Horrific moment son learnt Aussie mum was killed on hijacked plane in 9/11 terror attacks
Before going on a trip-of-a-lifetime, an Australian woman gave her son some instructions - which later led him to make an horrific discovery.
The last time Australian comedian Simon Kennedy saw his mother Yvonne she handed him a copy of her flight itinerary.
“Just in case there’s a terrorist attack or something,” she told him lightheartedly before leaving Sydney for the US.
She was well-travelled, and having worked for the Red Cross for decades, had seen tragedy up close — including the aftermath of the Granville train disaster. She had also prematurely lost her husband Barry to a heart attack when their two sons were young. So it wasn’t out of character for her to be cautious.
“She knew how the world worked,” Simon, 44, told news.com.au in New York on Tuesday.
“It’s certainly dark considering what ended up happening but she knew that most people were good.”
What the family had no way of knowing at the time was that she was about to become one of 10 Australian victims in the worst terror attack to ever take place on American soil.
Yvonne, then 63 years old, was at the end of a solo trip of a lifetime to celebrate her retirement when she boarded American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington to Los Angeles, on September 11, 2001. But she never made it home.
During the flight, hijackers took control of the plane and forced passengers and crew to the back of the aircraft. Forty-five minutes later it slammed into the US defence headquarters, the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, while travelling at about 853km/h.
All 59 people on board the plane died instantly. It was 9.37am and the third commercial passenger jet that Al-Qaeda terrorists had hijacked in the US and ploughed into a building that morning. The first aircraft smashed into the north Twin Tower of the World Trade Center in New York at 8.46am.
The second struck the south tower 17 minutes later, and then came the Pentagon. The last plane crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania when passengers tried to overthrow the hijackers, at 10.03am. More than 3000 people from more than 70 countries died in the attacks, including the 19 hijackers.
Simon, then 26, first learnt of the catastrophe when he received a call at his Sydney home from his brother Leigh who was living in London.
“I’d gone to bed without looking at the television and he said, ‘Have a look at this, some planes have hit buildings in America, and I want to know where Mum is because she’s over there on holidays’,” he told news.com.au.
Simon grabbed the flight itinerary his mum had left with him and crosschecked the details with those Leigh quoted from the news.
“The flight numbers matched up,” he said. “The itinerary pretty much told us what we didn't want to be true.”
It was days until a family friend who worked for the Australian government unofficially confirmed what he already knew: Yvonne was on the flight and had been killed.
“It was awful, horrendous,” Simon recalled.
“There was a certain numbness that came with it and I think I sat in my pyjamas for a day just staring at the television just hoping that maybe she hadn’t gotten on that flight or something had changed — but it hadn’t.”
The final moments of those on-board American Airlines Flight 77 were later pieced together by investigators in part by cockpit recordings and frantic phone calls made by several passengers. For Simon, the notion that his mother was likely “very scared” still shakes him to the very core.
“Part of me would like to think she was oblivious to what happened but that’s not the facts, she would have been well aware what was going on, and that would have been quite frightening,” he said.
“It’s hard to picture someone you love like that.”
He recently sought to learn more about his mother’s last moments alive but wanted to avoid the “painful details”. And so he requested the names of passengers sitting around her so he could imagine who she might have consoled. The Department of Defence provided the requested information, which included the name of a four-year-old child.
“She was a giver,” Simon said of his mother.
“I’ve always had this idea in my mind that she would have been comforting people and looking after those around her … she was the kind of person who would have been holding someone’s hand.
“She was compassionate and inclusive and that should be her legacy.”
Yvonne was due home from her trip on September 15, 2001. Instead, four days after her scheduled return date, more than 1000 people gathered at a memorial service for her at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney.
Some of her personal belongings were later recovered from the Pentagon crash site. Among them was her wallet, keys, various identity and credit cards, and US currency. The Kennedy family donated most of the items to a museum. But Simon kept one thing: his mother’s engagement ring which “survived (the crash) with a bit of a scratch”.
“We’ve still got it … it’s pretty special,” he said.
Some of her remains were also located and buried across two locations, in Sydney and Washington.
Amid the darkness and grief, Simon rose to a higher place, and soon got back on stage.
There’s one topic you’ll never find him joking about, however: Islamophobia.
It disturbs the professional comedian and goes against the very essence of who his mother was. That’s why he wants others to know that “no matter what religion, no matter what creed, no matter what race or political motive, everyone is deserving of humanity” — even those behind the attacks.
“The world has changed a lot since that day and so have the attitudes of many,” he said.
“Mum was an open-minded person who made friends from all different backgrounds.
“She was the type of person who’d talk to random people on a bus.”
Simon has visited the Pentagon crash site on several occasions, and this week travelled from Sydney to New York, to read his mother’s name at the 9/11 commemoration on the 18th anniversary of the tragedy.
The ground zero ceremony honours those killed in the attacks with the reading of all victims’ names, and moments of silence, as well as tolling bells that mark the times when the planes crashed and the centre’s twin towers fell.
“I’m here to make her proud,” he said.
And there’s no doubt she would be.
“She’s got four grandkids (between her two sons) she never got to meet,” Simon told news.com.au.
“That's one of the hardest parts — I would love those kids to have their grandmother and I’d love to have her around.”
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