Vice President Dick Cheney thought he had given the military the authority to shoot down a hijacked airliner on 9/11. He was wrong. The order reached the air-defense chain too late to be passed to any fighter pilot before United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m.
That gap matters because Heather Penney, a fighter pilot reflecting on the day years later, has become part of the stark memory of what air crews were asked to do and what they were never told. The question still draws readers back now because the choice Cheney believed had been made was not the choice the pilots actually received, and the difference was measured in minutes.
Cheney confirmed the presidential authorization with George W. Bush by phone roughly between 10:18 a.m. and 10:20 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. The authorization allowed military fighter pilots to shoot down any hijacked commercial airliner that failed to respond to instructions. But Cheney's order did not reach the Northeast Air Defense Sector until 10:31 a.m., and the pilots under its direction got no version of it at all.
Instead, the only instruction they received was to identify the type and tail number of any suspicious aircraft, not to engage it. The NEADS mission commander and senior weapons director later told investigators they chose not to pass the authorization down to the pilots they were directing. In other words, the order existed inside the command structure, but it stopped short of the people who would have had to act on it in the air.
Cheney, meanwhile, was still operating as if the military had already moved. At 10:39 a.m., he told Donald Rumsfeld that he believed multiple aircraft had already been intercepted. He had also said there had been at least three instances of reports of aircraft approaching Washington. Gen. Richard Myers later said the military spent much of that morning chasing false and unconfirmed threats layered on top of the real ones, adding, “We fought many phantoms that day.”
The 9/11 Commission later documented the breakdown inside the White House and the air-defense network and concluded that Cheney was mistaken in believing the authorization had been passed to the pilots. Gen. Ralph Eberhart told the commission the military could likely have shot down the hijacked aircraft if the FAA had passed along word of the hijackings as soon as it learned of them. That is the hard edge of this story: the authority was there, the pilots were airborne, and the warning never reached them in time.
For Heather Penney, that leaves one of the most sobering conclusions from the day. The system did not fail because no one was willing to act. It failed because the order that might have changed the outcome never reached the cockpit.
