Like everyone who lived through September 11, 2001, we remember the shock, the fear and the uncertainty of that day. But for our family, 9/11 became very personal. At the time, my wife Patty was a flight attendant for United Airlines. With only a few years of seniority, she often served as a fill-in crew member, flying wherever United needed her. The flight she worked most frequently was United Flight 93.
By providence, Patty was not flying that September. She was on disability leave recovering from an injury suffered during severe turbulence on a flight from Denver to Dallas.
When we learned that Flight 93 had been hijacked and crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers and crew fought back against the terrorists, it hit extraordinarily close to home. Reports of the violence aboard the hijacked aircraft were especially unsettling
for Patty. These were people doing the same job she did, on airplanes and routes that could easily have been hers.
For Patty, September 11 became a turning point. She decided she had experienced enough of life as a flight attendant and left the airline industry to begin a new career in real estate.
9/11 changed the course of another member of our family as well.
Patty’s oldest son, Peter, was a United Airlines captain living with his family in Benicia, California. He had previously flown combat in the Mideast as an A-10 pilot in the Air Force and remained in the reserves. Peter immediately recognized that the attacks would lead to a major contraction in commercial aviation. He decided to return to military flying, went to Phoenix to train on the F-16, and eventually joined his brother David at Homestead Air Reserve Base in Florida, where David was the squadron commander.
Both brothers would go on to fly several combat missions in the Middle East.
But there was another deep personal connection to Flight 93.
Tom Burnett
Tom Burnett was a colleague of mine in the medical device industry and a fellow parishioner in Danville, California. Tom was one of the passengers who fought back against the hijackers, sacrificing his life along with the others aboard Flight 93 and preventing the
terrorists from reaching their intended target, believed to have been the United States Capitol.
I remember our assistant pastor, Father Frank Colacicco, who was close to Tom, telling me something I have never forgotten. Tom often spoke about his belief that he had a higher purpose in life and that he was searching to understand what it was. On September 11, Tom found it.
He and his fellow passengers knew they might not survive what they were about to do. Yet they acted. Their courage almost certainly prevented an even greater tragedy in Washington D.C. and saved the lives of people they would never know.
I remember Tom’s funeral as though it were yesterday – the church packed with people who came to remember and honor him.
Those who lived through the weeks and months following 9/11 will also remember the uncertainty. What would be attacked next? Were our families safe? What should we do if another terrorist attack came?
Twenty-five years later, I think about how that single morning changed the direction of our own family: Patty leaving aviation; Peter returning to military flying; Peter and David eventually flying combat missions; and colleague and fellow parishioner, Tom Burnett, discovering in the most unimaginable circumstances the higher purpose he had spent so much of his life seeking.
September 11 reminds me that we rarely know when history will arrive at our own doorstep—or what it may ask of us when it does.
Tom Burnett and the other heroes of Flight 93 showed us what courage, sacrifice and service look like when that moment comes.
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