Heather Penney said she and Marc Sasseville were ready to carry out a fighter pilot suicide mission on September 11, 2001, if that was what it took to protect Washington, D.C. She was 26, working in an office when she realized America was under attack, and she and Sasseville scrambled to their F-16s.
Penney said they planned to search for an airliner likely coming low over the Potomac and would use their jets as weapons if necessary. She later learned that Flight 93 had already crashed before they launched, a gap of about half an hour to 20 minutes that made the mission impossible from the start.
Heather Penney and Marc Sasseville
Penney was a First Lieutenant and an F-16 fighter pilot for the D.C. Air National Guard in 2001. She said, "The world had changed and we knew we needed to get airborne" after the hijacked planes struck the twin towers.
She also said, "When we took off we needed to go search for an airliner that was likely coming low over the Potomac and that we would do what was necessary to protect and defend," and added, "We did not have missiles," The plan, as she described it, was for Sasseville to hit the nose of the aircraft and for her to strike the tail.
September 11th attacks
Penney said, "[Sasseville] would ram his jet into the nose of the aircraft, and I would ram mine into the tail." She said that if they had succeeded, "it would have been a suicide mission."
She was airborne for about three hours. By the time she landed, Penney said she learned that Flight 93 had already crashed and that they "would never have been able to stop them."
Washington, D.C.
Penney said the mission reflected the air defense posture after the fall of the Soviet Union, when most of America's alert units had been shut down. She said that, when the launch order came, she and Sasseville did not know the flight number or details about United 93.
Now a retired Air Force Major, Penney said, "When it was clear what the mission would be, I realized that if the universe put me in this place, then that was my purpose."
