Actually, the scene you’re referring to is from the Clancy novel, ‘Debt of Honor”.
The novel centers around a Japanese government that is taken over by war-mongering industrialists. They incite a war...yes, a shooting war...with the US. The bulk of the novel is the story of how we cleaned their clocks both militarily and through cloak-and-dagger stuff.
In the novel, a pilot for Japan Air Lines named Sato loses both a brother and his only son in the war. As a result, he goes a little bonkers and hatches a plan. He gins up a way to fly a 747 to Washington D.C. to exact an ‘honorable’ revenge. He manages to crash the plane into a joint session of Congress, killing everyone, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the entire Supreme Court, and the President and First Lady. The only survivor (because he was on his way to another part of the building) was the newly-sworn-in Vice President, Jack Ryan.
In the novel, a Secret Service person on the roof of the Capitol does manage to fire a Stinger at the aircraft at near point-blank range, and it does take out an engine, but it was too little, too late.
I must have read that book like around 2000 or so, it came out before 9/11 correct?
You know actually the worst fear I could think of isn’t a bomb on a plane, even a nuke, no its a large jet that has been covertly turned into a massive crop duster and it ain’t spraying bug juice.
Comes into America, makes a couple stops at major hubs, drops a bit here, there and there, and also infects the passengers.
Who knows, maybe it was shot down because intel suggested it was too grave of a threat to enter any populated airspace, better to just do it secretly and let everyone guess.