“Lucky, you’re coming with me,” barked Col. The jets would be armed within an hour, but somebody had to fly now, weapons or no weapons. At least two “hot-cocked” planes are ready at all times, their pilots never more than yards from the cockpit.Ī third plane hit the Pentagon, and almost at once came word that a fourth plane could be on the way, maybe more. Things are different today, Degnon says. “It was a little bit of a helpless feeling, but we did everything humanly possible to get the aircraft armed and in the air. George Degnon, vice commander of the 113th Wing at Andrews. “There was no perceived threat at the time, especially one coming from the homeland like that,” says Col. 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. The jets were still equipped with dummy bullets from the training mission.Īs remarkable as it seems now, there were no armed aircraft standing by and no system in place to scramble them over Washington. In the monumental confusion of those first hours, it was impossible to get clear orders. When it happened again, they knew it was war.īut the surprise was complete. When it happened once, they assumed it was some yahoo in a Cessna. They were sitting around a briefing table when someone looked in to say a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. On that Tuesday, they had just finished two weeks of air combat training in Nevada. She takes the stick of her own vintage 1941 Taylorcraft tail-dragger whenever she can.īut 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. She flew two tours in Iraq and she serves as a part-time National Guard pilot, mostly hauling VIPs around in a military Gulfstream. Penney, now a major but still a petite blonde with a Colgate grin, is no longer a combat flier. “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. military prepared to throw at the attackers was effectively a suicide mission. (C-SPAN)įor 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).īut 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. In this 2011 interview, Major Heather Penney talks about how she heard about the Sept. “I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot.” We’d be ramming the aircraft,” Penney recalls of her charge that day. So that was the plan.īecause 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. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.Įxcept her own plane. The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it. The day’s fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. Heather “Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. WASHINGTON - Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt.