The pilots knew it was a civilian and they had to down it. They had ‘blue death’ in their guns which could shred the plane @ 6000 rpm. Ram would be last choice since to be sure you couldn’t punch until impact.
I had to look up “blue death” - I had previously only heard of “blue flu”. :)
The 20mm Gatling gun system. Yeah, I can see that doing some serious shredding of an airliner. They didn’t call it blue death on the web page, but I saw 6000 shots/minute and figured it was the same thing.
Ramming wouldn’t be my preferred method to attack, and another article claimed that was one of the plans with the DC Air Guard if they intercepted flight 93.