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The message below is from Carl Carson. Carl is having some problems logging on to the forum while he's away, and asked it to be posted for him.
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Mike: Would you forward this to the T-craft forum, please. Nice to have "Lucky" Penney be a Taylorcraft pilot. This came to me from a friend in Seattle who is the spokesperson for the NW FAA region.
Thanks, Carl
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The events of Sept. 11, 2001, put an F-16 pilot into the air with orders to bring down United Flight 93
By Steve Hendrix
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 of 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 whenever she can.
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 licence 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 (9/11/01), 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 incomplete. 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 mission.
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 see people react.”
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. ‘Let’s go!’
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 engines, 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 Sasse!@#$!ville 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 impact?
“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 thatextraordinary 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.”
----------------------
Mike: Would you forward this to the T-craft forum, please. Nice to have "Lucky" Penney be a Taylorcraft pilot. This came to me from a friend in Seattle who is the spokesperson for the NW FAA region.
Thanks, Carl
----------------------
The events of Sept. 11, 2001, put an F-16 pilot into the air with orders to bring down United Flight 93
By Steve Hendrix
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 of 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 whenever she can.
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 licence 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 (9/11/01), 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 incomplete. 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 mission.
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 see people react.”
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. ‘Let’s go!’
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 engines, 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 Sasse!@#$!ville 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 impact?
“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 thatextraordinary 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.”
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