her boyfriend, computer software designer Joseph DeLuca, were going to California’s wine country to celebrate Linda’s forty-seventh birthday.
Donald and Jean Peterson, the only married couple on the plane, were, like Cashman and Driscoll, headed to Yosemite National Park, for a vacation with Jean’s parents and her brother. They originally held tickets for a later flight but arrived early at Newark and were given seats on Flight 93. A retired electric company executive, Don counseled men struggling with alcohol and drug dependency. Packed among his belongings was a Bible in which he’d tucked a handwritten list of the names of men he was praying for.
Donald Greene, an experienced pilot who worked as an executive in an aircraft instrument company, planned to join his brothers at Lake Tahoe for a hiking and biking trip. He’d packed his gear in a green duffel bag adorned with the words “Courageous Challenge.” Honor Elizabeth “Lizz” Wainio was a district manager in the retail arm of the Discovery Channel Stores, heading west on business. Andrew “Sonny” Garcia—who had worked as an air traffic controller years earlier with the California National Guard—was going home after a meeting for his industrial supply business. Richard Guadagno, a biologist who’d studied close-quarters fighting as part of his training as a federal law enforcement officer, was returning to his job as manager of the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Eureka, California, after celebrating his grandmother’s hundredth birthday.
At thirty-eight, expecting her first child, Lauren Grandcolas was an advertising executive and aspiring author, returning home to California from a memorial service for her grandmother. Retired bartender John Talignani was traveling west to support his family after the death of his stepson, who’d been killed in a car crash on his honeymoon. A cane and a mobility scooter hadn’t stopped Colleen Fraser from becoming a fierce advocate for the disabled and helping to draft the Americans with Disabilities Act. When Congress debated the bill, Colleen commandeered a paratransit bus and drove fellow activists to Washington to lobby senators. She was on hand when President George H. W. Bush signed the bill into law.
The thirty-seven passengers on Flight 93 would be cared for by CeeCee Lyles and four others: chief flight attendant Deborah Welsh, who loved exotic places and donated extra airline meals to homeless people in her Manhattan neighborhood; Lorraine Bay, an easygoing veteran of thirty-seven years in the sky who mentored younger flight attendants; Sandra Bradshaw, who’d cut back on her schedule to spend more time with her two toddlers, her stepdaughter, and her husband, Phil, a pilot for US Airways; and Wanda Green, who served as a deacon in her church, was a single mother to her daughter and son, and nearly thirty years earlier had become one of United’s first African American flight attendants.
Pilot Jason Dahl learned to fly at thirteen and rose swiftly at United to become a “standards” pilot who trained and tested his fellow pilots. When his son Matt’s sixth-grade class went to Washington, D.C., Jason arranged to fly the plane, to make sure they arrived safely. Whenever he flew, Jason carried a small box of rocks, a treasured keepsake from Matt. Jason planned to be home in Colorado on Friday for his wedding anniversary. He had a cascade of surprises planned for his wife, Sandy, a United flight attendant, starting with a baby grand piano programmed with their wedding song. He’d also arranged a manicure, a pedicure, and massage; after that, he planned to prepare a gourmet dinner for Sandy and sixteen of their friends. Then they’d fly to London.
Jason had never flown with his copilot, LeRoy Homer Jr., but they were cut from the same cloth. LeRoy had filled his boyhood bedroom with model planes and started flying lessons at fifteen. He had graduated from the Air Force Academy, served in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, and flown humanitarian missions in Somalia. Thirty-six, soft-spoken and charming, LeRoy had served as a major in the U.S. Air Force Reserves. He traveled regularly with his wife, Melodie, a nurse he’d met through mutual friends, but they’d scaled back their adventures since the birth of their daughter, Laurel, eleven months earlier. Inscribed inside his wedding band was part of a Bible verse on life’s blessings: faith, hope, and love. The inscription was the next line, “And the greatest of these is love.”
SEATED IN FIRST class, four men from the Middle East—three from Saudi Arabia and one from Lebanon—had murder and martyrdom in mind. All four had checked out of the Newark airport’s Days Inn that morning and had passed through security without incident. The CAPPS security system selected one, Ahmed al-Haznawi, for additional screening. Following the same steps as the screeners at Logan and Dulles airports, Newark’s security staff checked his suitcase for explosives, didn’t find any, and held it off the flight until Haznawi boarded.
Ziad Jarrah, the onetime Lebanese disco habitué who became part of Atta’s extremist Hamburg crew and trained as a pilot, sat in seat 1B, closest to the cockpit.
Before boarding the plane, Jarrah made five telephone calls to Lebanon, one to France, and one to his girlfriend, Aysel Sengün, in Germany, to whom he’d sent a farewell letter and a package of mementos a day earlier. She was in the hospital after having her tonsils removed. The connection was clear, the conversation banal. Sengün heard no noises in the background, and she detected nothing strange or suspicious about the call. He asked how she was doing, then told her, “I love you.”
Sengün asked, “What’s up?” Jarrah said “I love you” again, then hung up.
Ahmed al-Haznawi sat in the last row of first class, in seat 6B, directly behind glassware importer and consultant Mickey Rothenberg. Saeed al-Ghamdi and Ahmed al-Nami sat in 3D and 3C. At least one of the four men possessed the terrorist instruction sheet that began with “The Last Night,” tucked into either his carry-on or his checked luggage. Among the commands for the last phase, once they boarded the plane, were the following:
Pray that you and all your brothers will conquer, win, and hit the target without fear. Ask Allah to bless you with martyrdom, and welcome it with planning, patience, and care… .
When the storming begins, strike like heroes who are determined not to return to this world. Glorify [Allah—that is, cry “Allah is Great”], because this cry will strike terror in the hearts of the infidels. He said, “Strike above the necks. Strike all mortals.” And know that paradise has been adorned for you with the sweetest things. The nymphs, wearing their finest, are calling out to you, “Come hither, followers of Allah!”
If the group of terrorists on United Flight 93 tried to follow the pattern of their collaborators aboard Flights 11, 175, and 77, they were clearly one hijacker short. A Saudi man who authorities later suspected was supposed to have been the twentieth hijacker had landed a month earlier at Florida’s Orlando International Airport, arriving on a flight from London. He landed with no return ticket or hotel reservations, carried $2,800 in cash and no credit cards, spoke no English, and claimed he didn’t know his next destination after he intended to spend six days in the United States. He grew angry when questioned by an alert immigrations inspector named José E. Melendez-Perez, who suspected that the man was trying to immigrate illegally. Melendez-Perez thought the Saudi fit the profile of a “hit man.” He consulted with supervisors, then forced the man onto a flight to Dubai, via London.
Waiting in vain that day at the Orlando airport was Mohamed Atta.
AT 8:00 A.M., Flight 93’s scheduled departure time, the 757 pushed back from the Newark gate, but it didn’t get far. It fell into a tarmac conga line with perhaps fifteen other planes, stopping and starting, slowly taxiing toward the runway. Passengers in first class drank juice, while those in coach went thirsty. Ten, twenty, forty minutes crawled past.
A few seconds before 8:42 a.m., pilots Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr. heard the command from the tower: “United Ninety-Three … cleared for takeoff.”
Nearly a half hour had elapsed since the start of the hijacking of American Flight 11. Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney had already called American Airlines offices in North Carolina and Boston and had provided information about the hijackers’ identities and tactics. Major Kevin Nasypany’s team at NEADS had been notified about Flight 11 five minutes earlier. The F-15s at Otis Air Force Base had been ordered to battle stations less than a minute before. The pilots of United Flight 175 had just notified air traffic control about a strange radio transmission