09/29/2026
He graduated from UMass Lowell in 1972 with a degree in nuclear engineering. His family had farmed the same 150 acres in Dracut, Massachusetts, for four generations already.
John Ogonowski joined the Air Force instead of chasing either path exclusively.
He flew transport missions in Vietnam, sometimes returning with the remains of fallen soldiers aboard his aircraft.
He left the Air Force as a Captain and joined American Airlines in 1978, becoming a senior captain by 1989.
Twelve days a month, he traded his farm boots for a captain's uniform. The other days, he went back to the soil.
Ogonowski married Peggy, a flight attendant, in 1983. They raised three daughters — Laura, Caroline, and Mary Katherine — on White Gate Farm.
In 1998, he helped establish the Dracut Land Trust to protect local farmland from development, with a bumper sticker on his truck that read: "There is no farming without farmers."
That same year, the Farm Service Agency approached him looking for open agricultural land for Southeast Asian refugees resettling in nearby Lowell.
Here's what almost nobody watching a busy commercial airline pilot juggle two demanding schedules would have expected: he took on a third responsibility entirely, teaching immigrant farmers who'd never grown crops in a New England climate before.
Why would a pilot flying jumbo jets twelve days a month spend his remaining time building irrigation systems and greenhouses for strangers?
The answer, he said himself, traced back to what he'd seen in Vietnam.
He leased small plots of his farm to Cambodian refugee families, who grew bok choy, lemongrass, water spinach, and other vegetables from home.
"These guys are putting more care and attention into their one acre than most Yankee farmers put into their entire 100 acres," he told the Boston Globe in 1999.
Their produce eventually reached Boston's high-end restaurants, and the program grew into what became known as the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, federal officials were scheduled to visit the farm that same day to inspect the refugee farmers' progress.
Ogonowski made his usual drive to Logan Airport instead, to fly as captain of American Airlines Flight 11 to Los Angeles.
At 8:14 a.m., the flight's last routine radio communication was acknowledged. Minutes later, the aircraft was hijacked.
He was 50 years old.
His daughter Laura, 16 at the time, was pulled out of class that morning and told her father was gone.
His brother, Jim Ogonowski, ensured the farmland was preserved as protected open space afterward, following what John had already been working toward through the land trust.
The New Entry Sustainable Farming Project he helped start continues to operate today, still training immigrant and refugee farmers across Massachusetts.
The federal officials scheduled to inspect his farmers' work that afternoon arrived to find out why their host wasn't there. The program he'd built kept running anyway.
John Ogonowski spent his final years teaching refugee families to farm land he didn't have to share with anyone, and never lived to see the visit meant to recognize that work.
Across more than 20 years since his death, the farming program he helped start remains one of the more overlooked legacies connected to that day — one still training new farmers in Massachusetts today.
Right now, every fall, farmers in Dracut still hold a food drive in his name, continuing the same kind of quiet giving he practiced before anyone was watching.
