12/09/2026
The sky over Washington was a clear, cloudless blue on the morning of September 11, 2001, when Lieutenant Heather "Lucky" Penney was ordered to find United Airlines Flight 93 and bring it down. She was 26, a rookie fighter pilot barely a year out of training, and the F-16 she climbed into had no missiles and no live am******on -- there had been no time to load any. There was only one way left to stop an airliner with a fighter jet, and she and her flight lead, Lieutenant Colonel Marc Sasseville, had agreed on it on the way to the runway: he would fly his plane into the cockpit, she would fly hers into the tail.
"We wouldn't be shooting it down," Penney said. "We'd be ramming the aircraft. I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot." She was sure she would not be coming back: "I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off."
"No one's trained for this," she says. "This is not something our military does." She had been a fighter pilot for barely a year, and that morning she should have been on a routine flight -- instead she was in a scheduling meeting when the word came that the country was under attack. What she was being asked to do, she and her flight lead understood without having to say it aloud: to stop the plane, they would have to kill everyone aboard it, and themselves.
That she was the one in the cockpit was the end of a road she had been on since girlhood. Her father, John Penney, had flown combat missions over Vietnam, and as a child she found his old mission tapes from that war. "It was the most harrowing, exciting, sort of meaningful thing that I could think of," she says. "I was just on fire to be a fighter pilot."
She was an English major at Purdue, headed for a teaching career, when the door finally opened. "It wasn't until I was in graduate school that Congress had opened up combat aviation to women," she says. "First thing I did was apply." By September 2001 she was the first woman to fly the F-16 in her D.C. Air National Guard squadron.
What she did not know, as she climbed into the cockpit, was that her father might be somewhere in the sky ahead of her. He had left the Air Force to fly for United Airlines, and that morning he was working East Coast routes. In the rush of the mission, the possibility never surfaced. "It never occurred to me that my dad, who was a pilot for United at the time, could have been airborne on that day," she says. "My mother figured it out weeks afterwards -- that that actually could have been him in the cockpit."
She flew for hours that day, sweeping ever-wider circles over Washington in a 90-minute search that never found the plane. She did not know that the passengers of Flight 93 had already made her mission unnecessary -- that they had taken a vote, rushed the cockpit, and forced the airliner into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at the cost of their own lives.
To Penney, the heroism that mattered that day was theirs, not hers. "The real heroes are the passengers on Flight 93 who were willing to sacrifice themselves," she says. "I was just an accidental witness to history."
She has never accepted the word "hero" for herself, and she is unsparing about why. The mission, she says plainly, was a failure -- not hers, but the country's. "In the mid-'90s, when the nation cut our Air Force in half," she says, "that was the reason why I was sent on a su***de mission." There were no armed jets ready because no one had imagined needing them.
Penney flew on after that day -- she served two combat tours in Iraq and retired from the Air National Guard as a major. Today Penney is a defense analyst who spends her days trying to make sure the next pilot is never put in her position. The F-16 she scrambled in that morning, she points out, is still flying. "The young men and women who fly it now are doing so in aircraft that are older than they are," she says. "I do what I do today so that they are not also sent on a su***de mission."
Asked if she would make the same choice again, she does not hesitate. "Absolutely," she says. "Even with daughters, even with my life now." What she wants people to take from that morning is not her story but what it showed her about everyone else's capacity for courage -- the strangers in the stairwells, the first responders climbing toward the fire, the passengers over Pennsylvania.
"I've come to realize that heroism isn't something unique or possessed by only a chosen few," reflects Penney. "That courage is there inside of each and every one of us."
"Let us never forget," she says. "But perhaps more importantly, let us remember: that there are things in this world more important than ourselves. That inside each and every one of us is that courage and heroism that we were blessed with witnessing that day -- that these are not unique or extraordinary qualities, but instead are common, and all around us, every day."
---
For books for children and teens about women who answered the call to serve their country, visit our blog post, "The Price of Peace: A Mighty Girl Recognizes Veterans and Remembrance Day," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12356
For a children's book that gives groundbreaking women in the military, past and present, the respect they deserve, we highly recommend "Heroism Begins With Her: Inspiring Stories of Bold, Brave, and Gutsy Women in the U.S. Military" for ages 9 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/heroism-begins-with-her
To give children and teens -- who were all born after 9/11 -- a better appreciation of this day and its historical significance, you can find many reading recommendations in our blog post "We Remember" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=34372
For tweens and teens, we recommend "Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story" for ages 9 to 12 (https://www.amightygirl.com/nine-ten), "Towers Falling" for ages 9 to 13 (https://www.amightygirl.com/towers-falling), "All We Have Left" for ages 13 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/all-we-have-left), and "Hope and Other Punchlines" for ages 14 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/hope-and-other-punchlines)
In addition to the fictional stories featured in our blog post, we also recommend these two excellent non-fiction books on the history of 9/11: "What Were the Twin Towers?" for ages 8 to 12 (https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780448487854) and the graphic novel "In the Shadow of the Fallen Towers" for ages 13 and up (https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780063360983)
