Three F-16s that flew in defense of Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001, will be retired and preserved as museum artifacts.
The three planes all flew on 9/11: two were among the first three jets to scramble in defense of the capital and the third escorted Air Force One as it returned to Washington later in the day.
On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist groups hijacked four U.S. airliners, with two striking the twin World Trade Center towers in New York City and the third slamming into the Pentagon near Washington, D.C. The fourth plane was the one that would eventually crash in Shanksville, Pa.
This week, on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the National Guard Bureau confirmed that the three planes would be saved:
- Tail number 85-1438, flown by now-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, will go to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. His plane was the third to scramble on 9/11.
- Tail number 85-1461, flown by now-retired Lt. Gen. Marc Sasseville, will become a static display at Joint Base Andrews. He was the first to scramble, but this was the jet he flew as escort for Air Force One at the end of the day.
- Tail number 86-0255, flown by Heather Penney, now director of research at AFA’s Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies, will go to the American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Mass. Penney’s was the second plane to scramble, flying with Sasseville.
Saving the Vipers
Members of the wing began research more than a year ago to figure what had happened to the jets flown on that fateful day, tracking down old paperwork to figure out who signed out which aircraft and then to discover where those tails were today.
Working with the National Guard Association of the United States, a nonprofit association that advocates for the Guard, they reached out to the Air Force, the Air National Guard, the White House, and others, offering ideas for preserving the historic aircraft under the National Museum of the United States Air Force Heritage Program.
Among the D.C. National Guard F-16s flown on 9/11, one remains in regular flying status with the Air National Guard’s 162nd Wing in Tucson, Ariz. That was the plane Caine flew, which will eventually go to the Air Force Museum.
Guard advocates learned three other planes flown on 9/11 had been converted into QF-16 Full-Scale Aerial Target drones. One—the jet Sasseville scrambled in—was destroyed at the end of its flying life in a missile test. The remaining two were headed for a similar fate when the issue of saving the planes was raised with the Air Force and others.
Jon “Ice” Eisberg, vice president at NGAUS, said once the issues were clear, the challenge was getting the attention of the right people.
“This was a team effort,” Eisberg said. “We just reached out to some of our normal contacts. We went to the National Security Council. We went to Office of Public Liaison in the White House. We went to the Pentagon, and we alerted some folks up on Capitol Hill to this issue.”
The challenge in saving the planes was that QF-16s are a limited resource. The conversions are expensive, about $5 million apiece. The last of 127 conversions was delivered to the Air Force by contractor Boeing in April 2025, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine’s 2026 USAF & USSF Almanac.
QF-16 drones are used for targeting, and once their available flying hours are used up, they can be used in destructive live ordnance tests. One program that would benefit from such tests is the AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile, which the Air Force is developing to extend the range of air-to-air combat capabilities beyond visual range.
Still, saving the planes was a priority, and the Air Force came up with a solution: Run down the clock on the QF-16s available flying time, and when their flying hours were all used up, transfer the planes for preservation.
The 9/11 Mission
In a National Guard Bureau video created for the 25th anniversary, Caine recounted his 9/11 experience. “I was running our flying program” that day, Caine recalled. When he saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center on TV, “it was clear that the United States was at war.”
Caine, a major and the wing’s weapons officer at the time, called for live weapons to be readied on the flightline, but getting weapons ready takes time. Soon after, the White House called, he said, “telling us to get airborne.”
Joining Sasseville, a major and the wing’s operations director, and two junior pilots, Penney and Brandon “Igor” Rasmussen, Caine said the group formulated “a hasty, quickly constructed gameplan.”
The clock was ticking as they waited for official authority to launch, and once they had that, weapons were still not ready. Sasseville, who would eventually rise to become Vice Chief of the National Guard Bureau, told Penney as they headed to their plane that they would have to ram the airliner.
“We had an entire wing of support behind us, getting things moving that day, reacting to that terrible attack,” he said. “The White House communicated with us because we were one of the few units in a position to actually do something. … We took off as soon as we could.”
Penney, a young lieutenant and the daughter of an experienced fighter pilot, has wondered why she got the nod that day. “I like to think it was because I was a good pilot,” she said in a recent conversation. “But I think it was because I was single. It was just me and a dog.”
Everyone was operating on adrenaline, Sassevile said. “No one asked any questions.”
Once on the flightline, they dispensed with the routine pilot’s precheck, climbing directly into their planes, trusting their maintainers to have gotten everything ready. Penney had never scrambled an aircraft before—or even trained to.
They took off without clear rules of engagement—these were arranged once they were airborne—and headed out in search of what would later become known as Flight 93, which crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa., after the passengers stormed the cockpit to stop the terrorists inside.
In fact, they had already done so when Sasseville and Penney took off, but no one knew that at the time.
“We understood what the threat was,” Penney said, recalling their flight up the Potomac River to the northwest of Andrews. “We were looking for a rogue airliner, flying low. We knew they had turned off their transponders.”
Without missiles or bullets—the F-16 has a gun, but they were loaded only with training rounds—the objective target would have to come down with brute force.
“Our only choice,” Penney said, “was going to be to ram the airliner.”
But first they’d have to find it. Unsure of its location or even what vector it was taking to the capital, they headed up the Potomac, then circled back to defend the city. The plan, Sasseville told Penney, was that he would aim his jet at the cockpit and the terrorists, and Penney would take aim at the tail.
The Federal Aviation Administration had ordered all planes in U.S. airspacer to land, and it gradually became clear that Flight 93 had crashed short of the terrorists’ intended target.
Returning to Andrews, Penney recalled looking down at a base that had come alive, its parking lots full, and a line of cars backed up waiting to get on base. “Guardsman came to their units without needing orders, without waiting for paperwork,” she said. They got planes ready, set up cots in the operations area, brought in food. The Guardsman would fly air combat patrols over Washington for the next 90 days straight, and they were already on duty—before they’d ever received orders or even a call.
“They just told their employers, ‘You know, boss, my nation’s calling,’ and they went.”
Now their planes will endure as a reminder of that day and the clear sense of duty those Airmen displayed when the United States came under attack.
