4/24/2023 0 Comments Fighter pilot in cockpitShe actually finds it more difficult to rehash the story than it was to board an F-16 intending to fulfill her sworn duty to sacrifice her life in defense of her country. There is nothing cathartic about continually reliving the day’s tragic events. When she relays the story today, she refers to their mission as a failure in large part because of the organizational shortcomings that prevented Penney and Sasseville from arriving in time to sacrifice their own lives. “Much later during the postmortem, I realized we took off half an hour after the passengers crashed Flight 93,” Penney says. If not for the heroic actions of the passengers and crew who resisted the four hijackers and forced the plane to crash into the Pennsylvania countryside, United 93 likely would have become the fourth hijacked plane that morning to obliterate a national landmark. In fact, they later learned that their frustrating wait to be authorized for takeoff had taken too long. Sasseville and Penney, however, never located the airliner. “When Sass and I took off, we believed that if we were successful that this was a one-way mission, that this was a suicide mission,” Penney says. Sasseville would ram the cockpit and Penney the tail, preventing the plane from reaching its intended target, reportedly either the White House or U.S. they would crash their fighter jets into the rogue Boeing 757-222. If they successfully located the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 - a flight from Newark to San Francisco that had veered back toward Washington, D.C. With no time available to arm their F-16s after learning the nation was under attack, the pilots took off from Andrews Air Force Base, fully expecting not to return. It wasn’t until 2011, when her flight lead, Marc Sasseville, asked Penney to participate in an event acknowledging the 10-year anniversary of the attacks, that they publicly shared their remarkable story. “No one really asked, probably because no one really knew,” says Penney, who graduated from Purdue in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in English and in 1997 with a master’s in American studies. 11, 2001, only a few people outside of Heather Penney’s immediate family were aware of the sacrifice the fighter pilot intended to make that morning to prevent any additional tragedy. Heather Penney planned to crash into hijacked United Flight 93 to prevent it from reaching Washington, D.C.įor years after the terrorist attacks of Sept.
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