The Top Gun heroine
Ex-fighter pilot lands her Boeing 737 after engine explodes at 32,000ft and a passenger is sucked halfway out of cabin window
A PILOT was hailed a heroine yesterday for landing her plane after an engine exploded and a passenger was sucked halfway out of a cabin window.
Tammie Jo Shults, who flew fighter jets for the US Navy, calmly told air traffic control ‘there’s a hole and someone went out’ while carrying on with the remaining engine.
Passengers said the 56-year-old ‘Top Gun’ had nerves of steel for pulling off a successful emergency landing.
After touching down in Philadelphia Captain Shults, who is a mother of two, checked on each of the passengers on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380.
Two of them, Tim McGinty and Andrew Needum, had wrestled Jennifer Riordan back inside the Boeing 737 after she was pulled almost out of the window next to her.
The 43-year- old mother of two died in hospital from major injuries.
Capt Shults joined the US Navy in 1985 and became an ‘aggressor pilot’ and instructor before resigning in 1993 to join Southwest. In the military she rose to become a lieutenant commander and had been one of the first women to fly the F-18.
‘She has nerves of steel. That lady, I applaud her. She was awesome,’ said Alfred Tumlinson, who was on Flight 1380.
Capt Shults’s brother-in-law, Gary Shults, said: ‘She’s a formidable woman, as sharp as a tack. My brother says she’s the best pilot he knows. She’s a very caring, giving person who takes care of lots of people’.
Investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board said the failed engine on the Southwest jet showed signs of metal fatigue that caused a fan blade to come off.
Flight 1380 had taken off from New York LaGuardia on Tuesday at 10.27am bound for Dallas with 144 passengers and five crew. Around 20 minutes into the flight, and at 32,000ft, passengers heard an ‘incredibly loud noise’. Shrapnel from the failed engine smashed a window, causing the cabin to depressurise and the oxygen masks to come down.
Mr McGinty said: ‘Somebody saw the lady out the window so we tried to get her back in and I wasn’t strong enough. A fireman [Mr Needum] jumped in and helped and between the two of us we got her back in. It seemed like two minutes and it seemed like two hours. They were having to drop the plane 20,000ft in five minutes, the pilots, I don’t know how they did it.’
Miss Riordan, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, was on a business trip for Wells Fargo, a bank where she worked in community relations. Southwest said the plane had been serviced just three days earlier. Its fleet of 737s will now be inspected on an accelerated schedule.
The plane’s engine cover was found 70 miles northwest of Philadelphia airport.
NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said he wanted to know why the metal fatigue was not detected.
Capt Shults’s husband Dean is also a pilot. They live in Fair Oaks Ranch, Texas.