 8:46 a.m. (see 8:46 a.m. September 11, 2001). [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 7]