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Thursday, September 13, 2001
Flight 175: A chilling date with fiery death
Caller says men stabbed flight staff
By William Glaberson
New York Times News Service
   NEW YORK - Of the four, the crash of Flight 175 seemed, in some ways, the most chillingly deliberate.
   While the attention of the world was riveted on the already damaged north tower of the World Trade Center, it was United's Flight 175 that plowed into the south tower with a homicidal theatricality its planners must have known would be broadcast everywhere.
   As details began to emerge on Wednesday, the story of Flight 175's 50-minute final flight terrified the friends and family members left behind as much for what they did not know as for what they did.
   "There is heartwrenching empathy for what we assume they went through," said Andrew Freedman, a friend, speaking for the family of Ruth Clifford McCourt, a New London, Conn., woman who died on Flight 175 along with her 4-year-old daughter, Juliana.
   At Logan International Airport in Boston, Flight 175 took off on time with just 56 passengers in the big Boeing 767. It left the gate at 7:58. Its wheels were in the air by 8:15. Victor J. Saracini, an experienced 50-year-old pilot who had been a Navy flier, was at the controls.
   Between takeoff and 9:05, the moment of impact, a few things are known. The flight was on course heading southwest toward Los Angeles until 8:47, when, west of the George Washington Bridge over New Jersey, it made a sharp left turn. Twelve minutes later, it made another sharp left, to settle on a course leading directly to the south tower.
   At some point, men armed with knives stabbed flight attendants, a cell phone caller from the plane said in several short calls to his father in Connecticut. Relatives of the caller, Peter Hanson, a 32-year-old software executive from Groton, told reporters that the hijackers seemed to be trying to force the crew to open the cockpit doors.
   "The plane," he said, "is going down." He was traveling with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter.
   Flight 175, like each of the planes that were used as weapons on Tuesday, included people traveling for many reasons. McCourt and her daughter were heading to a spiritual center in California, and, perhaps, to Disneyland.
   There were businessmen and tourists. One of the passengers, Al Marchand, was an off-duty flight attendant who was a retired New Mexico police lieutenant.
   Two scouts from the Los Angeles Kings hockey team were passengers - Mark Bavis, 31, who had played on Boston University's team with his twin brother Michael, and Garnet Bailey, who was known as Ace, a former professional player who had befriended Wayne Gretzky on the Edmonton Oilers. The hockey scouts were headed toward the Kings' training camp in El Segundo.
   Some of the passengers had ended up on the flight by chance. Others had planned carefully. But, still, in life as it was until Tuesday anyway, details of airlines and flight numbers were treated as incidental, not significant enough even for loved ones to dwell upon in advance.
   On Wednesday, Alasdair Drysdale, the chairman of the geography department at the University of New Hampshire, described how, late on the day of the crashes, he had talked with the wife of a colleague, Robert LeBlanc, who recently retired from the university and had been on his way to an academic conference in Los Angeles.
   LeBlanc, Drysdale said, was unsure of her husband's precise travel arrangements and still hoped that he had been on some other plane. But there it was in LeBlanc's daily diary at the office. "It said: '8 o'clock, leave Boston,'" Drysdale said.

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