Fighter
Pilot Was Tasked With Taking Out United 93 By Crashing Into It - Matt Vespa
On September 11, 2001, Lt. Heather Lucky Penney had one harrowing
mission: bring down United 93. She took off from Andrews Air Force Base, but without weapons. No missiles, machine guns, etc.;
she would have to ram into the commercial airliner to save American lives.
I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot, she said. The 13th anniversary
of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has come and gone; we will always remember those who have died. But this story of a fighter
pilot who was willing to sacrifice herself to save others is surely worth the read. For years, she never gave her account
of what happened; she later escorted Air Force One back to D.C. Now, shes a mother of two daughters and the head of the F-35
program at Lockheed Martin (via Washington Post):
Because the surprise attacks were unfolding, in that innocent
age, faster than they could arm war planes, Penney and her commanding officer went up to fly their jets straight into a Boeing
757.
We wouldnt be shooting it down. Wed be ramming the aircraft, Penney recalls of her charge that day. I would essentially
be a kamikaze pilot.
But 10 years later, she is reflecting on one of the lesser-told tales of that endlessly examined morning: how
the first counterpunch the U.S. military prepared to throw at the attackers was effectively a suicide mission.
We had to protect the airspace any way we
could, she said last week in her office at Lockheed Martin, where she is a director in the F-35 program.
She was a rookie in the autumn of 2001, the first female F-16 pilot theyd ever had at the 121st Fighter
Squadron of the D.C. Air National Guard. She had grown up smelling jet fuel. Her father flew jets in Vietnam and still races
them. Penney got her pilots license when she was a literature major at Purdue. She planned to be a teacher. But during a graduate
program in American studies, Congress opened up combat aviation to women and Penney was nearly first in line.
A third plane hit the Pentagon, and almost at once came word that a fourth plane
could be on the way, maybe more. The jets would be armed within an hour, but somebody had to fly now, weapons or no weapons.
Lucky, youre coming with me, barked Col. Marc Sasseville.
We dont train to bring down airliners, said Sasseville, now stationed at the Pentagon. If you just
hit the engine, it could still glide and you could guide it to a target. My thought was the cockpit or the wing.
He also thought about his ejection seat. Would there be an instant just before
impact?
I was hoping to do both at the same time, he says. It probably
wasnt going to work, but thats what I was hoping.
Penney worried
about missing the target if she tried to bail out.
It would be
hours before Penney and Sasseville learned that United 93 had already gone down in Pennsylvania, an insurrection by hostages
willing to do just what the two Guard pilots had been willing to do: Anything. And everything.
The real heroes are the passengers on Flight 93 who were willing
to sacrifice themselves, Penney says. I was just an accidental witness to history.