spacetoday.net: Former military astronaut among victims of terrorist attack

Posted: Sun, Sep 16, 2001, 2:01 PM ET (1801 GMT)
A retired Air Force officer who had trained to be an astronaut was among those killed Tuesday in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Charles "Chuck" Jones was one of the passengers of American Airlines flight 11, a Boston to Los Angeles flight that was hijacked and crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Jones joined the Air Force's Manned Spaceflight Engineer (MSE) program in 1982 and had been assigned to a military shuttle mission, STS-71L, originally scheduled for launch in 1987. That mission was cancelled in the wake of the Challenger accident, however, and Jones left the MSE program for other Air Force assignments. He retired from the Air Force in 1999 and joined BAE Systems facility in Hudson, New Hampshire as a program manager; he was traveling on business in that capacity Tuesday.