To put the shoe on the other foot, the US had trouble effectively getting fighters up for 9/11. On the surface of it, dealing with a civilian airliner seems like it should be trivial compared to a warplane. But North American air defense had been designed around an assumption that there would always be advance warning of incoming aircraft out over the Atlantic or Pacific or Arctic, not a sudden discovery that an aircraft was already inside US airspace and heading for the Capitol, and alert levels had been lowered after the Cold War.
As a result, at the time, the "ready aircraft" were not kept armed. Loading weapons aboard required time that wasn't available, and the fighter pilots involved scrambled unarmed, with the intention of suicide-ramming Flight 93.
Orders had come from Vice President Dick Cheney for her squadron to get airborne and stop Flight 93 from reaching Washington D.C. Penney and her squadron leader, Mark (“Sass”) Sasseville, were to launch first. With no live missiles on board, they had nothing but their aircraft to use as a weapon. It would take upwards of an hour to assemble and load the missiles on to a jet. Another pair of F-16s would stay until missiles could be loaded, but Penney and Sasseville were to take off immediately.
“I’m zipping up my G-suit when Sass looks at me and says, ‘I’ll take the cockpit.’ [Meaning that he would ram into Flight 93’s front end.] I would take the tail,” she said. “I’ve had people ask me, ‘Who told you would have to ram the airplane? Who ordered you?’ But no one did. What was said was all that was said.”
In the event, the passengers voted to storm the cockpit, were breaking down the door, and the hijackers power-dived the plane into the ground, thus eliminating the necessity.