Credit union association employee almost took hijacked plane

WASHINGTON - One year after hijackers took over and plunged American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, Tracy Reynolds manages conference services at ASET International, a firm that provides language translation for events in the Washington D.C. area. But on the day of the attack Reynolds was in the air on a flight from Washington's National Airport to Orange County's John Wayne International, by way of a Chicago connection. As then NASCUS' manager of corporate relations, Reynolds had reserved a seat on the doomed flight, but had changed her mind a few weeks before. "What it really comes down to is that I am really not a morning person," Reynolds explained. NASCUS' four-day annual conference began in Dana Point, California, about an hour south of L.A. on the 13th and Reynolds had wanted to spend some time in the LA area after the event. At first it had seemed more convenient to fly into LA and rent a car to drive down to the conference site. "But the more I thought about it the more it made sense just to fly out of National which is much closer to my home and into John Wayne since that is so much closer to the site," she said. So she had cancelled her reservation on flight 77. It was only later, at her parent's house in Chicago that she realized that she had once been reserved onto the plane that had been crashed. "It really shook me up," she said. "Such seemingly little decisions can mean so much," she added.