The rookie pilot who was ready to give her life on Sept. 11

Retropod

The Washington Post

History, Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.5 • 670 Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2018

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Heather Penney was among the first female combat pilots in the country. On Sept. 11, 2001, she got a mission: Bring down the fourth hijacked plane hurtling towards Washington.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod. A show about the past rediscovered.
0:11.6	September 11, 2001. Lieutenant Heather Penny waits on a runway at Maryland's Andrews Air Force Base,
0:22.0	ready to fly.
0:28.4	That morning, two commercial airliners crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York.
0:30.6	A third flew into the Pentagon.
0:35.7	A fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington.
0:38.7	Penny had a simple mission.
0:40.4	Stop it.
0:45.5	She didn't have ammunition or missiles, though.
0:48.6	She didn't have anything to attack the plane with,
0:51.0	except her own plane.
0:53.0	So that was the plan.
0:58.0	Penny and her commanding officer would fly their fighter jets straight into the hijacked Boeing 757.
1:06.0	Penny was one of the first generations of female combat pilots in the country.
1:14.7	Her nickname was lucky.
1:17.5	She grew up smelling jet fuel.
1:19.7	Her father flew in Vietnam.
1:22.3	Though she earned her pilot's license in college at Purdue,
1:25.5	she had no plans to join the military. She majored in
1:29.1	literature. She wanted to become a teacher. But something else was also holding back a career in the
1:35.3	air. Combat aviation wasn't open to women. In graduate school, that changed.
1:46.8	And so did everything for Penny.
	...

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