My wife’s call was the first specific information the airline and the government got that day

“My wife’s call was the first specific information the airline and the government got that day,” said Mike

Sweeney, the widowed husband of Amy Sweeney, who went face to face with the hijackers on Flight 11. She gave

seat locations and physical descriptions of the hijackers, which allowed officials to identify them as Middle

Eastern men—by name—even before the first crash. She gave officials key clues to the fact that this was not a

traditional hijacking. And she gave the first and only eyewitness account of a bomb on board.”

The captain of American’s Flight 11 stayed at the controls much of the diverted way from Boston to New York,

sending surreptitious radio transmissions to authorities on the ground. He gave extraordinary access to the

drama inside his cockpit by triggering a “push-to-talk button” on the aircraft’s yoke … the plane turned

south toward New York, and more than one F.A.A. controller heard a transmission with an ominous statement by a

terrorist in the background, saying, “We have more planes. We have other planes.” All of it was recorded by a

F.A.A. traffic-control center in Nashua, N.H. According to the reporter, Mark Clayton, the federal law-

enforcement officers arrived at the F.A.A. facility shortly after the World Trade Center attack and took the

tape. To this writer’s knowledge, there has been no public mention of the pilot’s narrative since the news

report on Sept. 12, 2001.