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Two F-16s took off over Washington D.C. with zero missiles, no live ammunition, and a pact.Colonel Marc Sasseville and 26-year-old Lieutenant Heather Penney were sitting in a routine morning briefing at Andrews Air Force Base when the news broke. First one plane into the World Trade Center. Then a second.Sasseville looked across the room at Penney: "Lucky, you're coming with me."There was just one fatal problem. Arming an F-16 takes would take to long and Washington didn't have minutes to spare. If a hijacked airliner was heading for the nation's capital, the jets themselves would have to be the weapons.Suiting up, they agreed on a strategy in seconds. Sasseville would ram the cockpit. Penney would take the tail."I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off," Penney later recalled. She ran to her fighter jet, screaming at the ground crew to pull the chocks, and launched into the sky at 10:42 a.m.For 90 agonizing minutes, they circled over a quieted sky hunting United Flight 93.They found nothing.Because miles away, in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Flight 93 was already down. At 10:03 a.m. - almost 40 minutes before Penney’s wheels left the tarmac - the passengers on board had fought back with the hijackers.Later, Penney did the math, and the realization has never left her: without the sacrifice of those passengers, Flight 93 would have hit Washington long before the air force fighters could ever get airborne.She spent the rest of the day patrolling the capital's skies and escorting Air Force One back home. But for the last 25 years, Heather Penney has flatly rejected the title of hero.In her eyes, her mission failed."The real heroes are the passengers on Flight 93," Penney says. "I was just an accidental witness to history." 🇺🇸