Victor Saracini: 'Consummate pilot' killed on 9/11

It was early Sunday morning - 4 a.m. - and Victor Saracini munched an English muffin as his wife, Ellen, kept him company in their Bucks County kitchen before he headed off to work.

Labor Day had just passed, and with it a glorious summer at the Jersey Shore.

"It was ordinary conversation, food shopping, the kids back in school, remodeling," Ellen Saracini recalled.

Then Victor Saracini drove off to Newark, N.J. He never came home again.

At 9:03 a.m. Sunday, a bell will ring in Lower Makefield not far from the Saracini home, marking the moment 10 years ago that his United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. The bell will ring in the Garden of Reflection - Pennsylvania's official memorial to the 2,973 victims of Sept. 11 - which Ellen Saracini helped build.

More than 50 victims were from the Philadelphia area, including 18 from Bucks County, hit hardest by the attacks.

As one of the four pilots of the commercial jets hijacked that day, Victor Saracini has been a face of the victims. And his wife has spoken for surviving relatives, raising money and joining lawsuits to freeze the terrorists' assets.

She is also a pilot - that's how they met at Louisiana Tech University in 1981. The Atlantic City boy was working on his master's degree and teaching flight classes; the Long Island girl was majoring in aviation.

A pilot's job for Victor Saracini brought them to the Philadelphia area, and in 1985 the former Navy pilot started working for United Airlines.

"He liked to travel with his guitar," Ellen Saracini said, the memory prompting a smile. "He was recognized in airports with his guitar slung over his shoulder."

A perk was the discounted plane tickets that enabled the family to travel the world - to take their "adventures."

"Those priceless moments were a big part of Victor," Ellen Saracini said. "He loved his daughters. He wanted to teach them everything about life - how to present yourself, how to act in the world."

The girls, young women now, still travel. Kirsten Saracini spent 2½ months in Europe studying organic farming before starting work on her master's degree this semester at Columbia University. Brielle Saracini, a junior at Boston College, jetted to Dublin, Ireland, last week for a semester's study program.

"They're like Victor," Ellen Saracini said while sitting on a bench bearing his name in the Garden of Reflection. "They have a thirst for knowledge."

When Victor Saracini, 51, drove off early Sept. 9, he was headed to Newark and ultimately to Boston for a Tuesday flight to Los Angeles.

He called home from Boston that day and talked to the girls, Ellen Saracini, 52, said. "They talked about school, teachers, projects, and whether they ate their vegetables."

He called Monday night, after the girls had gone to bed. He and his wife talked about "the chlorine in the pool, normal things," she said. "You never think it will be the last time you'll talk."

Early the next morning, as Victor Saracini prepared for United Airlines Flight 175, two men from the United Arab Emirates and three from Saudi Arabia got ready as well.

The leader of the five, Marwan al-Shehhi, had been in the United States for more than 15 months, taking flight classes, getting certified to fly commercial jets, and taking transcontinental surveillance flights, according to the 9/11 Commission report. The other four had arrived that summer to carry out a mission hatched in 1996.

As the five terrorists and 51 other passengers boarded United Flight 175, Saracini, First Officer Michael Horrocks, and seven flight attendants readied the Boeing 767 for its scheduled 7:58 a.m. departure from Logan International Airport.

The plane took off at 8:14 a.m., just as hijackers took control of American Airlines Flight 11. About 20 minutes into the flight, air-traffic controllers asked the United flight crew to look for Flight 11, which they saw about 2,000 feet below their 31,000-foot cruising altitude.

Then Saracini reported: "We heard a suspicious transmission [from another aircraft] on our departure out of Boston - like someone keyed the mike and said everyone stay in your seats. . . . Did you copy that?"

It was his last message.

The hijackers on his jet attacked between 8:42 a.m. and 8:46 a.m., using knives, Mace, and the threat of a bomb - much as the Flight 11 terrorists had.

Saracini and Horrocks were killed, a flight attendant on the plane reported in a call to a United worker in San Francisco.

"They both had military backgrounds," Ellen says. "Neither one would have wanted to give up the airplane. He was the consummate pilot. Unfortunately, he never came home."

At 9:03 a.m., as passengers talked about storming the cockpit, al-Shehhi steered the jet at 587 m.p.h. into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

And millions of television viewers, shocked by the fiery impact, realized that the crash of American Flight 11 into the North Tower minutes earlier had been no accident.

Ellen Saracini was at Brielle's elementary school that morning to train parents to make calls checking on absent students.

As arriving volunteers brought news of a plane crash, she canceled the training and headed home.

She left Brielle, 10, at the school and Kirsten, 13, at her middle school - she had no idea her husband had been involved with the crashes in New York, she said.

Within about an hour, a friend and fellow United pilot delivered the news before it was announced on TV.

A week later, more than 1,000 relatives, friends, and neighbors filled St. Andrew Roman Catholic Church in Newtown.

Instead of a casket, cloth-draped tables in front of the altar displayed reminders of Victor Saracini: A worn Navy flight jacket, his guitar, a blurry photo of him holding his smiling daughters.

Within a year, Ellen Saracini and several other local women who had lost husbands or sons dedicated themselves to erecting a memorial that would ensure the community and the world would never forget the events and the victims of Sept. 11.

Last week at the Garden of Reflection, a Wall of Remembrance was made available for visitors to write messages and leave mementos.

Ellen Saracini was one of the first to inscribe her message, which concludes:

Today I unburden my heart, open it and allow the joy of celebration to embrace me.

The celebration of the lives that this Garden of Reflection has enabled to be remembered.

And a friend of Victor Saracini's wrote:

Drive fast

Take chances

God bless you Vic