WEST LAFAYETTE – For years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 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.
“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.
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.
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. 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. — they would crash their fighter jets into the rogue Boeing 757-222.
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. Capitol.
“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 and Penney, however, never located the airliner. In fact, they later learned that their frustrating wait to be authorized for takeoff had taken too long. 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.
“Much later during the postmortem, I realized we took off half an hour after the passengers crashed Flight 93,” Penney says. “They would have reached D.C. before we ever took off.”
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.
There is nothing cathartic about continually reliving the day’s tragic events. 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.
“People always ask, ‘So were you traumatized from the day?’” Penney says. “And I’m like, ‘No, I’m not traumatized from the day, but I pretty much am traumatized after every speech.’”
And 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. 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.
“They were just ordinary Americans doing the ordinary business of their lives. And yet they had to make a choice that they never should have had to make. And that truly is where I feel the failure the most,” Penney says. “In telling the story, I felt very conflicted about it because we were a ‘failure,’ and also I did not want it to be voyeuristic.
“And so, as I began to tell the story, it became very important to me to move to a meaning that was greater than just what happened and to help people realize the story’s not about me. I’m simply a witness,” she continues. “Certainly, Sass and I were willing to give our lives. Anybody would have been willing to do the same, and I can say that with certainty because the passengers on Flight 93 did.”
