On the morning of September 11, two United States Air Force pilots climbed into the cockpits of their F-16 fighter jets with a clear objective. They had to stop a hijacked commercial airliner from crashing into Washington D.C. There was just one massive problem facing the aviators. Their fighter jets carried absolutely no live ammunition. To bring down the Boeing 757, the pilots agreed to use their own aircraft as missiles, knowing they would not survive the impact.
A Desperate Scramble at Andrews Air Force Base
As the attacks unfolded in New York and at the Pentagon, radar operators tracked United Airlines Flight 93 turning toward the nation’s capital. At Andrews Air Force Base, located roughly 24 kilometers (15 miles) outside of Washington, the military urgently ordered jets into the sky.
Lieutenant Heather Penney and her commanding officer, Major Marc Sasseville, rushed to their F-16s. Because the military did not keep fully armed jets on standby for domestic threats at that time, their planes held only dummy bullets used for training. Arming the jets with actual missiles would take an hour. The hijacked plane was minutes away.
The Decision to Ram the Airliner
Sasseville and Penney strapped into their seats. They received authorization to bring down Flight 93 by any means necessary. With empty weapon bays, the two pilots established a grim tactical plan. Sasseville looked at Penney and told her he would crash his jet directly into the cockpit of the commercial airliner.
Penney immediately responded that she would take the tail section. They planned to eject just before the moment of impact, but both aviators understood that escaping the massive debris field of a mid-air collision at hundreds of miles per hour was a physical impossibility.
Hunting for Flight 93
The two unarmed F-16s launched into the empty skies over the East Coast. They pushed their aircraft to speeds exceeding 600 miles per hour (965 kilometers per hour). Without radar guidance from ground control, which was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of air traffic, Penney and Sasseville flew low over the landscape.
They scanned the horizon visually, hunting for a massive airplane flying at an unusually low altitude. They cleared the airspace over the Pentagon and flew northwest into Pennsylvania, fully prepared to execute their fatal maneuver the second they spotted the target.
The Passengers Bring Down the Plane
Penney and Sasseville never found their target. As the fighter jets patrolled the skies, the passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 fought back against the hijackers. A struggle in the cabin forced the aircraft to crash into an empty field in Shanksville,
Pennsylvania, approximately 200 kilometers (125 miles) away from its intended target in Washington. The unarmed F-16 pilots continued to fly combat air patrols for the remainder of the day, completely unaware that the people on board the commercial flight had already prevented the attack.