They were late, United Airlines Flight 93 had been scheduled to take off at 8:01am. Now it was sitting on the tarmac, waiting for clearance to depart for San Francisco. Two days earlier, a fire had started at one of the sites under new construction, briefly closing the airport. Flights already delayed by the construction around an overtaxed airport had backed up even further. Flight 93 passengers had walked down the concourse of Terminal A, where they breezed past the security gate, then walked the 100 yards to a long circular hallway from which the boarding ramps jutted out like spokes. The plane pulled away from the gate on time. Then it sat. It was a 110 foot long space that different people from different worlds were meant to share for the six hour flight across a continent filled with immigrants and their descendants.
Hilda Marcin, 79, took an isle seat in row 17. A retired special education teacher's aide, she was moving to Danville, California to live with her daughter's family. Her old daughter had driven her to the airport, waited with her until 7:30 then saw her mother off to a new life.
Thomas Burnett, 38, had been living in planes for the preceding six days. A senior vice president and chief operating officer for a medical research company in San Ramon, CA, he had made it home at 4:00pm for dinner, left at 11:00pm that night, stopped in Minnesota, then spent the weekend moving deer stands around on land he owned in Wisconsin. He planned to go back in November to hunt deer.
Christine Snyder's husband of two months was waiting for her back in Kailua, Hawaii where she worked as an arborist, planting trees and landscaping public places, bringing human order to a natural paradise. On the drive to the airport she marveled at the billboards, wires, transmission lines, industrial plants, things she didn't see back home.
Also on board were found men from an entirely different world. The leader had been born in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. Out wardly, it would have been hard to know the turmoil that boiled inside him. Find ways to blend in with your opponent and contol him, they were told. They blended in, into a seat in first class.
United Flight 93 groaned down Runway 4-Left, pulled up and banked to the west. From the right side of the plane, passengers would have seen lower Manhattan where, on overcast days, the only thing poking above the clouds were the twin pillars of the World Trade Center. On this day, everything was clear.
No one could have know that, in the skies over Pennsylvania, the worlds of Hilda, Marcin, of Thomas Burnett, of Christine Snyder, of Ziad Jarrah, would meet in a cataclysm of cool rage and desperate coutage, as passengers trid to take back their airplance, all the time unaware that an Air Force jet, scrambled from a base in Virginia was closing in with orders to shoot the plane down before it got to Washington, DC.