Armchair Dragoons Forums
The Reference Desk => History and Tall Tales => Topic started by: bayonetbrant on September 05, 2019, 01:37:03 PM
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excerpt from a forthcoming book
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/05/911-oral-history-flight-93-book-excerpt-228001 (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/05/911-oral-history-flight-93-book-excerpt-228001)
Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney: We would be ramming the aircraft. We didn’t have [missiles] on board to shoot the airplane down. As we were putting on our flight gear in the life support shop, Sass looked at me and said, “I’ll ram the cockpit.” I made the decision I would take the tail off the aircraft.
Lt. Col. Marc Sasseville: We didn’t have a whole lot of options.
Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney: I had never been trained to scramble [mobilize] the aircraft. It would typically take about 20 minutes to start the jets, get the avionics systems going, go through all the preflight checks to make sure the systems were operating properly, program the computers in the aircraft. That’s not even including the time to look at the forms, do the walk-around of the airplane, and whatnot. We usually planned about half-an-hour to 40 minutes from the time you walked out the door to the time that you actually took off.
Col. George Degnon, vice commander, 113th Wing, Andrews Air Force Base: We did everything humanly possible to get the aircraft in the air.
Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney: I just got my radios up, and I was yelling at my crew chief, “Pull the chocks!” He pulled the chocks and I push my throttle. The crew chief was still running under the tail so that my gear would come up—there are safety pins that are all in the airplane—and so they were pulling all those safety pins as I was taxiing to go do an immediate take-off. I didn’t even have an inertia navigation unit. I didn’t have any of that set up. It was lucky it was a clear, blue day because we didn’t have all the avionics. They were not yet awake when we took off.
Lt. Col. Marc Sasseville: I was thinking, Wow, we’re in a little trouble here.
Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney: Sass and I fully expected to intercept Flight 93 and take it down.
Lt. Col. Marc Sasseville: I was going into this moral or ethical justification of the needs of the many versus the needs of the few.
Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney: I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off. If we did it right, this would be it.
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Lt. Col. Marc Sasseville, Star Trek fan. :bigthumb: