Twenty-five years ago, a Chinatown-raised flight attendant named Betty Ong picked up an airplane phone and calmly reported that something was terribly wrong aboard American Airlines Flight 11. Her 23-minute call to ground personnel became the first documented report of a hijacking on September 11, 2001, providing crucial information about what was happening aboard the plane. A quarter century later, her hometown neighborhood still keeps her memory alive through a renamed recreation center, an annual family retreat, and youth programs that carry her name.
Ong reached the American Airlines reservation desk roughly 20 minutes after Flight 11 departed Boston's Logan International Airport, according to ABC7 Bay Area. “I think we're getting hijacked,” she told the agents on the line, according to the station's report, before relaying that someone had been stabbed in business class and that the cockpit was not responding. Ong also provided details about where the hijackers were seated, information that authorities later used to help identify the men responsible for the attack.
Those seat numbers mattered far beyond that single phone call. Reports from Ong and fellow flight attendant Madeline “Amy” Sweeney provided critical early details about how Flight 11 was hijacked. Air traffic controllers had already suspected something was wrong when the flight veered off its assigned course, per the same ABC7 account. Ong's call ended when Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
A Chinatown Childhood, A National Legacy
Before she became a flight attendant, Ong grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown, graduated from George Washington High School in 1974, worked at her family's Jackson Street beef jerky store, and held a job as a baggage handler at San Francisco International Airport, according to Better Magazine. She joined American Airlines in 1987, spending 14 years with the carrier before the attacks. Several members of her family still live in the neighborhood where she was raised, the station's report notes.
According to the San Francisco Planning Department's existing conditions report, Portsmouth Square is a park and open space on the eastern edge of San Francisco's Chinatown.
Her older brother, Harry Ong, has said the anniversary of the attacks brings recurring anxiety and stress for the family, per the same ABC7 account. He has also said the family remains very proud of Betty and what she did that morning, and that they continue to support her legacy through community volunteering. According to Harry Ong, about 40 percent of families of 9/11 victims had not received remains of their loved ones. Betty Ong's own thigh bone was found two blocks from the World Trade Center site in 2002, and was cremated after its recovery; her ashes were interred in the Ong family plot in Colma.
The Fight to Rename a Chinatown Rec Center
Community advocate Rev. Norman Fong and local organizers had initially petitioned to rename Ong's former schools, Jean Parker Elementary and Francisco Middle School, before those efforts proved unfeasible and the city instead focused on the Chinatown recreation center where she played as a child, as Hoodline's 2019 remembrance detailed. That multi-year grassroots push culminated in 2011, when San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee and city officials reopened the renovated Chinese Recreation Center, re-dedicating the $21 million facility as the Betty Ann Ong Chinese Recreation Center, according to San Francisco Public Works. The rebuild was funded in part by a voter-approved 2008 San Francisco park bond.
Beyond the recreation center, Ong has also been remembered through other local tributes. Nationally, her name is also inscribed at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Lower Manhattan, alongside her fellow Flight 11 crew members and passengers. In Massachusetts, Ong's name is associated with the Madeline Amy Sweeney Award for Civilian Bravery, another tribute to her memory.
Family Programs Keep Her Memory Local
The Ong family has adopted the Chinese Recreation Center and sponsors parties and programs for children there throughout the year, and it holds an annual retreat in Betty's memory. The nonprofit Betty Ann Ong Foundation, established by her siblings to promote youth physical activity and outdoor education, provides summer camps and free shoe programs for young people. The foundation's reach extends beyond San Francisco, running summer wellness camps for children in Bakersfield alongside an Adopt-A-Park program at University Park.
Twenty-five years after her call from Flight 11, Ong's story remains anchored less in the abstractions of a federal investigation and more in the daily life of the neighborhood that raised her. As Hoodline's earlier reporting on the recreation center's history has noted, her legacy in San Francisco is grounded in the parks, streets, and youth programs that keep her memory tied to Chinatown itself, even as her name lives on in the official record of how the nation reconstructed that morning's events.
