Little Silver couple Rita and James Mastriani were married Sept. 8, 2001. They have spent 25 years together and
remember 9/11 as the day they were supposed to start their honeymoon on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. COURTESY JAMES MASTRIANI
By Sunayana Prabhu
LITTLE SILVER – James Mastriani can rattle off an endless list of clichés about how every day is a gift. And he believes each one, not because of what he lived through, but because of what he didn’t.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the Little Silver resident and his wife of three days, Rita, were originally booked on United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco for their honeymoon to Hawaii. A simple decision to switch to an earlier flight saved their lives and set the course for how the couple has tried to honor those who never came home.
Passengers on Flight 93 managed to take control of the flight from hijackers, preventing a strike on another U.S. target, but the plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all on board.
“I still get the chills,” Mastriani said as he recalled the sequence of events leading to that day.
Mastriani, then a young attorney at a large Manhattan law firm, had booked their honeymoon trip to Maui. They were to fly from Newark to Hawaii with a layover in San Francisco. But something about the itinerary bothered him. They only had about 20 to 30 minutes to make their connection in San Francisco, so Mastriani decided to make a last-minute switch.
“Flight 93 was a 7:55 a.m. flight, and there was a 7:05 a.m. flight. So, on my own, I went and changed the flight. I didn’t think twice about it,” Mastriani said.
On 9/11, the couple boarded the 7:05 a.m. flight.
“There wasn’t Wi-Fi on airplanes then, or live television,” he said. “We went up in the air, and in two hours, the world had changed.”
Mid-air, the screens went dark, Mastriani said, and the pilot announced that the entire United fleet had been grounded due to a national emergency. The plane landed in Lincoln, Nebraska. Military jets sat on the tarmac with engines running and air marshals came aboard, Mastriani said.
Only later did they understand why. “The flight we had left behind, United Flight 93 – same airline, same gate, same route – had been hijacked,” he recalled.
The airport in Lincoln was crowded with stranded passengers. James and Rita rented a car, checked into the closest Embassy Suites and tried to process what had happened. The couple eventually drove to Aspen, Colorado, and spent several days there. They took the “long way” back home to New York via Amtrak, Mastriani said, witnessing a “country that had put flags on barns and fences.”
When they reached New York, smoke was still rising from downtown. At the time, the Mastrianis lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “You could smell the smoke. You could see it, and you could smell it from our apartment,” he said.
James’ office was in Times Square with a clear view of where the World Trade Center had stood. Almost immediately after 9/11, Mastriani said, he began volunteering and providing pro bono work for small businesses in Lower Manhattan “to help them get grants and fundraise.”
In time, he realized he no longer wanted to build a life in the city.
“I was done with New York City,” he said.
The couple moved to Little Silver in 2004, where they have lived ever since.
HONORING FLIGHT CREWS
For Rita, the transformation took a longer, unexpected turn. She joined American Airlines in 2018 as a flight attendant.
“She was a dental assistant,” James said. “She became a flight attendant for American Airlines, and wears a badge that honors Betty Ong and some of the other brave flight attendants on American Airlines Flight 11.”
Flight 11 was the plane that struck the North Tower. The 9/11 Memorial describes Betty Ann Ong as “the first siren of alarm notifying authorities that the country was under attack.” Thirty-six pilots and crew members aboard the four flights hijacked on 9/11 – American Airlines Flight 11, American Airlines Flight 77, United Airlines Flight 93, and United Airlines Flight 175 – died that day. Their story is integral to the his- tory of Sept. 11 and is honored during Aviation Week ever year by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.
“We feel connected to Flight 93 for obvious reasons but we feel connected to all of those flight attendants and crew members and captains and co-captains, first officers, through her job,” James said.
SURVIVOR’S GUILT
The full weight of that morning has never left Mastriani, as it hasn’t many others.
“You think about being there and what you would have done, and could you have been so brave,” he said of the passengers on Flight 93. “It just sat with me for so long.”
It wasn’t until the 15-year anniversary of 9/11 that Mastriani spoke about his experience. “In some ways I feel guilty,” he said. “Because you could find people in Little Silver or Fair Haven or Rumson who grew up without a father, and my story seems minimal or insignificant compared to that.”
He is sharing his story now for remembrance.
“I want to tell it to honor those on Flight 93, those in the World Trade Center, the first responders, the firefighters, the policemen, the Port Authority workers. I want to tell the story to honor those who lost everything and their families and friends,” Mastriani said.
Life is still “difficult and complicated,” but his perspective has shifted, he said.
And he circles back to the acknowledged clichés he applies to life. “I’m not waiting until retirement to do things that I want to do now because every day of life is a gift, and that gift is precious.”
This article originally appeared in the September 10-16, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.
