Flight 93's passenger boarding method in conflict

It's been reported that the passengers on Flight 93 had boarded the plane via the boarding ramp/jetway at Newark Airport:

Flight 93: Forty lives, one destiny
The Flight 93 passengers had walked down the concourse of Terminal A, where they breezed past the security gate, then walked the 100 yards to a long circular hallway from which the boarding ramps jutted out like spokes.
At Gate 17, they strode another 70 feet down the jetway, made a left turn, and were inside the Boeing 757. - post-gazette.com (10/28/01)

An American flag flies over Gate 17 of Terminal A at Newark Liberty International Airport. On September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 pushed back from the gate at 8:01 am, headed for San Francisco.


The article reports twice that the passengers used the boarding ramp:

One passenger was late. Mark Bingham had overslept and his friend, Matthew Hall, drove madly from Manhattan to Newark. They screeched to a halt outside Terminal A at 7:40. Bingham leapt from the car, lugging the old, blue-and-gold canvas bag he'd used as a rugby player at the University of California at Berkeley a decade earlier.
United attendants reopened the door to the boarding ramp and let him on the plane.

However, it's been discovered that an eyewitness tells a different story:

Triton's Clayton White on other side of recruiting
"You might say Clayton White's life has come full circle since February 1996.
White’s career didn’t end there, however. He eventually made the NFL’s New York Giants as a free agent and spent three seasons in the league, the last one in 2002 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
But the most lasting memory of White’s time in New York had nothing to do with football.
"We had played a Monday night game in Denver, and flew back home the next morning," White said. "We landed in Newark, N.J., about 6:45 in the morning. We usually get off the plane on the tarmac and board a bus to get to our cars. "I noticed another plane sitting next to ours because the people were walking to the plane across the tarmac instead of through the jetway. "Two weeks later, as we’re taking another plane to a game, one of the stewardesses informed us the plane that had been boarding next to us was Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11. That was a very eerie feeling." - Fayetteville Observer (01/31/06)

Clayton White

Note that White's plane landed at 6:45am. The Post-Gazette article says that Flight 93 was scheduled to take-off at 8:01am, but was delayed and backed off the gate at 8:01am. The flight crew reportedly boarded 35 minutes prior which would have made it around 7:25am:

Late. They were late. United Airlines Flight 93 had been scheduled to take off at 8:01 a.m. Now it was sitting on the tarmac, waiting for clearance to depart for San Francisco.

The crew boarded its flight 35 minutes ahead of the scheduled departure.

This is also at the same airport where a fire happened the day before which temporarily closed down the airport.

This all reminds me of what they had planned in Operation Northwoods:

An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

See also:

• Flight 93 pushes back from Newark Airport's Gate A17
• Operation Northwoods