Former Air Force Lieutenant Heather ‘Lucky’ Penney shared the harrowing reality of what members of our military are prepared to do, at the ultimate personal cost, to protect their fellow citizens.
Penney, who was only 26 years old at the time, was faced with a suicide mission to stop United Airlines Flight 93 from potentially crashing into Washington, D.C.
Flight 93 was the fourth plane hijacked on September 11, 2001, and the only one that did not reach its intended target because of the bravery of the passengers and crew that fought the hijackers and crashed the plane in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Because of a delay, Flight 93 was still on the ground when the other three planes were already hijacked. After takeoff, it flew normally west for about 46 minutes when the hijackers stormed the cockpit. Controllers heard a “Mayday” and “Get out of here!” before one of the hijackers took control of the plane and turned the plane toward Washington D.C.
Passengers and crew used airphones and cell phones and learned about the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. They voted to try to retake the plane, and Todd Beamer’s last recorded words, words that have echoed for more than two decades, said, “Are you ready? Okay.”
“Let’s roll.”
Following a struggle in the cockpit, the plane rolled and pitched, and they crashed the plane rather than lose the cockpit.
Before the plane was recaptured by Beamer and his fellow heroes, military leaders faced an unimaginable decision. They would have to send their pilots on a suicide mission to ram the commercial airliner to prevent the attack on D.C.
Penney shared, “We knew what the target would be. It would be an airliner full of innocent Americans. But we didn’t have any live missiles. We had no real weapons on board. So we knew that this would be a suicide mission.”
“And if we were to take down an airliner, we would have to ram our jets into the aircraft.”
“And so as I was zipping my G-suit up, Sass says to me, ‘I’ll take the cockpit.’”
“So his plan was he would fly his jet into the cockpit to take out the terrorists and the flight controls, and then I would ram my jet into the tail of the aircraft.”
“We had to assume that the White House, that Congress, our most cherished national institutions, the foundational bedrock of our democracy, would be the next target. We had to assume that.”
“We did not know that 93 had crashed. We did not know that the passengers had already done the job.”
“In many ways, I feel like a mission failure, not only because our nation lacked the imagination, we weren’t sitting alert, we didn’t have live weapons, and frankly, we were too late.”
“Thank God for the passengers, because if it hadn’t been for them, we were given the authorization too late to have made a difference. 93 would have made it.”
“Those passengers were placed in a position where they had to make a choice that they never should have been faced with. But thank God they did.”
Watch:
Watch the full video here:
The bravery of Beamer and his fellow heroes has been honored with the Flight 93 National Memorial, run by the National Park Service.
It includes the Wall of Names for passengers and crew, the Tower of Voices, a visitor center, and the crash site itself, which is treated as a burial ground and is not walked on by the public.
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