Extended interview: F-16 pilots recall mission to intercept Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001

Hello, I'm Nora Odonnell, as we mark 22 years since the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, we remember those lives lost, the families no longer whole, and the heroes who risked their lives to help others, including two fighter

pilots

here in Washington. In the DC area, we first told her story two years ago, but it's still very unknown and we think everyone should hear it. We've included in this

extended

cutaway air traffic control audio covering the airspace over the East Coast as a reminder of the confusion as it all unfolded that Tuesday morning, which is when Mark Sasville, SAS call sign and Heather Peny, the call sign Lucky, took off after the World Trade Center was hit with a single

mission

: protect the nation's capital, no matter what it cost.

American Airlines Emergency Line, please indicate your emergency Hello, this is Ned American Airlines calling. I am monitoring a call on

flight

11, the stewardess is informing our representatives that the pilot has all been stabbed, we were hit by surprise, we contacted Air Traffic Control, they will handle this as a confirmation. hijacking and we weren't going to be stuck on the ground watching America get hit again weapon Ser F Hello Boston Senate tmu, we have a problem here, we have a hijacked plane heading towards New York and we need you, we need someone. send some F-16s or something to help us, this is the real world or exercise, no, this is not a manest exercise, so if you are in a SC, no, we have several situations happening here, it is escalating to the big thing and We need to get the military involved in this, well what's going on?

Get me someone who has the authority to put military in the air now. Well, thank you both for doing this. I think, as much as we all know about 911, and reflect on its history, it is one that many people don't know. Let's start 20 years ago. What were you both doing when you found out about the first attack on the United States? General. It was a normal Tuesday morning. We had just returned from a big deployment in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, where we had a lot of training to do and we had a lot of success. We had a normal scheduling meeting and in the middle of that is when things start to develop.

And all of us by surprise, before you know it, the phones are there. ringing and we're talking to the White House jock we're talking to the Secret Service uh trying to really understand what's going on and um one thing led to another before we got too far down the road that we were Trying to take off so soon as we could to make sure another plane didn't hit its target, essentially Heather, describe where you were when you first heard about the World Trade Center. I was sitting in the scheduling meeting with SAS and some of the other

pilots

who were part of the squadron's senior leadership that day, so there was SAS, Dan Raisen Kane was there, it was Mark Drifter Valentine's first day, the 11th.

September, we had Phil the dog Thompson, he was our

flight

supervisor, so we were. we were working on what was going on, how we were going to fly that week, who was available, who had check trips that month, it was just normal administration and David hits Kahan, one of our enlisted soldiers knocks on the door and opens the door and says a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center and I remember thinking hard about how that could have happened. It was a spectacularly clear blue day and I don't know about you, but I think most of us assumed it was a small plane that was like It's a small general aviation Cessna and everyone knows that those planes just bounce off buildings, so They don't actually cause damage, so I remember some inappropriate jokes, but it wasn't until he came back and said that a second plane hit the second World Trade Center. and it was on purpose and that's when we all walked up to the bar and saw the images that everyone else saw that morning, that's when we really knew that the nation was under attack.

I remember when the second plane crashed. I immediately thought it was us. We're at war I immediately thought someone else had just hit the building. Wow, the whole building collapsed. This is not an accident. I think we thought the same thing and in my mind my instinct was that we needed to react, we need to get up. in the air with whatever we have, but this is December 7, 1941, many years later and we cannot allow another plane to reach its target if they come this way and, not long after, the Pentagon is attacked, we were all in mode of jet here at the wing, it was a full effort by the wing to get the planes ready to start taking out missiles and get some sort of airborne capability.

Well, I told the SD that so far we need to get them. The wrestlers ruined Manhattan because we don't know how many guys there are outside of B, it could be two, it could be more. I think once we got past that initial actions phase, so to speak, we began to understand that we were going to have a long... ongoing security commitment for many years, I had no idea it would take that long, but you were thinking we had We had to get up in the air, when the orders fell, so we never received any official assignments.

White House Athlete, if there was anything we could get into the air, then we were at that time our squadron, our wing was not part of NORAD, we were not part of that task structure to defend the United States, so when they indicated that what turned out Fight 93 was coming down the river as we were talking about it, that told us there may be more to come, we need to do something and that essentially became our unofficial task and we did what we had to do. Heather describes what Did you understand when the White House called and what they wanted you to do?

We knew immediately as soon as we saw the footage that we needed to protect and defend, but since General Sasville said we were not a warning squadron, we didn't have any. missiles and we were not part of the command and control chain, how could we obtain Authority? Everyone in the squadron, everyone in the wing immediately began to take action. I remember our intelligence officer, David, the crazy guy at MCN, making phone calls to the airline reservation counters trying to find out who it was, you know who was still in the air, who it was, what planes were taking off, what they were doing. airliners, I was trying to get an idea of ​​what was happening within the airspace when we finally got the call from the White House, our

mission

.

Protect and defend was a no-brainer, although at the time we had no missiles on board, we needed to do everything we could to prevent any further attacks from reaching our nation's capital, the White House. I come from Boston, well, we. let's spin and burn and get it going, well here we go, this is what we're going to do here east of the white house right now, so describe that, I mean, you just take me back to that moment, you know? Was it let's get up? The White House just called as well as it communicates with you, get on the planes like H, describe that to me, General, so essentially it was uh uh uh Phil, the dog Thompson, uh he was standing behind the service desk, uh, talking, uh, uh. to the Secret Service and that was the demand signal that there might be more to come, so that's all we really needed.

He called the wing commander. The wing commander came down. We met with a quick briefing to assess the threat. Find out what. We had to do it and hopefully I was the first one to take off and we just went down, grabbed our flight gear and got on the planes. Lieutenant Colonel Denman, the maintenance officer at the time was there pulling. pins uh and we jumped on the planes and took off without wasting any time uh it just happened so fast uh because of the severity of the problem we knew we didn't have time to spare when did they tell you that you could shoot down a plane, if he didn't respond, that came a little longer late, once we were on the air, that all sorted out the vice president, as you know, and we all know at this point, he made a statement, so it took a while for that to come. down, through the Wing Commander here, and once we were in the air, we understood what the rules of engagement were and that was really part of the concern, in the fog of war at that time, in the confusion that we needed .

Be very careful not to make the situation worse, but you are fighting to get the plane in the air. What did you understand about the rules of engagement? Heather, we understood what the threat was. We were looking for a rogue airliner flying. low you were not communicating with air traffic control go to 06 traffic is at 11:00 and 5 miles northbound fast moving type and unknown altitude are you the traffic? Do you know what type it is? You can see it looks like a 757 sir, a 757, can you? calculate your altitude it looks like you have a CO altitude right now sir choose 86 thank you so we had a very good idea contextually of what a hostile target would comprise as general sasville said the indications were that there was a plane arriving from the northwest. under the pomac river and that was the initial target we were looking for and we would have to do whatever it took to prevent it from reaching DC after SAS got us out and disinfected the airspace enough to make sure there was no threat. on that axis and then brought us back to DC.

I remember you worked with pic air traffic control and taught them how to become Air Battle Man managers because there was an incredible response from the police helicopter and military airlift medics, so even though when we took off, the airspace was dead calm when we got back and S set up a counter-rotating combat Air Patrol, all kinds of planes and helicopters started flying and we had to distort who was a good guy, who was a Medevac, who was uh, you know, the official government that he was just an innocent individual who had no idea what had happened and could potentially be a threat and air traffic control, the controllers on the pomac tron, the radar system that manages all the airspace around D.C., they did it. fantastic job, I mean, general, how long do pre-flight checks usually take?

It's usually a 20 minute program, 15 to 20 minutes, nice and calm, and making sure everything is organized, where you need the right fuel, with the right tire pressure, the oxygen pressure and the like and how long did you have in 9911 um I arrived right at the cockpit and that's part of the team effort that Lucky talks about, it was a team effort and the maintainers do a great job, it's a second check when we jump so we both trust our maintainers, that's the special bond that pilots and crew chiefs have and uh, and we both jumped in and took off right away, actually, Heather, I read you were saying, pull the blocks, what do you mean? moving around, you guys were moving around and taking things off the plane to get up as quickly as possible, you know, jump on the plane like general sasville said, I mean, normally it would take up to 20 minutes and we didn't have primary care doctors. so clearly we didn't have 20 minutes and I had never really been trained on how to code an airplane, how to code an F-16 and to be able to do that you had to do it today we call it Hawk Hawking, a jet.

There are systems you can preset so we can take off and go very fast, but I had never been trained in any of that, the Jets clearly hadn't been set up for that, so I had to compensate. my own coding procedures you didn't have all the instruments on when I jumped on the plane my main concern was what is the minimum I need to do to make this plane airworthy checking the engine checking the flight control but I had no navigation system, he had no radar, none of the systems had time to do their normal checks, he was just waiting for the flight line to work and his F-16s were not armed with missiles, why not?

Well, we never did. which never since we weren't part of the Enterprise alert um it's actually a little dangerous to have active missiles loaded all the time so we had them available but they weren't assembled we didn't store them together right? That's a huge Hazard, so they were not assembled let alone brought here to the flight line let alone loaded onto the planes, which happened about an hour after we took off and therefore elevated and more had missiles on their planes when they took off. I mean, if you remember after the fall of the Soviet Union, the nation wanted a peace dividend and they really wanted to cut the entire military, so they cut the Air Force in half and therefore all the units The nation's borders to protect us from Soviet nuclear bombs had been reduced to just five alert units for the entire nation.Specifically, it is a much more operational force where we are better trained.

Our team is very similar to what active duty has, so I'm sure if a similar scenario were to happen again. although in a different domain, let's just say that I think our ability to respond in an equally successful way has greatly improved Heather. I understand that later that day you escorted Air Force One and President Bush back home it was a sense of relief escorting President Bush was It was an honor, it was also disappointing, uh, at that point, I think the stage had calmed down enough, we had planes that were armed at the time, we also had additional resources from NORAD, so there was a waxed plane.

We had a tanker, there were additional fighters that were in the air, so it was an honor to be able to bring President Bush back home to Andrew Air Force Base, but it definitely didn't have the importance of our first mission 20 years later. Do you think about that day 911? In some ways, the legacy of 9911 is always with me when I think about the mission we didn't have to do because the passengers of Flight 93 did. I also want to give you heads, Washington bosses. go ahead United 93, do you have information on that? Yeah, it's down, it's down, yeah, when did it land? because it didn't land.

Oh, it's down, yes, somewhere northeast of Camp David. Clearly, our nation not only owes a lot to those heroes, but also to SAS and I Owe Our Lives to them too and they made a decision that they should not have made, that they should not have had to have taken, that they should not have had to have made the decision to sacrifice their lives, but that is also why when I think about 9/11, instead of being overcome by trauma, horror and tragedy, I am actually overcome by hope because of the character and the bravery and service to all of us that they demonstrated that day and the other 911 heroes, the first responders and you know, the neighbors who opened their homes to strangers, that this is what it means to be an American and we see it today with with Americans opening their homes to strangers, it is true that that day showed the best of who we are and that is part of what I hope to live through my daily decisions and honor his legacy and his gift to us, so Somehow I live my living as normally as possible is the best way we can say that the terrorist didn't win, that we are still who we are going to be and that we are going to live our lives as normally as possible and at the same time, hopefully, with that kind of life. of awareness and mindfulness of being our better angels I think about it every day I work at the Pentagon I drive by the 9/11 Memorial every day those on Flight 93 who paid the ultimate price actively participated knew what they were doing those are the real heroes those who perished on the planes inside the Pentagon inside the towers those are the real heroes I think an event as traumatic as that was looking back long term in the long Arc of time we will still prevail we will preserve our values ​​and we will not be deterred there is nothing about a traumatic event like that or anything else our enemies throw at us that slows us down well General and Heather thank you so much for sharing your story with us, thank you and thank you for your time your service yes thank you thank you it's quite a story