LUCKY ONES

Couple altered itinerary

By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff, 9/12/2001

eeks ago, Susan Yahn and Peter MacPherson of Wayland began planning their trip to the Hawaiian island of Maui.

She had booked the American Airlines morning flight to Los Angeles, and her husband was booked on a United Airlines flight. With three kids to take care of, they don't fly together, just in case.

Luckily for them, they changed their plans.

MacPherson decided to go Monday instead of yesterday and flew through San Francisco instead of Los Angeles.

And Yahn decided to take a later flight, so she could see her children off at the school bus stop.

Yahn, a 48-year-old real estate agent, was on the Logan Express bus from Framingham when cellphones began ringing all around her. There had been a airplane crash. In New York. The flight she was supposed to take.

''I just started to cry, and I cried all the way to the airport,'' Yahn said. ''I said, `I'm not going anywhere.'''

She never got off the bus - the airport was closed by the time she arrived anyway. On the way back, she frantically alerted her son and her husband that she had changed her flight.

''My son called me at 4:30 a.m. [Hawaii time], and I woke up to this tale that Tom Clancy in his wildest imagination couldn't figure out,'' MacPherson, a sales manager for a software company, said in a phone call from Maui. ''My wife really had a near miss. But she was a good mother who said, `I want to see my youngest off to school.' I'm just happy she's fine.''

Yahn said she felt as though both she and her husband narrowly escaped death.

''I've had three glasses of Scotch on the rocks, and I'm a wine drinker,'' she said. ''I feel very fortunate to be here. As Dorothy says, there's no place like home.''

Michael Paulson can be reached by e-mail at mpaulson@globe.com.

This story ran on page A6 of the Boston Globe on 9/12/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.