Tammie Jo Shults is the airplane pilot who safely landed the Southwest Airlines flight that had its engine blow out and subsequently blow a hole in the cabin, depressurizing the plane and resulting in the death of one passenger. As the Washington Post reports, Shults is one of the first pilots trained by the Navy, and her trip there was as tough as you might imagine.
She recalled attending a lecture on aviation during her senior year of high school, in 1979. A retired colonel started the class by asking Shults, the only girl in attendance, “if I was lost.”
“I mustered up the courage to assure him I was not and that I was interested in flying,” she wrote. “He allowed me to stay but assured me there were no professional women pilots.”
When she met a woman in college who had received her Air Force wings, she wrote, “I set to work trying to break into the club.”
And so when the Air Force wouldn’t even humor her, she applied to be a pilot in the Navy—with not a lot of optimism on their side.
Shults was among the first female fighter pilots in the U.S. Navy, according to friends and the alumni group at Shults' alma mater, MidAmerica Nazarene.
She was a 1983 graduate of the university in Olathe, where she earned degrees in biology and agribusiness, said Carol Best, a university spokeswoman.
Cindy Foster, a classmate of Shults' at MidAmerica who graduated the same year, said Shults enlisted in the Navy and was met with "a lot of resistance" because of her gender. She'd always had a love for flying, and she chose the Navy only after the Air Force denied her a chance to become a pilot, Foster said.
She rose to the rank of lieutenant commander and was the first woman to sly an F/A-18 Hornet for the Navy. On Tuesday, Tommie Jo Shults did what she was trained to do, and there are hundreds of people and their loved ones that are grateful for it. As one passenger explained:
"She has nerves of steel," said passenger Alfred Tumlinson, of Corpus Christi, Texas. "That lady, I applaud her. I'm going to send her a Christmas card — I'm going to tell you that — with a gift certificate for getting me on the ground. She was awesome."
"The lady, the crew, everything, everybody was immaculate," he said. "They were so professional in what they did to get us on the ground."
You can listen to nerves of steel in this playback of pilot Shults as she communicates with the Philadelphia control tower during her emergency landing.