Heather ‘Lucky’ Penney
9/11 fighter pilot enjoys GA
Service to one’s country means you’ll be asked a lot, and sometimes it could be the unthinkable.
For U.S. Air Force pilot Heather “Lucky” Penney, the unthinkable happened on the unthinkable eleventh day of September 2001. She and fellow F–16 fighter pilot Marc H. Sasseville were given the suicide mission of searching out and ramming United Flight 93, which was hijacked and believed to be heading for the U.S. Capitol. Because they had to be airborne so quickly, neither pilot had ammunition to shoot Flight 93 down. As the lead pilot, Sasseville would ram the cockpit, Penney would hit the tail. The United flight presented another problem for Penney: It was possible it was her father who was its captain.
“I know I speak for everyone on the flight line—we all wanted to be on that mission,” she said. “We knew our nation was under attack and it was our job to protect and defend.”
By the time Penney and Sasseville were in the air and sanitizing the airspace, the passengers of Flight 93 had taken down the hijacked aircraft in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Her father was not the captain.
“But we felt like a failure.”
However, the pair of fighter pilots had more to do that day. Along with two other pilots, they spent the morning helping clear the airspace and eventually were the escorts for President George W. Bush returning to D.C. from Florida.
“The people who don’t get enough credit are Potomac Approach. We take them for granted but they learned to speak fighter pilot that day and pivoted to be essential to clearing the airspace.”
Penney is retired from the U.S. Air Force and works for a Washington, D.C., aviation think tank. She also flies charter part time for Chantilly Air in a Citation XLS. But her passion is for GA. She bought a 1941 Taylorcraft when she was in flight training in Texas that was “the love of my life; think of a boy and his dog and that was me and her.”
Today she owns and flies a quiver of aircraft: a 1942 Stearman, a Bücker Bü 131 Jungmann she bought from aviation legend Bob Bailey, a 1950 Cessna 170 (“my ride or die girl”), and a 1942 L–3. Her favorite? “Whatever I am flying that day, because I am flying!”
