Thomas Burnett was going home after a busy few days on the road. He settled into his seat on United Flight 93. It was bound for San Francisco from Newark, N.J., Tuesday morning.
Jeremy Glick was to have flown out Monday on a business trip. But a freak fire at a construction site near the airport stalled traffic and he missed his flight. Now, he, too, was aboard Flight 93 Tuesday morning.
Mark Bingham, a 6'5' public relations executive, was assigned seat 4D in the first class section of the Boeing 757.
The plane was freshly loaded with more than 11,000 gallons of jet fuel for the cross-country flight.
Burnett, Glick, Bingham and 35 other passengers aboard the jet settled in for what was to be a six-hour flight on a beautiful morning.
Instead, the doomed plane crashed beside a strip mine in western Pennsylvania, one of four jets hijacked during the terrible hours of Tuesday morning in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.
Two of the hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center and the third into the side of the Pentagon in Washington. Thousands were injured and an untold number died.
But with Flight 93, the final jet to crash Tuesday morning, there were no lives lost on the ground. Some people believe that may have been the legacy of passengers like Burnett, Glick and Bingham.
It was 90 minutes after takeoff, and Flight 93 was just outside Cleveland when radar detected the plane veering sharply south. The passengers would have been finishing breakfast right about then, the first of two meals served on the flight.
As the jet turned off its westerly course, it climbed from 36,000 feet to 40,700 feet. Its air speed slowed to 400 miles an hour.
In San Ramon, Calif., a bedroom community in the Bay Area, it was just after 6 a.m. PDT Deena Burnett was feeding her three children breakfast when the phone rang. She had turned on television and was watching the scenes of death and destruction being replayed from the World Trade Center.
On the other end of the line was her husband, Tom.
'Are you OK'? she asked nonchalantly.
'No,' came the reply.
Her heart sank. Then she heard him say the other words: His plane had been hijacked.
'I'm on the airplane. They've already knifed a guy. They're saying they have a bomb. Call the authorities.'
The line went dead.
Shaking, Deena Burnett fought her panic. But she dialed 911 and they put her in touch with the FBI.
Burnett wasn't alone in calling out.
Glick, too, called his wife, who set up a three-way connection with the emergency dispatch center in Newburgh, N.Y.
Over the course of the next few minutes, Glick whispered that three men had taken over the plane. The men had knives. They had a large red box they claimed was a bomb.
In Pennsylvania, an emergency dispatcher in Westmoreland County took yet another call from the plane.
The time was 9:58 a.m. EDT and this caller said his flight was being hijacked.
Over the course of the next 45 minutes, Burnett called home three more times. By the third call, she knew her husband was trying to formulate a plan.
On the fourth, he told her a group of passengers had voted and were going to try to do something.
During his phone call, Glick told his wife that the people seated around him were going to stop the hijackers. 'We're going to rush the hijackers,' he told her. Those were his last words. Then he hung up.
What happened next inside the airplane cabin can only be guessed.
The plane began losing altitude rapidly as it passed over Pennsylvania coal country.
The last radar hit came at 10:03 a.m. It had crashed.
