Airline ops manager charged in sex sting

Airline ops manager charged in sex sting

An American Airlines operations manager who was among the few people to learn of the first 9/11 hijacking before the jet struck the World Trade Centre has been arrested in an online child-sex sting.

Ray Howland is charged with arranging a sexual encounter with a woman and a 10-year-old girl and sent explicit messages after posting online that he was “looking for a family or a couple of girls” for sex while in town on business.

Howland, 55, of Arlington, Texas, was actually communicating with an undercover agent from the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office, prosecutors said.

He was arrested on Friday in downtown Pittsburgh and charged with criminal attempt to commit rape of a child, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and other offences.

He remained jailed on $US150,000 ($A195,312) bail pending a July 7 preliminary hearing.

As a front-line supervisor at American’s system operations control centre in Fort Worth, Texas, Howland received some of the first panicked calls from employees at Logan International Airport in Boston reporting the hijacking of Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. The calls are mentioned in the notes section of the 9/11 Commission report.

Transcripts show Howland telling Logan employees to keep the hijacking to themselves minutes before the Los Angeles-bound Boeing 767 hit the World Trade Centre’s North Tower.

“We don’t want this getting out,” Howland says, according to the transcripts.

“We’re aware of the situation. We’re dealing with it right now. So let us deal with it.”

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