Difference between revisions of "Sandy Bradshaw calls"

Sandra Waugh Bradshaw was juggling dual careers -- flight attendant and mother. She was home in Greensboro, N.C. with her year-old daughter, Alexandria. In the coming year, her son Nathan would arrive.

...

Sandy Bradshaw, 38, would work the back of the plane, in economy class. After the first of her two children was born two years ago -- she also had a 16-year-old stepdaughter -- Bradshaw cut back on her workload. Her husband, Phil, a US Airways pilot, urged her to quit. She was thinking about it. But after 11 years as an attendant, and a personnel file filled with complimentary letters from pleased passengers, she still loved to fly.

She was in economy because she'd picked up Flight 93 late in the planning. Ordinarily, she liked working first class. It was a good fit with her gregarious ways.

"She just liked the one-on-one that you have with people up there," Phil Bradshaw said.

...

Phil Bradshaw was home in Greensboro, N.C., on the telephone, talking with a friend about the horrors on television. The line clicked. He asked his friend to hold.

It was Sandy Bradshaw, his wife, the flight attendant.

"Have you heard what's going on? My flight has been hijacked. My flight has been hijacked by three guys with knives," she said.

Who was flying the plane? Phil asked his wife.

"I don't know who's flying the plane or where we are," she said.

Sandy Bradshaw, who was trained never to spill hot coffee on a paying customer, slipped into the airplane's galley and began filling pitchers with boiling water.

...

"I see a river." Sandy Bradshaw couldn't name it. It suggested, though, that Flight 93 was somewhere over Western Pennsylvania.

"I just told her to be safe and come home soon," Phil Bradshaw said. "She said she hoped she would."

...

"Everyone's running to first class," Sandy Bradshaw told her husband. "I've got to go. Bye."
http://www.post-gazette.com/headlines/20011028flt93mainstoryp7.asp