On 9/11/01, as chaos ensued, Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was
sitting in her F-16 jet at Andrews Air Force Base with very specific
orders.
Bring down United Airlines Flight 93 ‘by any means possible.’
She
and Col. Marc Sasseville were given those orders that day, even though
they were sitting in planes without any live ammunition. That meant,
they both had to plan to ram the hijacked plane with their own jets.
For
more than 10 years, Lt. Penney (now a Major), didn’t talk about about
her experience that day , but in 2011 she gave an interview to C-SPAN,
an interview and a story we had not heard until now.
She talked about how Col. Sasseville was ready to ram the cockpit, and she would aim for the tail.
She told the Washington Post:
“We had to protect our airspace any way we could.”
But neither pilot would have to give their lives that day after
getting word that Flight 93 went down in a field in Pennsylvania.
She told the Washington Post:
“I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off. The real heroes are the passengers on Flight 93 who were willing to sacrifice themselves. I was just an accidental witness to history.”
But they were still ready to give their lives that day, like so
many others were ready to and did. And for that, they are all heroes.
And there was one more twist to the story. From the Washington Post:
“Later, as the Penney family checked in on each other from around the country, they marveled at the other fateful twist on the extraordinary events: the possibility that Penney’s own father could well have been in
the cockpit of her airliner target.John Penney was a captain at United Airlines at the time. He had been flying East Coast routes all the previous month. The daughter had no way of knowing whether the father was airborne or not.
“We talked about the possibility that I could have been on the plane,” Col. John Penney said. “She knew I was flying that kind of rotation. But we never fell down and emotionally broke apart or anything like that. She’s a fighter pilot, I’m a fighter pilot.”
