Fighter pilot sent on ‘suicide mission’ after 9/11 Twin Tower attacks was ultimately saved by heroic strangers
Today marks 25 years since the September 11 attacks, when 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger planes and carried out a series of attacks across the United States.
Almost 3,000 people were killed, including those at the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington D.C, and aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which was ditched in a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers heroically overwhelmed the hijackers in the cockpit.
And among the many extraordinary stories to emerge from that horrific day is that of Heather Penney, a then-26-year-old fighter pilot who was prepared to give her life to stop Flight 93 from reaching Washington DC.
Penney and fellow pilot Marc Sasseville were scrambled from Andrews Air Force Base after the attacks, with orders to intercept the hijacked aircraft.
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There was just one problem, however. They didn't have time to properly arm their F-16 missiles.
A 'suicide mission' using their planes as weapons
As Penney recalled via Sky News: "It was too late for Marc and I. We knew at that point that this would be a suicide mission."
The pair knew they might have to deliberately crash their jets into the passenger aircraft.
"When we got the orders to launch, and we ran to get our flight gear, Marc Sasseville says to me, 'I'll take the cockpit.' So he would ram his jet into the cockpit of what we now know was Flight 93. And I would ram my jet into the tail of the aircraft."
The plan was that, if they couldn't stop the plane with weapons, they would use their own aircraft.
'Their fate had already been sealed'
Penney was also aware that doing so could mean killing the innocent passengers on board.
"This may sound harsh, but as tragic as that would have been to snuff out the lives of the innocent civilians on that flight. With terrorists at the controls, their fate had already been sealed," she explained.
But Penney and Sasseville never had to carry out their 'suicide mission'.
'It also gave me a hope and a faith in ordinary Americans'
Unknown to them at the time, the passengers aboard Flight 93 had already fought back against the hijackers.
The plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 am, killing everyone aboard but preventing it from reaching its intended target.
By the time Penney and Sasseville were in the air, the passengers had effectively saved countless lives on the ground.
The former pilot has since described those passengers as the true heroes of 9/11.
Reflecting on the day a quarter of a century later, Penney said: "The passengers thank God that they chose to sacrifice their lives because we would have been too late."
And it was only years afterwards that she fully understood what their actions meant to her.
"What it gave me is not only a profound sense of gratitude for what they did, but it also gave me a hope and a faith in ordinary Americans," she reflected.
Rhiannon Ingle