Tammie Jo Shults, the Southwest Airlines Co. captain who safely landed a Boeing 737 jetliner Tuesday after an engine broke apart midflight, is being hailed as a level-headed hero, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Passenger Marty Martinez said in a text message, “Most people don’t get to walk away from an experience like this, but she was able to safely get us home.”
The plane’s engine broke apart at more than 30,000 feet, spraying metal pieces through the fuselage, killing one person and injuring seven.
Capt. Shults, a former Navy fighter pilot, New Mexico native, wife of a Southwest pilot and mother of two, navigated the Dallas-bound flight with 144 passengers and five crew members on board down to a runway at Philadelphia International Airport.
The Journal reports she is one of the first female Navy fighter pilots, but struggled against gender discrimination to get there.
Capt. Shults, who served eight years of active military duty, declined to comment after the damaged plane landed.
While in the Navy, Capt. Shults served at the Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron in Point Mugu, Calif., as an instructor pilot flying the EA-6B Prowler and F/A-18 Hornet, the Navy said.
In a first-person account in the book “Military Fly Moms,” by Linda Maloney, Capt. Shults traced her desire to fly to her youth in New Mexico, where she lived on a ranch under the “dogfighting airspace” of Holloman Air Force Base.
During her senior year of high school in 1979, a retired colonel addressed her dismissively at a vocational day.
“He started the class by asking me, 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 said in the book. “He allowed me to stay but assured me there were no professional women pilots. I did not say another word.”
She was undeterred and got a boost during college when she met a woman who had just received her Air Force wings—“my heart jumped,” she said in the book. Capt. Shults, whose maiden name is Bonnell, graduated in 1983 from MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, Kan., according to the school.
She said in the book that the Air Force wasn’t interested, but the Navy gave her an opening. The Navy “let me take the test and fill out the application for aviation officer candidate school, but there did not seem to be a demand for women pilots,” she said.
Thinking the military flight program was closed off to her, she said she enrolled in graduate school at Western New Mexico University and considered finding a new career.
A year after taking the Navy aviation exam, she found a recruiter to process her application. Within two months, “I was getting my hair buzzed off and doing push-ups in aviation officer candidate school in Pensacola, Florida,” she said in the book.
Shults and her husband, The Journal said, joined Southwest as pilots, and try to fly on the same days so they could be home together with their two children.
