On 9/11, Heather Penney Tried to Bring Down Flight 93 - HISTORY - 0 views
-
September 11, 2001 was supposed to be a typical day for Lieutenant Heather Penney of the District of Columbia Air National Guard. As Penney recalled in a 2016 interview with HISTORY, that morning she was attending a briefing at Andrews Air Force Base, planning the month’s training operations. At about 8:45 a.m., someone leaned into the room and said, “Hey, somebody just flew into the World Trade Center.”
-
The weather in New York City that day was very clear with blue skies. "We thought it was a small general aviation airplane or, you know, some small aircraft that maybe had...messed up their instrument approach," Penney recalled. It was assumed that a general aviation plane had made a terrible mistake, and they went back to their meeting.
-
They scrambled to the pre-flight area and donned their flight suits. 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.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
Pentagon was hit by hijacked American Airlines Flight 77. Reports circulated that a fourth plane, United Flight 93 out of Newark, New Jersey, was out there. Air command speculated it was also headed to D.C. for another strike on the Pentagon, or a strike on the White House or the Capitol building.
-
As she powered up the engines, she shouted to the ground crew to pull the chock blocks holding the wheels.
-
They had agreed upon the plan of attack. Sasseville would head for the 757’s cockpit and Penney would aim for the plane's tail. 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.
-
Beyond the mission at hand, there wasn’t much else on First Lieutenant Heather Penney’s mind. She had accepted the fate of Flight 93’s passengers, believing whether she succeeded or not, they were going to die. 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. 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. As it turned out, he wasn’t.
-
Now the mission changed from intercept to sanitizing the airspace. Not every aircraft aloft that morning was aware the FAA had ordered a national ban on takeoffs of all civilian aircraft regardless of destination. With the assistance of civilian air traffic controllers, Penney and Sasseville began to divert any aircraft away from the D.C. area and ordered them to land as soon as they could. They also identified the first-responding aircraft assisting the rescue at the Pentagon.
-
In the evening hours, it was time to bring the president home. Penney's plane and the others patrolling the skies around Washington, D.C. had been equipped with live ammunition. They were also given “free-fire” authority, meaning pilots could make the decision to fire on any civilian aircraft deemed to be a threat, instead of waiting for authorization. Several hours after the initial attack, it was still unclear whether more attacks were pending.
-
"I made a decision with my life and I swore an oath to protect and defend, but these were just average, everyday people, mothers, fathers, school teachers, businessmen," Penney told HISTORY. "They're true heroes."