The 9/11 pilot on a suicide mission

When Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney climbed into her F-16 on Sept. 11, 2001, she thought it might be the last flight of her life, said Steve Hendrix in The Washington Post. Penney and her commanding officer, Col. Marc Sasseville, had been ordered to take off from Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, D.C., and destroy hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 before it could crash into the Capitol building. But with no time to spare, the pilots took off without missiles. Their orders were to ram the aircraft, said Penney, then a rookie with the National Guard. “I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot.”

Penney planned to smash her fighter jet into the plane’s tail. “If I took off the tail of the aircraft, it would go straight down and so the pattern of debris would be minimized.” She thought about ejecting before impact, but dismissed the idea. “I mean you only got one chance, you don’t want to eject and have missed, right?”

In the end, Penney didn’t have to make the ultimate sacrifice. The passengers on Flight 93 attacked their hijackers, causing the plane to crash in a Pennsylvania field. Penney, now a director at Lockheed Martin, shrugs off any talk of her own heroism. “The real heroes are the passengers of Flight 93. I was just an accidental witness to history.”

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