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Flight attendant Jean Roger of Longmeadow,
Massachusetts, is shown in this November 1993
file photo. Roger was working on American
Airlines Flight 11.
Photo: Springfield Union News/AP

Terrorists slit throats of 2 AA flight attendants

By Paul Sperry
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON: Terrorists who hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston on Tuesday morning slit the throats of two female flight attendants who tried to bar them from entering the cockpit, an American Airlines employee told WorldNetDaily in an exclusive interview.

The terrorists then forced their way into the locked cockpit and commandeered the Boeing 767 to New York, where they slammed it into one of the World Trade Center towers. The flight, carrying 81 passengers, was bound for Los Angeles.

A third stewardess aboard the nine-crew flight Madeline Amy Sweeney used her cellphone, or possibly the plane phone, to alert Michael Woodward, her superviser back at Logan International Airport, about the hijacking and murders. The terrorists were armed with razor-tipped knives that looked like box cutters, she relayed.

"That was just horrific to all of us when we heard about it at about 8:15" yesterday morning, said the senior American Airlines employee, who works at Logan and said goodbye to the crew at the gate around 7:30 a.m. "We were, like, 'Oh my God, these poor girls are trying to save their captain and their plane.'"

The plane left the gate at about 7:45 a.m. and took off at about 7:55 a.m. Sweeney made her call around 8:10 a.m. or 8:15 a.m., the source says. At about 8:25 a.m., the jet turned sharply off its planned westbound flight path and headed south toward Manhattan. The jet crashed into the north World Trade Center tower at about 8:45 a.m. About 15 minutes later, a United Airlines jet sliced through the south tower.

According to the American source, the American captain, John Ogonowski, managed to key the cockpit mike, apparently without the terrorists knowing, allowing air-traffic controllers to briefly pick up their cockpit conversations. The terrorists turned off the plane's transponder, the equipment that identifies the plane and provides other information, such as whether it's been hijacked, to air-traffic controllers tracking it by radar. Ogonowski flew the plane with his first officer, Tom McGuinness.

"They were trying to clue in the tower," the airline source said.

The crew was very close, having flown the Boston-Los Angeles run together regularly, the source said.

"This was a senior crew," she said. "They've been around. A lot of them usually do that flight ?go out on Flight 11 and come back on Flight 12 [from Los Angeles]. We all knew them really well."

In fact, a couple of the stewardesses were married to American gate agents at Logan, she says.

"You know, I said goodbye to that crew at the gate," the American employee said. "I was up there talking to the girls who were doing the flight, and the crew walks by and gives us all a wave. They said, 'See you later, we're coming back on [Flight] 12.'"

"Everyone was just stunned," she said, when they learned some 90 minutes later of their ultimate fate in Manhattan.

As part of their investigation, FBI agents and Massachusetts state troopers have interviewed American Airlines employees and Logan airport workers, including custodians working the morning shift, to rule out an inside job and establish a record of all the people who were at the terminal that morning.

"It was pretty intense," said the American worker.

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Finding Joy in the Sky

You can call just about anybody a people person. People who were close to Jean Roger say they know this. But what can they do? It is, they say, the best way to describe her.

And it is why Ms. Roger, who was 24, became a flight attendant two years ago after attending Penn State.

"After four and a half years of college, she wanted to be a flight attendant," said her father, Tom Roger. "She enjoyed traveling and meeting people, from children to 90- year-old adults; she loved them all."

One person was especially important: her boyfriend, Kevin Dowd, a Boston-area stock broker whom she had been dating for about two years. The night before Ms. Roger reported for duty on American Airlines' Flight 11 to Los Angeles she celebrated Mr. Dowd's 30th birthday, just the two of them strolling through Boston.

That night Ms. Roger gave Mr. Dowd a card that, he said, summed up her general life philosophy. "She wished me to have love, happiness and peace of mind because really, everything else just comes and goes," Mr. Dowd said. Despite a late night, the following morning "she went to work with a smile on her face," Mr. Dowd said. "She was happy as could be."

It was simple numbers that put Jean Roger on American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston.

As a relatively new flight attendant, every third month the 24-year-old Roger was placed on a "standby" work list and had to call in every night to see if she was to be called up.

This past Monday she was on the list and had to be at the airport at 6:30 a.m. in case a flight attendant was needed.

"Someone called in sick and she had to go," said her father, Thomas.

Given the short notice of standby work, she typically didn't call her family until she arrived at her flight destination.

"That was the anxiety for us when we found out a plane had been hijacked. It took us three hours to find out she was in fact on the plane," Thomas Roger said. "I just feel so terrible for these people in New York who are waiting three or four days."

Roger was raised in Longmeadow, Mass., where she was a golfer and champion swimmer in high school.

She graduated from Penn State with a degree in environmental science, but after a family friend told her about the joys of being a flight attendant, Roger applied for the job two years ago.

"She loved it--the work, the schedule. It really suited her lifestyle," her father said. "And she loved going to strange places."

Profile courtesy of THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE.