Everybody likes a good story and most love a good war story. I dislike hero-hyping of soldiers or military actions so I reflexively pick at such stories.  Here goes.
 Before being chosen as a candidate to be a pilot of an F-16 a person has had a life of demonstrated intelligence and achievement as well as being strong and adept physically. They are probably also adrenalin junkies. A woman chosen as one of the first to qualify and be put in that position has no doubt met all the necessarily high standards and then some. These people are very accomplished and very good at what they do. As a kid I would have given my right arm to have had the skills they get to hone, and the opportunity to do so with amazing hot-rod airplanes costing many millions of dollars, and supported by an infrastructure costing billions. I got as far as owning and playing in a small tail-dragger of similar type and vintage as  Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney's Taylorcraft.
 There is one part of the story of her and her wing-mate's intended heroism that seems greatly hyped to me [It is a "war story", after all, so no surprise there] so as to make this story of the potential killing of many innocent Americans by our own military one that we want to hear and one which will make us applaud the principals as well as the principles involved.
 I believe that either of the two pilots would have been capable of bringing down that airliner with a very high probability of survival and so I would not call it a suicide mission and I doubt they expected it to be one as they flew to intercept the airliner. To compare it to a Kamikaze mission is completely wrong in every way.
 To illustrate why I think this is the case, consider this. Suppose a pickup truck was pulling a horse trailer at sixty mph down the interstate in the right lane and it had no rear-view mirrors and you approached from the rear driving a Porsche. Because the driver of the truck would not know you were there he would not be taking any evasive actions and very few would be available if he tried. Do you think you would be able to clip the rear of the trailer with the passenger side headlight of your hot-rod Porsche? I think I could.
 But how about jets flying hundreds of miles per hour? You have probably you have seen pictures of Jet fighters refueling in air. They are able to exactly match speed with the tanker, most of which are transport versions of 707's,  and drive a small opening in their aircraft onto a small pipe trailing from the tanker and to hold that position so as to refuel. Both the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds do complex maneuvers in tight formation in which the lead pilot sets the pattern of the maneuver and the other three or four just maintain their relative position a few feet away. It seems to me that either one of these pilots in an F-16 would have been able to approach the airliner from behind and knock off either the vertical stabilizer or the elevator of the airliner with the wing of their aircraft and possibly have their aircraft survive, but almost certainly have ample time to eject safely if it was too damaged to continue on.  They would have lived, dangling from a parachute and watching as all the passengers and crew of the airliner died.
 I believe that, although their mission was very risky, for us or for them to say that they were on a suicide mission is hyperbole. They were no doubt experiencing  a strong sense of duty complicated by the terrible responsibility of carrying out their terrible mission which was to bring down a loaded passenger jet, and were feeling fear and excitement and a myriad of other emotions as they streaked through the sky looking for their target, but I don't believe they expected to die.
 The final result was all the same for the passengers of that airliner but it was a reprieve for the two F-16 pilots, in the great scope of events, that they did not have to personally destroy a plane carrying so many of their fellow citizens. It is usually much easier to do such a thing and live comfortably afterwards if the lives are all of the "enemy". [Do you  remember The USS Vincennes shoot down of an Iranian airliner?] Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney and her wing-mate where very lucky indeed.
 Saying that they were going on a mission in which they would have willingly sacrificed their lives for a greater cause, rather than a more accurate description of them being willing to risk their lives, puts the story on a more heroic plane, so to speak. I am not putting them down, and I would not have done so if they had been forced to knock down the airliner, but telling their story the way it was told is part of both feeding and using the American military myth. They have certainly slept better ever since that day because they have been able to live their remaining lives with their story being of a brave commitment to duty that made them willing to sacrifice their own lives rather than that they are the American pilots known, most importantly to themselves, to have knocked down an American airliner over American soil and killing all the men, women, and children aboard.
 Again, they were very lucky on that day that so many were unlucky in the extreme.