How many people were aboard American Airlines Flight 77 and what were the crew roles and ages?
Executive summary
Contemporary official and memorial sources report that American Airlines Flight 77 carried a six‑member crew and 58 passengers (including five hijackers) for a total of 64 people aboard at departure, but several reputable references present alternative passenger tallies that have persisted in public record [1] [2] [3]. The names, roles and ages of the six-member crew are consistently reported in multiple accounts: Captain Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III , First Officer David M. Charlebois , purser Renee May and flight attendants Michele Heidenberger , Jennifer Lewis and Kenneth Lewis [4] [5].
1. Total number aboard — the headline figures and the memorial’s position
The Pentagon Memorial’s Frequently Asked Questions and related Pentagon material state that when Flight 77 lifted at 8:20 a.m. it carried 64 people: a crew of six and 58 passengers, a count that explicitly includes the five hijackers among those 58 passengers [1]. That same 64‑person total — six crew plus 58 passengers — appears in several summaries and popular reconstructions of the flight’s manifest [6] [1].
2. Who the crew were — roles, names and ages listed in multiple sources
Contemporaneous reporting and later compilations list the flight deck and cabin crew by name and age: Captain Charles Burlingame, 51, a former U.S. Navy pilot and Naval Academy graduate; First Officer David Charlebois, 39; purser Renee A. May, 39; and flight attendants Michele Heidenberger, 57, Jennifer Lewis, 38, and Kenneth Lewis, 49 [4] [5]. These names and ages are repeated in mainstream outlets’ victim lists and in archival resources that compiled the passenger and crew manifests shortly after the attacks [7] [8].
3. Conflicting passenger counts in the historical record
Not all authoritative sources present the same passenger total. The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s overview reports the crash killed six crew members and 53 passengers from the aircraft, yielding a different arithmetic and implying varying inclusion/exclusion of the hijackers in passenger counts [2]. The Pentagon Memorial homepage at times presents the human toll as “59 passengers aboard” alongside 125 Pentagon victims, language that can be interpreted differently depending on whether the hijackers are counted among passengers [3]. These differences have led to persistent confusion in public references.
4. Why these discrepancies exist — inclusion of hijackers and editorial framing
The variance in passenger totals is traceable in the sources to differing editorial choices about whether to count the five hijackers among “passengers” and to whether casualty tallies presented by memorials exclude the attackers when describing victims; some pages state totals “not including the hijackers,” while others give an absolute headcount on the aircraft at takeoff [1] [2] [3]. The available reporting does not provide a single, universally cited manifest document in these excerpts to reconcile every public total, so the divergence persists across reputable outlets and memorial statements [2] [1].
5. Bottom line and reporting limits
The clearest, directly stated count from the Pentagon’s own FAQ — cited by the official memorial — records 64 people aboard at departure (six crew and 58 passengers, the latter number including the five hijackers) and is therefore the most explicit consolidated figure in the provided reporting [1]. Multiple other reputable sources corroborate the six‑member crew and the exact crew names and ages [4] [5], but public references differ on passenger totals depending on whether the hijackers are included, and the sources provided here do not contain a single, unambiguous government manifest document that resolves every variant [2] [3] [1].