Southwest Pilot: “Airplane Not on Fire, But Part of it Is Missing”

Shults was among the first female pilots “to transition to tactical aircraft” such as fighter jets, the Navy says.

Shults graduated from MidAmerica Nazarene University in 1983, and her alma mater says she became one of the first female fighter pilots for the US Navy.

Her co-pilot briefed the passengers and Hess made an emergency landing in Lebanon, N.H. The passengers continued on their way to a business meeting with another charter.

No pilot wants to encounter the kind of catastrophic events that Capt. Tammie Jo Shults dealt with Tuesday as she managed to safely land a Southwest Airlines flight in Philadelphia after having an engine implode, the cabin depressurize after debris punctured a window, and having a passenger partially sucked out of the aircraft.

When the CFM56 engine on Shults’s plane exploded Tuesday it sprayed shrapnel into the aircraft, causing a window to be blown out and leaving Riordan dead and seven others injured.

National Transportation Safety Board chairman Robert Sumwalt said it was the first passenger fatality in an accident involving a us airline since 2009.

Pilots use a flight simulator to train for the possibility of midair engine failure, but the number who experience and survive one amounts to “a small club”, he said.

The breathtaking landing of the Southwest 1380 flight after the plane lost one of its engines was no easy task.

Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger was the captain who managed to land US Airways Flight 1549 safely onto the Hudson River in Manhattan in 2009 when the plane suffered engine failure after hitting a flock of geese while flying over NY, saving all 155 people on board.

Throughout the emergency, Shults’ communications remained clear and direct as she diverted the plane to Philadelphia, worked out an approach plan with ATC and made sure emergency vehicles and medical transport were standing by. Our hearts are heavy.

She now lives in San Antonio with her husband, Dean, whom she met in the Navy and who is also a pilot for Southwest.

Inside the cockpit, pilot Tammie Jo Shults calmly communicated the severity of the situation. “That’s how she’s wired”.

One passenger, Diana McBride Self, wrote on Facebook, “Tammie Jo Schults, the pilot came back to speak to each of us personally”. She added, “It was just as if she and I were sitting here talking”. “He allowed me to stay but assured me there were no professional women pilots”.

Audio recordings of the radio communications between Flight 1380 and air traffic controllers detail how Shults coped with a nightmare situation: a forced emergency landing under partial power, and after losing pressure in the cabin. In a March 1993 interview with the Navy’s All Hands magazine, Shults said, “It would be nice if they would take away the ceilings [women] have over our heads”.

She was wearing her seatbelt but was almost sucked out of the plane. She was doing her job. During her senior year of high school in 1979, a retired colonel addressed her dismissively at a vocational day.

“I mean she just touched it down so gently, I didn’t even know that we went from flying to being on the ground, it was smooth”, Jason Johnson said.

Cindy Foster, a classmate of Shults’, told The Kansas City Star that when Shults enlisted in the Navy, she encountered “a lot of resistance” because of her gender.