New details of how one of the planes flown into the World Trade Centre was hijacked have emerged from a call made by one of the flight attendants. She described events on board and the crew's realization that they had been diverted and were about to crash.
Madeline Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant on American Airlines flight 11, managed to make a call to a ground manager in Boston after the hijacked plane had started on its diverted route. What is not clear is how Sweeney managed to make the call and what type of phone she was using.
She reported how two fellow crew members had already been stabbed by the hijackers.
"This plane has been hijacked," Sweeney told Michael Woodward, a flight services manager, at Logan airport in Boston. She explained calmly that the intruders had just "gained access to the cockpit."
She continued: "A hijacker also cut the throat of a business class passenger, and he appears to be dead." She believed there were four hijackers -- they turned out to be five -- and she managed to identify their seat numbers. Three were in business class, all were of Middle Eastern appearance and one "spoke English very well."
Sweeney managed to keep talking to the ground manager until just moments before the aircraft crashed in New York. Mr Woodward asked her if she knew her location.
"I see water and buildings. Oh my God! Oh my God!" she said in the call. The conversation ended. The water would have been the Hudson river.
Sweeney, 35, from Acton, Massachusetts, was the mother of two young children. She had worked for American Airlines for 12 years and was one of nine attendants on flight 11, which left Logan airport with 81 passengers at 7:45am on Sept. 11.
Details of the flight came from an FBI report seen by the Los Angeles Times. FBI investigators working in Dallas, where American Airlines is based, have pieced together the report from talking to ground crew, which indicates that the call may not have been recorded.
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