Twenty five years ago today, a 26 year old rookie fighter pilot took off from Andrews with no missiles, no bullets that mattered, and orders that meant she was not coming back. Heather Penney was a first lieutenant in the 121st Fighter Squadron, DC Air National Guard, the Capital Guardians. She had been flying F-16s for a short time and she was the only woman in her class. Her father, John Penney, was a retired Air Force colonel who had flown in Vietnam and was then flying airliners for United. That morning both towers were burning, the Pentagon had been hit, and there was a fourth airliner still in the sky heading for Washington. United 93. The alert jets that normally sit armed on the ramp were not available. The squadron's F-16s were loaded with roughly a hundred rounds of non explosive training ammunition, ballast used to keep the aircraft in trim. No AIM-9s. No AIM-120s. Nothing that would bring down a Boeing 757. Lieutenant Colonel Marc Sasseville looked at her and said he would take the cockpit. She said she would take the tail. That was the entire plan. Two unarmed fighters would fly into a loaded airliner, aimed like darts at a jet almost seven times their weight, because there was no other way to stop it before it reached the Capitol or the White House. Penney has said she thought about ejecting at the last second and decided against it. She did not trust herself to stay on target if part of her was thinking about getting out. They ran to the jets, skipped most of the checks, and pushed the throttles up before the engines were properly warm. She said later that she was going to be a missile with wings. What she did not know, what nobody in the cockpit knew, is that it was already over. At 10:03 United 93 went into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, nose down at roughly 580 miles an hour, because forty passengers and crew had taken a vote, boiled water, grabbed a drink cart and gone up the aisle at the men who had taken their airplane. Penney and Sasseville flew for about an hour and a half looking for a plane that no longer existed, then escorted Air Force One back toward Washington. She flew two tours in Iraq and made major. For years afterward she refused to be called the hero of that story. Her line was that the real ones were already dead in a Pennsylvania field, and that they were ordinary people, mothers and fathers and schoolteachers and salesmen, who figured out what was happening and did the math faster than the United States Air Force could get a jet off the ground. They did with their bare hands what she was willing to do with a fighter.