Kamikaze: F-16 pilots planned to ram Flight 93

[jimmy olsen]

105 shells wouldn't have been able to take a jet liner down? Dozens of minutes to arm the plane?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44459345/ns/us_news-9_11_ten_years_later/#.Tmq3FOxLNac

Kamikaze: F-16 pilots planned to ram Flight 93

Pilots scrambled to intercept wayward plane so quickly there was no time to arm their jets

msnbc.com
updated 9/9/2011 4:17:05 PM ET

When the pilots of the 121st Fighter Squadron of the D.C. Air National Guard got the order to intercept Flight 93, the hijacked jet speeding toward the nation's capital, they figured there was a decent chance they would not come back alive.

That's because the F-16 jets they were rushing to get airborne were largely unarmed, recalls one of the pilots, then-Lt. Heather Penney, leaving them one option to take out the wayward plane: a kamikaze mission.

"We wouldn't be shooting it down. We would be ramming the aircraft, because we didn't have weapons on board to be able to shoot the airplane down," Penney told C-SPAN.

In the days before Sept. 11, there were no armed aircraft standing guard in Washington, D.C., ready to scramble at the first sign of trouble.

And with a Boeing 757 aircraft speeding in the direction of Washington, D.C., Penney and her commanding officer, Col. Marc Sasseville, couldn't wait the dozens of minutes it was going to take to properly arm their respective jets.

"It was decided that Sass and I would take off first, even though we knew we would end up having to take off before our aircraft were armed," Penney, among the first generation of American female fighter pilots, said to C-SPAN.

Penney said each jet had 105 lead-nosed bullets on board, but little more.

"As we were putting on our flight gear ... Sass looked at me and said, 'I'll ram the cockpit.' And I had made the decision that I would take the tail off the aircraft," Penney recalled.

Both pilots thought about whether they would have enough time to eject before impact.

"I was hoping to do both at the same time," Sasseville told the Washington Post. "It probably wasn't going to work, but that's what I was hoping."

Penney, a rookie fight pilot, worried about missing her target.

"You only got one chance. You don't want to eject and then miss. You've got to be able to stick with it the whole way," she said.

The pilots chose their impact spots in order to minimize the debris field on the ground. A plane with no nose and no tail would likely fall straight out of the sky, its forward momentum halted, Penney said.

"The people on Flight 93 were heroes, but they were going to die no matter what," she said. "My concern was how do I minimize collateral damage on the ground."

As it turned out, Sasseville and Penney never intercepted Flight 93. The passengers of that doomed plane made sure they didn't have to.

For more on this story, watch C-SPAN's interview with Penney and read the Washington Post's account of that day.

[Caliga]

It's cute how the government is slowly admitting in stages like this that it took out Flight 93.  A couple of weeks ago we heard Bush say that he gave the order to shoot down airliners if they threatened targets in DC.  I don't think I'd heard that before.

[Razgovory]

Great, our pilots have been taking lessons from the Russians.

[Ideologue]

I don't know much about shooting down jet liners, but the tale sounds a little tall.  They weren't even going to try shooting it before they rammed it?

P.S.: If they wanted to limit ground damage, again, wouldn't shooting one plane town be preferable to crashing three?

[The Brain]

I don't know much about shooting down jet liners, but the tale sounds a little tall.  They weren't even going to try shooting it before they rammed it?

P.S.: If they wanted to limit ground damage, again, wouldn't shooting one plane town be preferable to crashing three?

I couldn't live in a one plane town. I'd suffocate. I'm a big city boy.

[Mr.Penguin]

As i remember it, was the planes closest to Flight 93 only armed with inert training ammo for their 20mm guns as they were returning from a training mission. They wasn't sure that the few hundred inert rounds they had left was enough to bring down the the plane so a ramming attack was ordered as an option...

[jimmy olsen]

I have a hard time imagining that a hundred rounds wouldn't tear a wing off, inert or not.

[Mr.Penguin]

I have a hard time imagining that a hundred rounds wouldn't tear a wing off, inert or not.

A hundred rounds is a 1 second burst with a 20mm Vulcan gun, so you only got one change to hit the plane and at the same time do enough structural damage to bring down the plane, not as easy as it sounds... 

[jimmy olsen]

I have a hard time imagining that a hundred rounds wouldn't tear a wing off, inert or not.

A hundred rounds is a 1 second burst with a 20mm Vulcan gun, so you only got one change to hit the plane and at the same time do enough structural damage to bring down the plane, not as easy as it sounds...

Isn't that past the point where rate of fire becomes counterproductive?

[The Brain]

It's not easy to bring down a big multi-engine plane with gunfire. The number of bombers that came back from Germany looking like Swiss cheese comes to mind.

[Mr.Penguin]

I have a hard time imagining that a hundred rounds wouldn't tear a wing off, inert or not.

A hundred rounds is a 1 second burst with a 20mm Vulcan gun, so you only got one change to hit the plane and at the same time do enough structural damage to bring down the plane, not as easy as it sounds...

Isn't that past the point where rate of fire becomes counterproductive?

Well, normally would you carry around 600 rounds with the Vulcan gun, usually incendiary and HE rounds in order to do max damage with a short burst, as you only can expect the target to be in your sights for a split second, also remember on board guns on air crafts are secondary armament these days... 

[Zanza]

Couldn't pilot of a jet fighter eject a few seconds before impact and thus vastly increase his chance for survival? Or would the aircraft veer off course then?

[MadBurgerMaker]

I'm no combat pilot or anything, but I don't really see why they would need to directly tear a wing off or cause the fuselage to come apart or whatever.  This is a 757 we're talking about, not a B-17. They're not really built for the possibility of a bunch of bullets hitting them (from what I understand, airliners can be surprisingly tough, but they're still not "combat" aircraft).  A hundred rounds each seems like it would be plenty to at least cause catastrophic damage to one of the two engines hanging off of that thing, which in turn seems like it would probably damage the wing as well when it came all apart.  The "kamikaze option" seems like it should be more of a fallback in case they both missed with their 100 rounds. 

I dunno.  This rum is tasting really good right now though.  Pecan Street from P-ville, baby.

[Mr.Penguin]

Couldn't pilot of a jet fighter eject a few seconds before impact and thus vastly increase his chance for survival? Or would the aircraft veer off course then?

Not sure, I don't think that Japanese style ramming attacks has ever really been tested with modern jets...

[Razgovory]

Couldn't pilot of a jet fighter eject a few seconds before impact and thus vastly increase his chance for survival? Or would the aircraft veer off course then?

Well, it might slightly increase his chance of survival.