Barbara Olson postponed her flight by one day to celebrate her husband’s birthday. That decision put her on the plane that killed her.
On September 11, 2001, the 45-year-old conservative television personality boarded American Airlines Flight 77 at Washington Dulles International Airport. She was headed to Los Angeles to appear on Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect.” The flight was hijacked roughly 30 minutes after takeoff and deliberately crashed into the western side of the Pentagon, killing all 59 passengers and crew aboard, along with 125 people inside the building.
Olson had originally planned to travel on September 10. She pushed the trip back one day so she could spend her husband’s birthday with him. His birthday was September 11.
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Just two days before the attack, she made what turned out to be her final television appearance, joining C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” on September 9, 2001. Host Peter Slen noted that Washingtonian magazine had recently named her among “the 100 most powerful women” in Washington, a list that also included Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton. When asked what that kind of influence actually meant, Olson was characteristically quick and self-deprecating.
“I get up really early, I go home really late. Does that mean influence? I guess I know people like Bill Press,” she said with a smile.
As originally reported, Olson had become a fixture on cable news over three years, appearing regularly on “Larry King Live” and Maher’s show. Before her television career, she served as chief investigative counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives and worked at a Washington law firm with ties to lobbying.
Amid the chaos aboard Flight 77, Olson managed to call her husband, Theodore Olson, who was serving as solicitor general under President George W. Bush. She was one of only two people on the plane known to have reached loved ones, according to the 9/11 Commission.
“To this day, I don’t know how in the world she managed to do it,” Theodore Olson told Fox News in 2021.
He said she told him the hijackers had used knives and box cutters and had herded passengers to the back of the plane. She also told him the terrorists did not know she had a phone. The two calls came somewhere between 9:16 a.m. and 9:26 a.m. Both reassured the other that she would be okay.
“She said, ‘I love you.’ She sounded very, very calm,” he recalled.
Theodore Olson quickly alerted the FBI and the Justice Department about the hijacking. Shortly after, smoke began rising from the Pentagon on live television.
“I knew in my heart that it was her flight,” he said.
Because Olson was so widely recognized, her face was among the first shown on television as America began searching for answers.
“Barbara’s was the first face that went up on television screens to the American people because people knew who Barbara was,” her husband said.
She was 45 years old.
