01/01/2026
Great story to reflect on as we began a new year. May our good Lord prepare us for what is ahead of us 🙏🙏🙏
The plane was disintegrating at 32,000 feet. Her voice on the radio sounded like she was ordering lunch.
April 17, 2018. Southwest Flight 1380 climbed smoothly out of New York's LaGuardia Airport, bound for Dallas. One hundred forty-nine people settled into their seats. Flight attendants served drinks. The Boeing 737 reached cruising altitude. Everything was routine.
Then the left engine exploded.
The blast was so violent that Captain Tammie Jo Shults thought they had hit another aircraft. Metal shrapnel tore through the fuselage like bullets. Window 14A shattered instantly. The cabin depressurized with devastating force, air screaming outward at hundreds of miles per hour.
Jennifer Riordan, seated at that window, was partially sucked toward the opening. Passengers lunged for her, grabbing her legs and torso, fighting against physics itself to pull her back inside. Oxygen masks dropped. Alarms screamed. The plane rolled violently left and pitched into a dive. Smoke filled the cockpit.
Below, in the cabin, passengers sent what they believed were their final messages. "I love you." "Tell the kids I'm sorry." Flight attendants shouted instructions through chaos. Many were certain the aircraft was breaking apart mid-air.
The noise was deafening. Systems were failing. One engine was destroyed. Part of the fuselage was gone.
And in the middle of this nightmare, Tammie Jo Shults picked up the radio.
Her voice was perfectly calm.
"Southwest 1380, we're single engine," she said, as casually as if reporting a minor maintenance issue. "We have part of the aircraft missing, so we're going to need to slow down a bit."
Air traffic controllers asked if the plane was on fire.
"No, it's not on fire," she replied evenly. "But part of it's missing. They said there's a hole, and someone went out."
No panic. No fear. Just information delivered with surgical precision.
Air traffic control would later say they couldn't believe what they were hearing. Her heart rate, checked by medics after landing, had barely elevated. While 148 people fought terror below her, she was flying.
That extraordinary calm wasn't luck. It was built through decades of being told she had no right to be there.
She grew up on a ranch near Tularosa, New Mexico, where Holloman Air Force Base dominated the horizon. As a young girl, she would lie in the grass watching F-4 Phantom jets tear across the sky, leaving white contrails in the endless blue.
She wanted to fly those planes.
In high school, she attended an aviation career lecture. A retired Air Force colonel opened the session by looking directly at her and asking if she was in the wrong room. She was the only girl there.
"I want to be a pilot," she said.
He didn't laugh. But he told her the truth as he understood it: there were no professional women pilots. Girls didn't fly fighter jets. The military didn't want them. The airlines wouldn't hire them.
She could stay for the lecture, he said, but she should be realistic.
She wasn't.
She applied to the Air Force. Recruiters turned her away three times. They told her they desperately needed pilots. Just not women pilots.
She tried the Navy. She took the entrance exam and scored high enough to qualify. An officer refused to process her application. He told her she scored well enough for a man, but the standards were higher for women.
It took her a full year to find a recruiter willing to submit her paperwork.
In 1985, she entered Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School. She earned her wings. She became a flight instructor. She flew the A-7 Corsair II. Eventually, she became one of the first women to fly the F/A-18 Hornet in U.S. Navy service.
But even in the cockpit, barriers remained. Combat exclusion policies barred women from combat missions. Her husband, also a naval aviator, deployed to war zones. She could not. No matter how skilled she was, policy grounded her based solely on gender.
She became an instructor pilot and aggressor, flying against the Navy's best to sharpen their skills in simulated combat.
Then came an assignment designed to humiliate her.
A commanding officer openly stated he would not allow a woman to teach advanced aerial gunnery. He pulled her from that role and reassigned her to teach Out of Control Flight recovery.
It was meant as punishment. A way to sideline her.
Out of Control Flight taught pilots how to recover aircraft that had entered spins, unusual attitudes, or dives beyond normal parameters. When instruments lie. When hydraulics fail. When control surfaces stop responding. When survival depends on instinct, feel, and nerve rather than procedure.
For a year, she taught pilots how to bring back aircraft from the edge of catastrophe.
"I learned I don't have to be in control all the time to get back into control," she later said.
That lesson, born from discrimination, would save lives.
In 1993, she left the Navy and joined Southwest Airlines. For the next twenty-five years, she flew routine commercial routes. Thousands of flights. Millions of miles. Nothing remarkable.
Until April 17, 2018.
When the engine exploded, she knew instantly how catastrophic it was. Warning lights flooded the panel. Systems cascaded into failure. The aircraft fought her inputs with every control movement.
For a brief moment, she thought this might be the day she died.
Then her training took over.
She flew by instinct. By feel. Using everything she had learned teaching pilots how to recover from chaos. She initiated an emergency descent, dropping more than 20,000 feet in minutes while keeping the crippled aircraft stable. She lined up for Philadelphia International Airport.
One engine gone. Fuselage torn open. Hydraulics compromised. Part of the aircraft literally missing.
She landed it anyway.
Emergency crews surrounded the plane. Paramedics checked her vital signs and stared in disbelief. One told her she had "nerves of steel." Her heart rate was barely elevated.
Jennifer Riordan died at the hospital from her injuries. She was the only person who didn't walk away. One hundred forty-eight people survived because of what Tammie Jo Shults did in those impossible minutes.
After the landing, before she left the aircraft, she walked the entire cabin. She hugged passengers who were still shaking. She looked people in the eyes and told them they were safe. She stayed until the last person deplaned.
Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who had landed US Airways 1549 on the Hudson River, called personally to commend her.
Three weeks later, she was back in a cockpit. She retired from Southwest in 2020 but continues to fly privately and volunteers transporting medical patients and families who need help.
The world once told her she didn't belong in the sky. Recruiters dismissed her. Commanders tried to ground her. Policies explicitly barred her from missions based on nothing but gender.
But the sky never cared about those rules.
She was a girl from New Mexico who watched fighter jets and dreamed impossible dreams. They said girls don't become fighter pilots. She became one anyway.
They said women can't handle combat aircraft or crisis situations. She proved them catastrophically wrong.
And when an engine exploded at 32,000 feet, when metal tore through her aircraft, when people were praying and crying and sending final goodbyes, she spoke with a voice so steady it calmed everyone who heard it.
Because she had spent thirty years being ready for a moment she hoped would never come.
Her hands did not shake. Her voice did not waver. One hundred forty-eight people are alive today because one woman refused to accept the word "no."
Because barriers and discrimination and policies could not change what she always knew.
She belonged in that cockpit.
