"Theodore Olson's wife, Barbara Olson, Calls From Flight 77

Married to the US Solicitor General Theodore Olson, a close aide and friend of President George W Bush, she was a prominent member of Washington's conservative elite; this group, which also included the Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas and the independent counsel Kenneth Starr, prompted Hillary Clinton to complain of a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Below is an excerpt from a CNN story detailing an interview between Larry King and Theodore Olson regarding Barbara's phone call.

[King] Olson was one of the passengers on American Airlines Flight 77, which was "hijacked by terrorists and crashed into the Pentagon on September 11". But before she died inside the doomed airplane, Olson kept her cool and made two telephone calls to her husband.

"She wasn't crying, she didn't even sound frightened. She told me her plane was hijacked and that they didn't know she was making a phone call," Ted Olson told CNN's Larry King. Barbara Olson's last words to her husband, he said, were "What do I tell the pilot to do?" (cnn)

Below is excerpted from a detailed timeline developed at cooperativeresearch.org; this section details the communications.

(9:25 a.m.) A passenger on Flight 77, Barbara Olson, calls her husband, Theodore (Ted) Olson, who is Solicitor General at the Justice Department. Ted Olson is in his Justice Department office watching WTC news on television when his wife calls.

A few days later, he says, "She told me that she had been herded to the back of the plane. She mentioned that they had used knives and box cutters to hijack the plane. She mentioned that the pilot had announced that the plane had been hijacked." [CNN, 9/14/01 (C)] He tells her that two planes have hit the WTC. [Telegraph, 3/5/02] She feels nobody is taking charge.[CNN, 9/12/01] He doesn't know if she was near the pilots, but at one point she asks, "What shall I tell the pilot? What can I tell the pilot to do?" [CNN, 9/14/01 (C)] Then she gets cut off without warning. [Newsweek, 9/29/01]

Ted Olson' recollection of the call's timing is extremely vague, saying it "must have been 9:15 or 9:30. Someone would have to reconstruct the time for me." [CNN, 9/14/01 (C)] Other accounts place it around 9:25. [About 9:25, Miami Herald, 9/14/01, about 9:25, New York Times, 9/15/01 (C), "by 9:25," Washington Post, 9/21/01] The call is said to have lasted about a minute. [Washington Post, 9/12/01 (B)] By some accounts, his warning that planes have hit the WTC comes later in a second phone call (see (After 9:30 a.m.)). [Washington Post, 9/21/01] In one account, Barbara Olson calls from inside a bathroom. [Evening Standard, 9/12/01] In another account, she is near a pilot, and in yet another she is near two pilots. [Boston Globe, 11/23/01]

Ted Olson's account of how the call is made is also strange and conflicting. Three days after 9/11, he says, "I found out later that she was having, for some reason, to call collect and was having trouble getting through. You know how it is to get through to a government institution when you're calling collect." He says he doesn't know what kind of phone she used, but he has "assumed that it must have been on the airplane phone, and that she somehow didn't have access to her credit cards. Otherwise, she would have used her cell phone and called me." [Fox News, 9/14/01]

But in another interview on the same day, he says that she used a cell phone and that she may have gotten cut off "because the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don't work that well." [CNN, 9/14/01 (C)] Six months later, he claims she called collect "using the phone in the passengers' seats." [Telegraph, 3/5/02]

But it isn't possible to call on seatback phones without a credit card, which would render making a collect call moot. Many other details are conflicting, and Olson faults his memory and says that he "tends to mix the two [calls] up because of the emotion of the events." [CNN, 9/14/01 (C)]

Some have questioned if Ted Olson can be trusted in his account of the call, since he has stated that lying to the public is justifiable. [Sydney Morning Herald, 3/20/02] Between his memory and his approval of lying for partisan ends, can Ted Olson's account be trusted?

This is the only call from Flight 77, and the only call to mention box cutters.

source: http://www.humanunderground.com/11september/pent-data-77.html

The Buruea of transportation website contains search pages, where one can pull up detailed statistics about the history of which flights have been scheduled for which airports on any given day. Go to http://www.bts.gov/ntda/oai/index.shtml
 
Click on "detailed statistics" where one can search records of scheduled and actual departure times, arrival times, diversions and cancellations by departure airport, arrival airport, airline and flight number. Searches for Sept 11 2001 reveal that the flights AA 11 and AA 77 did not exist. They were not scheduled that day. Here are the search results which I encourage everyone to check for themselves.
 
A search for UA flights from Newark on Sept 11, 2001 shows 0093 to SF was scheduled at 8.00 and actually departed at 8.01. It is listed as "diverted" and did not arrive at its destination.
 
A search for UA from Boston on that day shows 0175 to LA was scheduled for 8.00 and actually departed at 7.58. Also listed as "diverted" and did not arrive at its destination. The term "diverted" is not clarified as to whether it includes hijacking and/or crashing, so the data gives no indication one way or the other as to truth of the official story about what happened to them, but it does confirm that they departed as per the official story and did not arrive at their destinations.
 
A search for AA flights from Boston that day does not list 0011. The earliest scheduled AA flight to LA that day was 0181 at 11.00
 
A search for AA flights from Dulles that day does not list 0077. The earliest scheduled AA flight to LA was 0135 at 11.15.
 
Here's a different search method. One can find the historical reliability and punctuality of specific flights over a period of time, by specifying the Airline and flight number and defining the time period. The search then returns figures on average delays in departure and arrival times and percentages of cancelled or diverted flights.

If one searches specifically for UA 175 or UA 93 narrowed down to sept 11 only, the search returns the result of "diverted" for each flight. A similar search for either AA 11 or AA 77 returns "no data found".
 
If you search for AA 11 or AA 77 on different days, you will find that they were regularly scheduled flights right up to Sept 10. AA 11 was scheduled daily from Logan to LA at 8.00, and AA 77 from Dulles to LA at 7.45. On Sept 11, they were not scheduled. Not cancelled. Just not scheduled.

On Sept 12, they re-appear in the schedule (obviously as cancelled for the next few days) up until Sept 20 when both flights change their numbers.
 
Thus the official figures from the Bureau  of Transportation statistics indicate that neither AA 11 nor AA 77 flew on Sept, 11 2001. This solves the question of what happened to them. Nothing. Because the flights did not exist.