Trailblazing top gun pilot cool in a crisis
UNITED STATES: Just 23 minutes after takeoff and 32,500 feet (9900m) over rural Pennsylvania, the calm routine of a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas was shattered by the boom of an exploding engine, a whoosh of air and the sight of a woman being sucked head first out of a broken window.
As oxygen masks were released from above and the plane tipped forward, a man in a cowboy hat leapt to his feet: Tim McGinty, a Texas real estate agent. He ran from his seat a few rows forward and grabbed hold of the woman and tried to pull her back inside. Jennifer Riordan, 43, a banking executive and mother of two, was already halfway out of the plane.
‘‘I couldn’t pull her in,’’ McGinty said. Then a firefighter named Andrew Needum arrived, and together they hauled her back.
A few rows behind, a retired nurse named Peggy Phillips heard a shout for someone with medical training to help. She pulled off her oxygen mask and hurried forward, trying to resuscitate Riordan in the aisle, but it was clear she had suffered grievous injuries.
‘‘If you can possibly imagine going through the window of an airplane at about 600 miles an hour (960kmh), and hitting either the fuselage or the wing with your body, with your face, then I think I can probably tell you that there was significant trauma,’’ Phillips said.
Fire warnings flashed in the cockpit, and Captain Tammy Jo Shults informed air traffic control and began an immediate descent.
Shults, 56, who was one of the first female fighter pilots in the US Navy and the first woman to fly an F/A-18 Hornet, responded with almost preternatural calm, bringing the plane down for an emergency landing in Philadelphia.
‘‘Have them roll the [fire] trucks,’’ she said. ‘‘Could you have medical meet us there on the runway as well? We have got injured passengers.’’
‘‘OK. Injured passengers,’’ an air traffic controller replied. ‘‘And is your aircraft physically on fire?’’
‘‘No,’’ Shults replied. ‘‘But part of it is missing. There is a hole and someone went out.’’
Shults’s descent has been compared to Chesley Sullenberger’s landing on the Hudson River after a bird strike in 2009, but she brought the plane in faster, without fully extending the flaps, apparently fearful that the aircraft would become unstable if she slowed too much before landing.
Sumwalt said an initial inspection of the engine had shown signs of metal fatigue.
Riordan’s relatives paid tribute to her yesterday, calling her ‘‘the bedrock of our family’’ and a vibrant, passionate personality who made an impact ‘‘on everything and everyone she touched’’.
– The Times