area and ordered them to land as soon as they could. With the assistance of civilian air traffic controllers, Penney and Sasseville began to divert any aircraft away from the D.C. Not every aircraft aloft that morning was aware the FAA had ordered a national ban on takeoffs of all civilian aircraft regardless of destination. Now the mission changed from intercept to sanitizing the airspace. Passengers on the flight had heroically prevented the hijackers from reaching their target. After about an hour into their mission, Penney and Sasseville heard that the Flight 93 had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. "We never found anything," Penney told HISTORY. airspace, looking for the fourth airliner. As it turned out, he wasn’t.įor the next 90 minutes, Penney and Sasseville made ever-increasing sweeps of D.C. It didn’t even cross her mind that there was a possibility the pilot of United Flight 93 was her father, who often flew out of East Coast cities. She briefly toyed with the idea of ejecting from her plane just before impact, but quickly dismissed the idea, knowing she had only one shot and didn’t want to miss. She had accepted the fate of Flight 93’s passengers, believing whether she succeeded or not, they were going to die. Airliners: ‘It Had to be Done’īeyond the mission at hand, there wasn’t much else on First Lieutenant Heather Penney’s mind. READ MORE: Behind the 9/11 White House Order to Shoot Down U.S. As they sped out beyond Andrews Air Force Base, flying low at about 3,000 feet, they could see black, billowing smoke streaming from the Pentagon. Sasseville would head for the 757’s cockpit and Penney would aim for the plane's tail. They would be flying a kamikaze mission, ramming into Flight 93, a Boeing 757 aircraft, nearly 7 times the weight of their F-16 fighter jets. Knowing that they had taken off with unarmed aircraft, that could mean only one thing.
Word came to them that they had shoot-to-kill orders. Receiving the go-ahead from flight control, both jets’ afterburners belched out thousands of pounds of thrust as they took off and headed northwest, the last known location of the fourth plane.
As she powered up the engines, she shouted to the ground crew to pull the chock blocks holding the wheels. Sasseville stopped her and barked, “Lucky, what are you doing? Get your butt up there and let’s go!” She quickly climbed into her cockpit. As they ran out to their planes, she started going through the checklist.
Being a rookie, Penney’s only combat experience was in training. Normally, preflight preparation for F-16 fighter jets takes a half-hour, allowing pilots to methodically work through a checklist. for another strike on the Pentagon, or a strike on the White House or the Capitol building. Air command speculated it was also headed to D.C. Reports circulated that a fourth plane, United Flight 93 out of Newark, New Jersey, was out there. Somewhere in the confusion as the pilots got into their flight suits and ran to their planes, the Pentagon was hit by hijacked American Airlines Flight 77. There was no time to arm their F-16 fighter jets, so they would be flying this mission virtually unarmed, packing only their undaunted courage.īut what was the mission? Where were they to go? What were they looking for? There were no clear orders as to what to do. An illustration painted by Gil Cohen of an F-16 fighter jet, the same aircraft flown by Heather Penney, on September 11, 2001, flying over the burning Pentagon in Washington, D.C.Īs confusion enveloped the briefing room, Penney's commanding officer, Colonel Marc "Sass" Sasseville, locked his eyes to hers and said, “Lucky, you’re coming with me.” They scrambled to the pre-flight area and donned their flight suits.
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