Well, good evening. Im chris brown, the Deputy Director of the Smithsonians National air and museum. And it is my to welcome you to tonights aviation lecture. Since 1982, this lecture series has spotlighted more than 140 of the biggest names in modern aviation history. Like all of our public programs. This lecture is presented free of charge. This is possible. Thanks. Through the generous support ge Aviation Private contributions like theirs are critical to our programs and exhibitions and it is my privilege to acknowledge them for their longstanding and valued. Representing ge aviation with us tonight is lisa crerar barclay, Digital Solutions leader of military Systems Operations at ge aviation. Lisa, to you and your colleagues at g. E. , we thank you for substantial and enduring support. Since we opened the museum here on the mall in 1976 and the uber hazy in chantilly in 2003. More. 350 Million People have walked through our doors to be informed and inspired by the history of flight and space travel. Drawing from the museums priceless collection of iconic artifacts, an intellectual trust our curators educate, docents, volunteers and others endeavor to tell stories about aerospace and how it has defined shaped the american experience. This evening are joined by a father team who, by virtue of their professional roles on. 11th 2001 offer us a unique glimpse into the horrors and tragedy of that fateful day. Not every aviation story is an uplifting or happy one. Indeed, for those of us professionally committed to the furtherance of aerospace, the horrific use of commercial jet airliners as weapons of terror was particularly. And yet we endured as a community and in the years since 911, the Aviation Industry has become more more accessible more affordable, more proficient, and even more influential than ever before. 911 for all its pain, tragedy is indeed a story to be told and remembered. To help that, i would like to introduce heather lucky penny. Most widely recognized for her service september 11th. Heather penney was part of the first wave of women who went directly into fighters from pilot training. She grew up around aviation and warbirds and applied to the Air National Guard to fly f16s as soon as she learned that congress had opened combat aviation to women. The first and only woman in the 121st Fighter Squadron and heather deployed to Operation Iraqi freedom for initial combat operations in nighttime scud hunting in the western deserts of iraq and also supported special teams. Heather flew the f16 for ten years before joining Lockheed Martin as the director of air force Aviation Training systems, specializing in government and strategic business development. Heathers passion for aviation has never faded. She has raced jets at, reno air races. She has 3000 hours with commercial instructor multiengine and air transport pilot ratings and volunteers. The Collings Foundation coping their b17 when her busy schedule permits, she enjoys flying her own stearman, a 1950 cessna 170. Along with her family and rescue dog. Fittingly she named gilmore after roscoe lion. Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great to introduce to you this evening. Heather lucky penny. So thank you all for coming out here tonight. And again, lisa i really thank you so much and the generosity of g. E. To support this lecture series, what the museum, what the air and space museum does and what the ge aviation lecture series allows was the museum to do is to tell these stories like mine so that people, like yourselves, can experience can experience history in a far more personal and hopefully impactful manner than when you just see the signs next to the airplane. So, again, thank you, lisa, for everything you and ge are doing to support lecture series to make it possible so that, for example, people like me can come listen to my heroes when they come and stand up on this podium. Now, im certainly not calling myself hero at all because. 11 was nothing that any of us planned and as you all know, because you all have your stories and your experiences of nine, 11, everything go one of us every single america was somehow touched by that day. We all have our connections. We all somehow lost either people, loved ones. So i appreciate the fact that you all are here today to listen to my 911 story because really all did that day was show up for work right right. We had just gotten from two weeks at red flag which at that point in my time as a young baby Fighter Pilot, the pinnacle of what i could ever hope for an experience. I had killed two migs. I had dropped bombs. I had been there for my time on target. And weve just gotten back from that that weekend we on saturday. So most people had taken that monday and tuesday and, wednesday off to reconnect with their families. I was single at the time, and so i went home on sunday, did my laundry and was ready to go to work. So that tuesday they were going through just the normal administration of running Fighter Squadron, right. What jets do we have . What sorties are we going to be flying . We were traditional mostly at the time were a guard unit. So a guard is is comprised of a few full time that make sure that the unit runs and all the administer action and is taken care of so that when the part timers show up that they can just jump in the jets and go and train. I was one of those few full time staff. Who needs check rides, whos doing upgrades. We just got back from red flag, so the jets were fitted with ters and external fuel tanks, ecm pods, and we had our training missiles board and we were moving into a training phase of dog fighting fighter maneuver. And we called it fm, just a lot of basic fun, if you ask me. But the maintainers were it was going to take a while to to to pull the the external fuel tank. And the ters there. It was going to take them a while to reconfigure jets to go do them to to clean it up. So we had slick, slick vipers. We could just go g r g our noses off, you know, i mean, so we had three guys that we could send down into the air force. Dare county arranges it down in North Carolina. We call it bully flight, whos a loose shooter, campbell was bully one. Eric parkinson was bully two. And then we had Billy Hutchison was bully. So they brief they take off. Theyre headed down to North Carolina to go bomb four quarters and strafe because its in like a little bit of low angle strafe. Everyone loves shooting the gun. And by the way, ive never seen a Fighter Pilot ever pull the gun and not go for we all make the noise so theyre down there theyre theyre bombing were sitting a in an administrative meeting and we get this knock at the door and an enlisted guy his noggin in with david chunks is what we call them. And dave says an airplane just flew into the World Trade Center and we looked outside because our room was right. The flight line, it was a huge plate window. And were thinking, how does that happen. Because as you know, i mean new york actually isnt that far away. Contrary what you know, traffic would have you believe actually really just kind of a stones throw as far as the bird flies and we share very similar weather patterns. We look outside and its a perfect crystal autumn day that we here how what . So were thinking know did someone poach their you know their their approach into laguardia. I mean it must have just been one of those little sightseeing airplanes going down the hudson. It kind of made a wrong turn, maybe. Was scud running. We made a couple of jokes about little airplanes bouncing off of buildings and. And then because we they dont do any damage, they just sort of fall the ground their planes, that is. And and continued on it wasnt i mean it wasnt really anything that triggered. Until a few minutes later chunks knocks on the door again says another airplane flew into the other World Trade Center it was on. We got up from our chairs and walked to the bar where we had the television and we saw what everyone else in america saw that day. We saw the footage of these airliners crashing to the trade centers. And we were absolutely. So people have asked, how could this have been possible . Right. I mean, didnt we have on alert . Well, once upon a time, we sat, but that was before we got our f16s, i mean, we gave up alert when we had shifted from, you know, the the thuds the to the air force. And so wed been a long time since we had that alert because if you recall, in 1991, when the wall fell, the soviet union fell, we didnt need it anymore. Right. The soviet bear threat was gone. And so we really we pared down our entire military through the peace dividend. And on september 10th and on september 11th, there were really only four units sitting alert, looking out over the oceans and over polar region to ensure that, no stray bombers came over the north pole to newcastle i mean that was that was the paris that we were living in. So no one ever imagined that that the threat would come from inside. Guide we had never we just had never conceived that something. So. Ingenious in the most horrible way could be done. So nearly immediately. To mark cecil, who is our deo at the time, he he really he to the operations desk raising cain dan cain was our weapons officer turns me goes lucky i need you i got to to build up some duties get us some maps, get us some takeoff and landing data. I dont know what to look like, but just make it happen. So brandon rasmussen, eiger and i go to the Flight Mission planning room. We start Mission Planning for something. We dont know what again, i mean, this is this is not the defensive air mission that i had for that i knew how to do. I mean, there was a certain point where you had a combat air patrol, and ive got a point that im defending, but defending against who . We dont have awacs. We dont have you know, we just have our own little bitty radars and we dont know who is hostile, whos friendly. And were not. I mean, nothing is clear. Everything is as confused is you could have imagined, but we do our best we we print out our our lineup cards with our take off and landing data. We get to sets. Some of the jets are clean and some of the jets are still heavy and dirty and our air to ground configuration, we print out maps of the entire local area. We put steer points on top of where we know government buildings are, where memorials are. We load up Data Transfer cartridges. Our data sees theyre like these. Theyre like these big bricks that are really kind of like thumb drives your jet where you can take all of your data and then put it into the jet and download it so that you can accelerate and program all of your avionics. We get that done. And i go and i go to hawk the ops desk. Now ill need to go through a little bit of bureaucracy because. The National Guard in dc is not like the National Guard in any other state, in other states, you know, the national has two chains of command. Youve got your federal chain of command, which only occurs when you get activated to deploy. And that in that case chat to the active Duty Air Force and youre for all intents and purposes, active Duty Air Force. And then thats your federal chain of the civilian chain of command goes up to the states. And were seeing that now where we have texas and florida and montana and washington, oregon, activating elements of their National Guard to serve their domestic requirement to protect their people in their state. And so theres a very chain of command that goes up to the governor well, d. C. Doesnt have a governor and our chain of command did not go to the mayor. Our chain of command on the civilian side went to the president of the United States. If you can imagine, he was pretty busy at that point in time. And honestly, i dont think he even realized that that was that we were a resource that he had because his authority was traditionally he delegated down through the secretariat to the of the army. And thats certainly not what the secretary of the army was thinking about. How do i get some defensive counter error up d. C. . Thats that was on his mind so were trying to get activated so that we can were trying to get the chain of command energized. Were trying to find who has the Legal Authority to tell us to launch how do we get. Because we cant just off on our on our own theres a very real and important reason why the civilian have the command of our military. So as as as much as we know, need to be airborne. We cant. So were grounded our general officer, her Wing Commander david worley had come from the wing building and hes sitting by the office desk and hes making phone. Hes trying to find to energize through his you know, hes hes hes our top. Hes making as many calls as he can raise. And cain, dan cain, our weapons officer. Two takes a risk and calls down to the bomb dump. Now the bomb dump is where we keep all of our explosives. Its where we keep all of our training missiles. It was where we keep all of our bullets, where we keep all of our bombs. We do have some bombs. We do have some live missiles, but we dont fly with them every. You certainly wouldnt want bombs and live missiles flying over your house on a daily basis if we have no intention of dropping them, were using them and that make any sense to us either because would just simply wear out those systems and. Oh, by the way, we dont keep explosives and the fuzes in the bodies or not some missile body or bomb body all built up, ready to go. You have it all separated. You to build it. It takes time, for example, when we go to war, its a three day cycle from the planning process to come down the wing for the bomb dump, to know exactly how many bombs they need to build, to actually put all that together to bring it out on the flight, to configure the aircraft. It doesnt happen instantaneously. So raising calls down to the bomb dump and tells them to, build us up some nines, some heat seeking sidewinders. Can you imagine if youre one of the enlisted airmen down in the bomb dump, youre not watching television. Youre probably in the middle of a card game and you get a phone call from the weapons officer and telling you, build me up some missiles. No live ones, just trust me. Can you imagine what be going through your mind . You have no air tasking order, youve got no legal papers work, no paper trail to that. This is a a legal order for you to execute. So it really is a testament to the vision, the and the courage that rayson must have had to make that phone call because we desperately needed those missiles, even though in my case, it wouldnt be in time. Being dc again. Something unique to operating out of andrews is we always to deal with the hassle of force one any time a distinguished visitor moves on Andrews Air Force base. An especially when its the president the entire base shuts down. I mean, you drive around the perimeter, you cant take off, you cant land and for very good reason to secure the important leaders of our nation. But when youre little, tiny fighter, that doesnt carry a lot of gas, but burns a lot of it quickly. Its a big problem. So we been working with the secret service to try to develop better coordination so that we could facilitate our training well as meet their security requirements and as part of developing that relationship, we had brought some of the secret service over to our unit and flown them in the back seat of the f16s to prove them that we are actually good guys. So we knew who they were and they knew who we were as. A result it was the pentagon was hit that Vice President cheney said, do have some fighters at andrews. Somebody get those guys airborne. And they knew who to call. I mean, as i mentioned, when we had a peace dividend in the 1990s and we drew down all of our forces and drew down our alert forces, and we were no longer sitting alert either, even if even if. The First Air Force of nora, if that is authority had known that we were at andrews i dont even have heyward, they would they would not have the Legal Authority to be able to activate. Its its a really unfortunate lesson that. Bureaucracy actually matters and organization it actually matters. And it has real world consequence forces. So fortunately, we finally the authorization from president from Vice President cheney get somebody airborne. Sas looks at me, he says, all right, lucky youre with me. Reason you take iger. You guys wait till you have missiles on board. Okay. I want to make sure you guys have missiles lucky lets go sas and i run down the hallway to life support or putting on a suit and putting on my vest and throwing my know, throwing on my harness and making sure ive got my helmet on my my dtc. Ive got my lineup cards, ive got my vest. And sas looks at me and he says, ill take the cockpit. I knew that i would take the tail i remember my dad had been involved in a Safety Investigation analyzing a crash of a 737 out of colorado springs. And they had lost their empanadas, had lost the vertical in the horizontal tails, and the airplane just went straight in. There was just nothing left. There is no way they could have pulled out, no way they could controlled it. And the other thing is, if they did, they wouldnt have glided in, would be no fan pattern of debris it would just be straight down. So i knew that i would take the tail were running out as fast as we can go as fast as i can go. Sas is outrunning me and you know, hes a major, hes an old guy. I you know, with. With all my flight, with all my flight gear had nearly doubled body weight he runs the first jet on the line and i run to the next one again. Recall that you. You know, im just a brand new lieutenant. Ive recently become combat mission ready. I just went to my first red flag. And as every pilot know