OU professor tried to save woman on Southwest flight
Most flights, Hollie Mackey opts for a window seat near the front of the plane.
But on Tuesday, long lines through security at New York’s LaGuardia Airport caused her to miss her boarding position and pushed her back a couple rows from her preferred seat.
Because the 10:30 a.m. flight to Dallas was scheduled to be a fourhour haul, the University of Oklahoma associate professor of women’s and gender studies chose mobility over comfort. She went with an aisle seat on Row 14 of Southwest Flight 1380.
“I always heard above the wing is the safest place in the plane,” said Mackey, who was flying back from an academic conference. “So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll sit here.’”
She had no way of knowing that she was sitting in the most dangerous row of that plane. Soon after takeoff, a blown engine shattered a window and nearly sucked Mackey’s seatmate out of the plane.
Jennifer Riordan boarded the Boeing
737 behind Mackey and stopped when she got to Row 14, warmly smiling as she asked if she could slide to the window seat.
A little while after Riordan, a Wells Fargo banking executive from New Mexico, sat down, a preteen girl scooted into the middle seat.
As they took off, Riordan read a paperback, the girl was hunched over her phone, and Mackey read on her iPad. Mackey couldn’t help but marvel at the different ways each woman settled in for a long flight.
“Everything was just normal,” Mackey said. “It was routine. It was lovely and when you think about your flying mates when you don’t know anybody, I just thought, ‘Well this is a really nice group.’”
What happened in next has become worldwide news. Twenty minutes into the flight, a fan blade broke and the left engine blew. Metal flew off and shattered the window next to Riordan. In an instant, the cabin depressurized. Oxygen masks dropped.
And the force of the air rushing out pulled Riordan halfway out the window.
“I looked over very quickly and I saw that Jennifer was in distress,” Mackey said. “So immediately, when you see that, you act. You do something.”
Pushing their oxygen masks aside, Mackey and the young girl kept their seat belts fastened but scrambled to wrap their arms around Riordan’s waist, pulling on her waistband as hard as they could to haul her back inside the cabin. But they weren’t strong enough.
The blown-out window created a deafening roar inside the plane, making it impossible to communicate. But both Mackey and the girl held tight to Riordan.
Because of the plane’s layout, it was nearly impossible for other passengers to see what was going on. “We were trying to flag people down,” Mackey said. “At one point, one of the flight attendants came close, and we thought that she was coming to us, but she turned to help somebody else who was in distress.”
Trying to comfort Riordan and the young girl until more help came, Mackey put her hand on her Riordan’s back and held on to the girl, trying to shield her from the cold and the suction force by the window.
Behind them, another woman reached forward to put her hand on Mackey’s back.
“I felt a hand on my back, and I looked over and I thought, all I could do was really be there for the girl and for Jennifer,” Mackey said. “I thought it would be awful to be alone.”
After about 10 minutes, Tim McGinty, a ranch real estate worker, and firefighter Andrew Needham rushed over to pull Riordan inside. Nurse Peggy Phillips then jumped in and performed CPR, and the flight attendants sprang to action, too. “I don’t think anyone will truly understand just how remarkable these people were in that moment, when somebody desperately needed them, the strength that they had,” Mackey said.
But it was too late. Riordan died from bluntimpact trauma to her head, neck and torso, according to the Philadelphia Department of Public Health.
Once pilot Tammie Jo Shults made an emergency landing in Philadelphia, Mackey and her fellow passengers were greeted by Shults, whose levelheaded actions and communication with Philadelphia’s air traffic control kept the situation from escalating any further.
The passengers were then shuttled off the plane by bus and later flew to Dallas as a group that night.
“I thought, ‘If I don’t get on now, I’m never going to ever again,” Mackey said of the second flight. “One of my colleagues with me was more afraid than I was. And sometimes you do what you don’t want to do because you need to model for others that they can do it too. I think that’s always the way I operate.”
After a brief layover, she arrived in Oklahoma City around 10:30 Tuesday night, greeted by her husband and longtime OU athletic department employee, Randy Garibay.
After telling her sons what happened, Mackey finally crawled into bed and glanced at her phone. It was just after midnight, just more than 13 hours after she took off from New York.
“There’s no way to be relieved or happy,” Mackey said. “Somebody didn’t make it. It was a strange space to be in and a lot of us processing through why didn’t the whole plane go down? And why did it hit that window instead of another window? Why didn’t the plane break apart? Just thinking about the ways that all of the pieces come together.
“In many ways, she might’ve saved us, but that doesn’t help.”