United Airlines Flight 93 · Newark, 08:42 — Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, 10:03:11 A Boeing 757-222, registration N591UA, scheduled out of Newark at 08:00 for San Francisco. It pushed back at 08:01 and then joined the ordinary morning queue at one of the busiest airports in the country, and did not get airborne until 08:42 — forty-two minutes late, with 44 people aboard. Four of them had boarded to take it, one fewer than each of the other three flights. Every consequence of that delay runs one way. By the time United 93 was at cruising altitude, the attack was already public. It reached thirty-five thousand feet at 09:02, one minute before United 175 struck the South Tower. At 09:24 a United dispatcher, acting on his own initiative, sent a text message to the cockpit printers of his airborne aircraft: "Beware any cockpit intrusion. Two a/c hit World Trade Center." Captain Jason Dahl acknowledged it at 09:26 — "Confirmed" — and asked what it meant. Two minutes later they came through the door. At 09:28:17 Cleveland Center heard a mayday, then a struggle, then a voice telling the cabin there was a bomb aboard and to remain seated. The aircraft dropped seven hundred feet, then climbed to forty thousand seven hundred. At 09:35 the autopilot was set on an easterly heading, and at 09:55 the hijacker at the controls dialled in the navigation frequency for Reagan National Airport. The target was Washington: the Commission judged it most likely the Capitol. And then the delay paid. From the seat-back telephones and two mobiles, the passengers and crew reached the ground — wives, husbands, parents, a switchboard operator — and what came back was not the ordinary answer. They were told about the two towers, and about the Pentagon. At least ten passengers and two crew got calls out. They understood that this aircraft was not going to land anywhere. They took a vote. The cockpit voice recorder has what followed: at 09:57 the sound of the assault beginning, a galley cart being driven at the cockpit door, shouting in English and in Arabic, and the hijacker at the controls rolling the aircraft hard left and right and pitching it up and down to knock them off their feet. It did not work. At 10:02 a hijacker asks whether to put it down; the answer is yes. The recording ends with the control wheel pushed hard forward. United 93 hit a reclaimed strip-mine field in Stonycreek Township, near Shanksville, at 10:03:11 — inverted, in a forty-degree dive, at about 563 miles an hour. Everyone aboard was killed. Nobody on the ground was hurt. It was 125 miles from the Capitol, about twenty minutes' flying. No fighter had been positioned to stop it, and the shoot-down authority the Vice President issued did not reach the pilots who were airborne until after it was down. The only thing that stopped United 93 was the people on it. Why it matters: it is the one of the four that did not reach what it was aimed at, and the reason is a forty-two minute delay at Newark and what forty of the people caught in it decided to do with the time it bought them. #September11 #Flight93 #UnitedAirlines93 #Shanksville #SomersetCounty - @cunning.conquests