2024-05-20
26 分钟Welcome to the Conversation, a program that centres women's lives.
I'm Ela al Shamahi.
Today I'll be talking to two f 16 fighter pilots.
And it turns out women flying f 16s is something of a rarity.
We asked the us, dutch, norwegian and danish air forces how many trained female f 16 pilots had passed through their ranks over the years.
In the US, the total is 129.
In the Netherlands, it's three.
In Norway, it's two, and in Denmark, it's one.
Manya Block, formerly with the Royal Netherlands Air Force, and Heather Penny, formerly with the United States Air Force.
Welcome to you both.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Heather, most of us have memories of the 911 attacks in 2001 in New York and Washington, but yours are closer to the event than most.
Just six months after becoming qualified, you were given a mission to intercept hijacked flight 93 before it reached Washington, DC.
As you might imagine, it was a very intense morning.
All of us in the fighter squadron felt that we needed to get airborne and that we needed to protect and defend.
The challenge for us is that we were not an alert squadron.
So people imagine that the United States had all of these alert fighter squadrons like it was the cold War, that pilots were ready to jump in airplanes and take off within seconds to go defend our airspace.
And that just simply was not the case.
And so when DC was attacked as a training squadron, we did not have live weapons on board.