Heather Penney says she and Marc Sasseville were ready to ram their F-16s into a hijacked airliner on Sept. 11, 2001, if that was the only way to keep it from reaching Washington. The former fighter pilot said the mission was so stark that, if it had worked, it would have ended with both pilots dead.
The story is being revisited now because Penney’s account captures how close the capital came to being defended by two airmen who understood they might not come back. She was 26 and working in the office when she realized America was under attack, then scrambled with Sasseville after orders took time to arrive. Penney said they believed Washington was a prime target and that the world had changed, so they needed to get airborne.
She said they launched without missiles and with one job in mind: find the aircraft and do whatever was necessary to stop it. In her account, Sasseville would have struck the nose and she would have hit the tail. That was not a drill or a bluff. It was the only option left once the jets were in the air.
Penney’s recollection also points to how thin the nation’s defenses were that day. In the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, she said most alert units had been shut down, leaving no jets on the ready with weapons loaded. By the time she and Sasseville got the order to launch, she later learned, Flight 93 had already crashed maybe half an hour to 20 minutes before takeoff. They had flown for about three hours before landing, and she did not know the flight number or any details about United 93 while airborne.
That is the hard edge of her story: two pilots were prepared to make a suicide run to defend Washington, and the chance to do it had already slipped away before they knew what they were chasing. Penney has said that when the mission became clear, she felt the universe had put her there for a purpose. What she could not know on Sept. 11 was that the aircraft was already gone.
