she couldn't explain and would never fully understand, O'Brien didn't use one of her normal sendoffs to the pilots: "Good day," or "Have a nice flight." Instead she told them, "Good luck." Hijacking The 9/11 Commission estimated that the flight was hijacked between 08:51 and 08:54, shortly after the North Tower was struck and not too long after United Airlines Flight 175 had been hijacked. The last normal radio communications from the aircraft to air traffic control occurred at 08:50:51. Although the terrorists were indeed equipped with knives and box cutters, unlike the other three flights there were no reports of anyone actually being stabbed or the use of mace and bomb threats, and notably, the pilots were not immediately killed but instead herded to the back of the plane with the rest of the passengers. At 08:54, as the plane flew in the vicinity over Pike County, Ohio, it began deviating from its normal assigned flight path and turned south. Two minutes later, at 08:56, the plane's transponder was switched off. The hijackers set the flight's autopilot on a course heading east towards Washington, D.C. The FAA was aware at this point there was an emergency on board the airplane. After learning of a second hijacking involving an American Airlines aircraft and the hijacking of a United Airlines jet, American Airlines' executive vice president Gerard Arpey ordered a nationwide ground stop for the airline. The Indianapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center, as well as American Airlines dispatchers, made several failed attempts to contact the aircraft. At the time the airplane was hijacked, it was flying over an area of limited radar coverage. With air controllers unable to contact the flight by radio, an Indianapolis official declared that it had possibly crashed at 09:09, 28 minutes before it actually did. Calls Two people on board the aircraft made phone calls to contacts on the ground. At 09:12, flight attendant Renee May made a phone call lasting just under two minutes to her mother, Nancy May, in Las Vegas. During the phone call, May erroneously said her flight "was being hijacked by six persons" who had forced "us" to the rear of the airplane. She did not explain whether the people crowded together were crew members, passengers, or both. May asked her mother to contact American Airlines, which she and her husband promptly did, although the company was well-aware of the