09-11-2014, 05:44 PM
When the Air National guard scrambled two F-16's to intercept United Flight 93, neither plane had any ammunition or missiles. The pilots were going to ram the passenger jet to bring it down.
“We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We’d be ramming the aircraft,” Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney recalls of her charge that day. “I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot.”
As remarkable as it seems now, there were no armed aircraft standing by and no system in place to scramble them over Washington. 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.
As Penney and her commanding officer, Col. Marc Sasseville were gearing up in the pre-flight life-support area, Sasseville met her eye, “I’m going to go for the cockpit."
She replied without hesitating, “I’ll take the tail.”
It was a plan. And a pact. Neither pilot had to follow that plan as the passengers aboard United Flight 93 had their own pact.
The full story is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/f-16...story.html
“We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We’d be ramming the aircraft,” Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney recalls of her charge that day. “I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot.”
As remarkable as it seems now, there were no armed aircraft standing by and no system in place to scramble them over Washington. 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.
As Penney and her commanding officer, Col. Marc Sasseville were gearing up in the pre-flight life-support area, Sasseville met her eye, “I’m going to go for the cockpit."
She replied without hesitating, “I’ll take the tail.”
It was a plan. And a pact. Neither pilot had to follow that plan as the passengers aboard United Flight 93 had their own pact.
The full story is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/f-16...story.html
