Female 9/11 fighter pilot reveals harrowing moment she braced for ‘Kamikaze’ mission to smash Flight 93 out the sky

A HEROIC US Air Force fighter pilot has spoken of the moment she braced herself for a suicide mission to knock Flight 93 out the sky during the horror 9/11 attacks.

Lieutenant Heather 'Lucky' Penney was one of those tasked with stopping the hijacked plane "by any means possible" following the earlier attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

However, as Lt. Penney and Lt. Col. Marc Sasseville had no missiles on board their F-16s they knew the only way to stop the United Airlines jet would be to "weaponise" their own planes.

"We would be ramming the aircraft. We didn’t have (missiles) on board to shoot the airplane down,” Lt. Penney said.

“As we were putting on our flight gear in the life support shop, Sass looked at me and said, ‘I’ll ram the cockpit.’ I made the decision I would take the tail off the aircraft.”

It had already been agreed by their bosses that this kind of attack would be a last resort if they could not otherwise divert the aircraft.

At the time, Sasseville said, he “was going into this moral or ethical justification of the needs of the many versus the needs of the few.”

It was a clearly a Kamikaze mission, but both pilots were ready to die if that's what it took.

“I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off,” Penney said. “If we did it right, this would be it.”

The suicide mission never happened as passengers took matters into their own hands and famously took on their hijackers with the call 'let's roll.'

Penney said: "The real heroes are the passengers on Flight 93 who were willing to sacrifice themselves."

The passengers had earlier reported that the hijackers had assaulted the cockpit and forced people to the back of the plane claiming a bomb was aboard.

They then learned from conversations with their loved ones that the World Trade Center in New York and The Pentagon in Virginia had already been attacked.

It was at this time that passengers Mark Bingham, Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett and Jeremy Glick formulated a plan to overpower the hijackers.

"Are you ready?” a fellow passenger was heard asking Beamer towards the end one phone call. “Let’s roll,” Beamer replied.

The passengers then make another run for the cockpit. “In the cockpit! If we don’t, we’ll die,” an unnamed male passenger says.

Seconds later, another passenger yells, “Roll it,” which was “a possible reference to a drink cart passengers might have used to ram the cockpit door.";

Juts after 10am, the plane crashed into a field near a reclaimed coal strip mine in Pennsylvania, just 20 minutes in flight time from Washington DC.

A new book called 'The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11' by Garrett M. Graff  now details the harrowing moments before it all ended.

Graff’s book includes accounts from phone operators and loved ones who spoke to passengers aboard the flight before they brought it crashing down.

The news comes as a traffic map video has emerged which shows the mass grounding of planes in the wake of the terror attack which left thousands dead.

The animation was created by NASA using FAA air traffic control data from September 11, 2001.

It shows the rapid grounding of air traffic across the US, and redirection of incoming international traffic, in response to the terrorist attacks.