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I'll take your points as to the first part of the call. But once she clearly stated who she was, what flight it was, etc., they continued with the stupid questions like they were looking around for the proper forms to fill out.

As we know from that day, regular passengers got through to their spouses or relatives that made 911 calls and got more information out than these two calls did.

I'm sticking with my attitude that these bureaucracies are horribly ran by bloated employees with no brains. Come on, you've flown I'm sure and had contact with brainless airline employees.

As for the "Easy, FM", I'll take that as an abbreviation of my nickname and not you calling me a Kerry-Moron! lol

Just appreviating your screen name, Fledermaus. Sorry. I save the epithet "Kerry-Moron" for the hijackers and OBL. :)

I listened again and still can't reach your same conclusion. The emergency ops guy on the second sound file took a little time to get Ms. Gonzales' name down but we don't have the video to see if he was waving over a supervisor, bringing up an employee roster, etc. Validating the identify must be SOP and he only spent 20 seconds doing it. Within 90 second he had the contacts to the plane and ATC dispatched out. It could have been better but not by much.

Come on, you've flown I'm sure and had contact with brainless airline employees.

I have been a Flight Attendant, a Dallas police officer for 8 years, have a degree from SMU, have a Commercial pilot license/Instrument Rating, and currently work for a major airline....in RES. Insulting all airline employees because their management "freezes" when the res agent gets a call like this, and the res agent acts like a res agent and not a trained police officer or flight crew member, is expected.

I will say corporations do not place enough worth on the diversified work experience, cross-training, other "seemingly unrelated" training, or education of their employees, nor are they empowered accordingly. Our PC society no longer places value on general knowledge and experience and neither do employers [G Gordon Liddy would agree]. In this I agree with you if I have, perhaps, clarified your point.

I would have handled this call differently (I'd have recognized the F/A nomenclature immediately, and COMMANDED the agent next to me to disconnect their call, call information, get ARTCC (and the right one!) and the FBI on another line within the 4 minute duration of this tape and not waited for a "supervisor" to come by and stand there) but what the hell do you expect?? My background is slightly unique, to say the least.

In the end, ATC had the info in time to scramble fighters but the government held off a few minutes too long, because after all, it can't happen to us.

Your personal attack on "airline employees" in general is what is FUBAR.

If I misunderstood your post...apologies.

NEVER FORGET who did this to us, nor how our INS dollars assisted all of them!!

And by my tagline, I'm not PC like my employer either.

I think FMaus has a point here.
She was on the phone with these AA employees for around 20 minutes, but only four minutes or so of the conversation was taped (so they say). Those four minutes were played on MSNBC and they are obviously from the beginning moments of the hijacking. The line from the dispatcher "I think we've lost her.." is taken out of context, I think, on this thread and in our national media today.

I hope the committee interviews the AA dispatchers tomorrow for the complete story of Betty Ong's final, brave report.
As I recall from in depth press reports at the time, the flight attendant said "I don't think (the captain) is flying the plane." The dispatcher asked her what she saw outside of the airplane. She responded, and I paraphrase here, "I see buildings, I think New York. Oh My God! Oh My God!" Then the transmissions ended. (This is taken from either the Times, the Post, or the Globe. I was reading everything at the time and got mixed up.)

I have an unhealthy obsession with these details, so please accept my apologies if I've offended you with this unsanitized version of events.

I have noticed that details like this were in the printed media for two or three weeks after the attacks, and then it seems that the sources dried up.