|
|
 11:59 AM (1 hour ago)
|
|
|
|
|
The
events of Sept.
11, 2001,
put an F-16 pilot into the
sky
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
ready
to
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
airliner
seemed
to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney,
one of the first two
combat
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
attacks
and
the initial U.S. reaction.
The one
thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline
sky
was
live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a
hostile
aircraft.
Except her
own plane. So that was the plan. 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
wouldn’t be shooting it down. We’d be ramming the
aircraft,”
Penney
recalls of her charge that day. “I would essentially be a
kamikaze
pilot.” For years, Penney, one of the first generation
of female combat
pilots
in the country, gave no interviews about her experiences on
Sept.
11(which included,
eventually, escorting Air Force One back
into
Washington’s suddenly
highly restricted airspace).
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.
Penney,
now a major but still a petite blonde with a Colgate grin, is no
longer
a
combat flier. She flew two tours in
Iraq and she
serves as a part-time
National
Guard pilot, mostly hauling VIPs around in a military
Gulfstream.
She
takes the stick of her own vintage 1941 Taylorcraft
tail-dragger
But
none of her thousands of hours in the air quite compare with the
urgent
rush
of launching on what was supposed to be a one-way flight to a
midair
collision. First of her kind.
She
was a rookie in the autumn of 2001, the first female F-16 pilot
they’d
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 pilot’s 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.
“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
in
Nevada. They were
sitting around a briefing table when someone looked
in
to
say a plane had hit the
World
Trade
Center in
New
York. When it
happened
once,
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
monumental
confusion
of those first hours, it was impossible to get clear orders.
Nothing
was
ready. The jets were still equipped with dummy bullets from the
training
As
remarkable as it seems now, there were no armed aircraft standing
by
and
no system in place to scramble them over
Washington. Before
that
morning,
all eyes were looking outward, still scanning the old Cold
War
threat
paths for planes and missiles coming over the polar ice
cap. “There
was
no perceived threat at the time, especially one coming from
the
homeland
like that,” says Col. George Degnon, vice commander of the
113th
Wing
at Andrews. “It was a little bit of a helpless feeling, but we did
everything
humanly
possible to get the aircraft armed and in the air. It was amazing
to
Things
are different today, Degnon says. At least two “hot-cocked”
planes
are
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
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,
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.
Penney
had never scrambled a jet before. Normally the pre-flight is a
half-hour
or
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
ground
crew
to pull the chocks. The crew chief still had his headphones
plugged
into
the fuselage as she nudged the throttle forward. He ran along
pulling
safety
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
more
than
400 mph, flying low and scanning the clear horizon. Her commander
had
time
to think about the best place to hit the enemy.
“We
don’t 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
“I
was hoping to do both at the same time,” he says. “It probably wasn’t
going
to
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 kids
and
salesmen and girlfriends. They did that
themselves.
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.” She
and
Sasseville flew the rest of the day, clearing the airspace, escorting
the
president,
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
thinks
often
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.”
|
|
|
Ad
Brooks Brothers
Save up to 50% off
 | Receive savings of up to 50% off select favorites during our Summer Clearance Event. |
More Promotions (9)
|
