Pilot sent on suicide mission to takedown Flight 93 on 9/11 opens up on moment she received order
25 years after the attacks on September 11, 2001, a woman whose nickname is 'Lucky', was tasked with the unimaginable.
There is much to be unpacked about the 9/11 attacks, from the initial horror of the two passenger planes crashing into both Twin Towers in New York City, to the plane that crashed into the Pentagon in Washington D.C, and then the final plane that was brought down by its passengers in a field in Pennsylvania.
There were ground workers who suffered the consequences of the attacks, having to clear the wreckage to look for any of the 2,977 people who died.
There were also families who were desperately searching for loved ones, and passengers on the planes who would never return home to those they love.
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Among the terror, came stories of those who tried to help, to step up and save those around them because their job put them in a position of being responsible for the public.
Such was a woman who is 'lucky' by name and by nature.
Heather ‘Lucky’ Penney was a fighter pilot, who says she was sent on a suicide mission to intercept United Airlines Flight 93, which was flying towards Washington DC at the time, and was pegged as being the fourth hijacked plane.
Speaking to ITV News, she said she was aware of the risks when she was tasked with intercepting it and was even shown material of what was happening.
“We knew that this would be a suicide mission," the lieutenant in the US Air Force, said. “We knew from those images that our nation was under attack."
She added: “It was clear that those flight paths were premeditated, deliberate, and designed to hurt and terrorise America.”
After seeing the pictures, according to the pilot, the third plane hit the Pentagon.
With that, Vice President to former President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, authorised the fighter pilots to proceed with their mission to get it out of the sky before it reached its destination.
“We knew what the target would be; it would be an airliner full of innocent Americans," she told the outlet's 9/11 stories video segment. “But we didn't have any live missiles, we had no real weapons on board. So, we knew that this would be a suicide mission.”
She explained that the plan was for her in her F-16 fighter jet and her flight lead, Colonel Marc Sasseville, to physically take it down.
She said: “He would fly his jet into the cockpit to take out the terrorists in the flight controls, and then I would ram my jet into the tail of the aircraft.”
However, unbeknownst to them, 40 passengers and crew had found out what was going on in the cock pit thanks to making contact with people on the ground.
With that, they took over and crashed it.
“We did not know that 93 had crashed. We did not know that the passengers had already done the job," said Heather, revealing: “Those passengers were placed in a position where they had to make a choice that they never should have been faced with, but thank God they did.”
Britt Jones