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Air force fighter pilot7/3/2023 ![]() 11: the everyday Americans who snapped into action when they were needed most, whether as first responders in New York City or passengers on a cross-country flight who prevented terrorists from further devastating a shocked nation.Ĭertainly, Sass and I were willing to give our lives. “And I’m like, ‘No, I’m not traumatized from the day, but I pretty much am traumatized after every speech.’”Īnd yet she persists in retelling the story in media interviews, public speaking engagements and even a TED Talk to honor those whom she views as the real heroes of Sept. “People always ask, ‘So were you traumatized from the day?’” Penney says. She actually finds it more difficult to rehash the story than it was to board an F-16 intending to fulfill her sworn duty to sacrifice her life in defense of her country. There is nothing cathartic about continually reliving the day’s tragic events. When she relays the story today, she refers to their mission as a failure in large part because of the organizational shortcomings that prevented Penney and Sasseville from arriving in time to sacrifice their own lives. “Much later during the postmortem, I realized we took off half an hour after the passengers crashed Flight 93,” Penney says. If not for the heroic actions of the passengers and crew who resisted the four hijackers and forced the plane to crash into the Pennsylvania countryside, United 93 likely would have become the fourth hijacked plane that morning to obliterate a national landmark. In fact, they later learned that their frustrating wait to be authorized for takeoff had taken too long. Sasseville and Penney, however, never located the airliner. 77: Fighter Pilot Heather Penney Reflects on Purdue Journey and 9/11 Mission “When Sass and I took off, we believed that if we were successful that this was a one-way mission, that this was a suicide mission,” Penney says. Sasseville would ram the cockpit and Penney the tail, preventing the plane from reaching its intended target, reportedly either the White House or U.S. they would crash their fighter jets into the rogue Boeing 757-222. If they successfully located the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 - a flight from Newark to San Francisco that had veered back toward Washington, D.C. With no time available to arm their F-16s after learning the nation was under attack, the pilots took off from Andrews Air Force Base, fully expecting not to return. ![]() It wasn’t until 2011, when her flight lead, Marc Sasseville, asked Penney to participate in an event acknowledging the 10-year anniversary of the attacks, that they publicly shared their remarkable story. “No one really asked, probably because no one really knew,” says Penney, who graduated from Purdue in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in English and in 1997 with a master’s in American studies. 11, 2001, only a few people outside of Heather Penney’s immediate family were aware of the sacrifice the fighter pilot intended to make that morning to prevent any additional tragedy. Alumna Heather Penney planned to crash F-16 into hijacked United Flight 93įor years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. ![]()
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