Betty Ong

After 8am that morning, people started to realise something was very, very wrong.

Flight attendant Betty Ong, who was on flight 11, headed to Los Angeles, and she made, honestly, a very remarkably clear call, she called to let ground personnel know that multiple people on the plane had been stabbed, a hijacking was underway, and that the cockpit was unreachable.

And that truly, like, I feel, God, I'm already feeling emotional about it because that truly is, as somebody who is incredibly phobic of planes, my absolute favorite worst nightmare.

Like nightmare fuel doesn't even do it justice.

I literally never cut anything out.

Well, I'm really interested in the life of this woman, Betty Ong, who was a flight attendant on flight 11 on 9-11.

So this is the first flight to hit the World Trade Center.

And she was absolutely incredible on that day.

And what she did, like to communicate to the ground and, you know, tell people what was going on she was like a first responder in like the worst scenario you could ever possibly imagine in the 21st century and what she did was just so heroic and what her family have done in her name since she died is just incredible so a lot of our new album which we recorded there with Danny Ball I'm writing about her life I'm writing about Betty Ong from her perspective unbelievable which people might find a little bit strange or unusual, but I hone in on people from history that I really admire and I want to keep them alive in songs.

And Betty Ong is someone, she rarely leaves my mind.

I love

that perspective in writing songs.

They must have felt that they weren't going to survive much longer.

So about 8.19, Flight 11 attendant Betty Ong got through to American Airlines.

She reported a hijacking, people stabbed and the cockpit inaccessible.

Another attendant, Amy Sweeney, supplied seat numbers and descriptions of the hijackers.

There's another woman I wanna talk to you about.

Her name is Betty Ong.

She was a flight attendant on Flight 11 for American Airlines, and she actually called and gave information back to the tower, and she was able to give in hijackers' seat numbers, crucial details about them, so that they could later on figure out what happened and who they were.

So of her last moments of life, Betty Ong called and saved as many people as she could because she knew that her flight was going the wrong way and was gonna hurt something or somebody.

She didn't know what was happening, obviously.

She knew that they had these, you know, five hijackers on the plane and had no idea what would happen next.

Like when I hear the flight attendant in the back getting the hot water pots ready, I know exactly where they are at.

When I hear Betty Ong saying I'm the number three flight attendant in the jump seat of this, I know exactly.

And yet we have people 25 years later who don't understand.

Americans are so good.