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MISSION UNIMAGINAB
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11:59 AM (1 hour ago)
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MISSION UNIMAGINABLE
The events of Sept. 11, 2001, put an F-16 pilot into thesky with orders to bring down United Flight 93
Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather“Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and readyto fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders:Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day’s fourth hijacked airlinerseemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first twocombat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.
“I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off,”says Maj. Heather “Lucky” Penney, remembering the Sept. 11 attacksand the initial U.S. reaction.
The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline skywas live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostileaircraft. Except her own plane. So that was the plan. Because thesurprise attacks were unfolding, in that innocent age, faster than theycould arm war planes, Penney and her commanding officer went up tofly their jets straight into a Boeing 757.“We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We’d be ramming the aircraft,”Penney recalls of her charge that day. “I would essentially be a kamikazepilot.” For years, Penney, one of the first generation of female combatpilots in the country, gave no interviews about her experiences onSept. 11(which included, eventually, escorting Air Force One back intoWashington’s suddenly highly restricted airspace).
But 10 years later, she is reflecting on one of the lesser-told tales of thatendlessly examined morning: how the first counterpunch the U.S. militaryprepared to throw at the attackers was effectively a suicide mission.
“We had to protect the airspace any way we could,” she said last weekin her office at Lockheed Martin, where she is a director in the F-35 program.Penney, now a major but still a petite blonde with a Colgate grin, is no longera combat flier. She flew two tours in Iraq and she serves as a part-timeNational Guard pilot, mostly hauling VIPs around in a military Gulfstream.She takes the stick of her own vintage 1941 Taylorcraft tail-draggerwhenever she can.But none of her thousands of hours in the air quite compare with the urgentrush of launching on what was supposed to be a one-way flight to a midaircollision. First of her kind.She was a rookie in the autumn of 2001, the first female F-16 pilot they’dever had at the 121st Fighter Squadron of the D.C. Air National Guard. Shehad grown up smelling jet fuel. Her father flew jets in Vietnam and still racesthem. Penney got her pilot’s license when she was a literature major atPurdue. She planned to be a teacher. But during a graduate program inAmerican studies, Congress opened up combat aviation to women andPenney was nearly first in line.“I signed up immediately,” she says. “I wanted to be a fighter pilot like my dad.”On that Tuesday, they had just finished two weeks of air combat training inNevada. They were sitting around a briefing table when someone looked into say a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. When it happenedonce, they assumed it was some yahoo in a Cessna. When it happened again,they knew it was war. But the surprise was complete. In the monumentalconfusion of those first hours, it was impossible to get clear orders. Nothingwas ready. The jets were still equipped with dummy bullets from the trainingmission.As remarkable as it seems now, there were no armed aircraft standing byand no system in place to scramble them over Washington. Before thatmorning, all eyes were looking outward, still scanning the old Cold Warthreat paths for planes and missiles coming over the polar ice cap. “Therewas no perceived threat at the time, especially one coming from thehomeland like that,” says Col. George Degnon, vice commander of the 113thWing at Andrews. “It was a little bit of a helpless feeling, but we did everythinghumanly possible to get the aircraft armed and in the air. It was amazing tosee people react.”Things are different today, Degnon says. At least two “hot-cocked” planesare ready at all times, their pilots never more than yards from the cockpit.A third plane hit the Pentagon, and almost at once came word that a fourthplane could be on the way, maybe more. The jets would be armed within anhour, but somebody had to fly now, weapons or no weapons.“Lucky, you’re coming with me,” barked Col. Marc Sasseville.They were gearing up in the pre-flight life-support area when Sasseville,struggling into his flight suit, met her eye. “I’m going to go for the cockpit,”Sasseville said. She replied without hesitating. “I’ll take the tail.”It was a plan. And a pact.‘Let’s go!’Penney had never scrambled a jet before. Normally the pre-flight is a half-houror so of methodical checks. She automatically started going down the list.“Lucky, what are you doing? Get your butt up there and let’s go!” Sasseville shouted.She climbed in, rushed to power up the engine, screamed for her groundcrew to pull the chocks. The crew chief still had his headphones pluggedinto the fuselage as she nudged the throttle forward. He ran along pullingsafety pins from the jet as it moved forward.She muttered a fighter pilot’s prayer — “God, don’t let me [expletive] up” —and followed Sasseville into the sky.They screamed over the smoldering Pentagon, heading northwest at morethan 400 mph, flying low and scanning the clear horizon. Her commander hadtime to think about the best place to hit the enemy.“We don’t train to bring down airliners,” said Sasseville, now stationed at thePentagon. “If you just hit the engine, it could still glide and you could guide itto a target. My thought was the cockpit or the wing.”He also thought about his ejection seat. Would there be an instant just beforeimpact?“I was hoping to do both at the same time,” he says. “It probably wasn’t goingto work, but that’s what I was hoping.”Penney worried about missing the target if she tried to bail out.“If you eject and your jet soars through without impact .. .” she trails off, the thought of failing more dreadful than the thought of dying.
But she didn’t have to die. She didn’t have to knock down an airliner full of kidsand salesmen and girlfriends. They did that themselves.
It would be hours before Penney and Sasseville learned that United 93 hadalready gone down in Pennsylvania, an insurrection by hostages willing todo 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 sacrificethemselves,” Penney says. “I was just an accidental witness to history.” Sheand Sasseville flew the rest of the day, clearing the airspace, escorting thepresident, looking down onto a city that would soon be sending them to war.She’s a single mom of two girls now. She still loves to fly. And she still thinksoften of that extraordinary ride down the runway a decade ago.“I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off,” she says.“If we did it right, this would be it.”
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