Tammie Jo Shults, F-18 Fighter Pilot
Today I listened to the audio of pilot Tammie Jo Shults
calmly speaking with Air Traffic Control in Philadelphia after the Number 1
engine exploded on her Southwest Boeing 737 aircraft. Her voice had the kind of calm I have heard
on headsets when I have been on military aircraft in serious trouble. You would never know the danger from the
voices of the pilots.
The Exploded Engine on Southwest Flight 1380
Shortly after I enlisted in 1972, I discovered that active
duty soldiers could fly anywhere for $10. After I settled in to my first
permanent duty station at Hill Air Force Base in Utah late that year, I decided
to take a week’s leave and fly military from Utah to Boston and try out Space
Available Flying.
I showed up flight operations at Hill the morning my leave began. The first flight out was to Lowry Air Force
Base in Denver. It was an executive jet
flying empty to pickup a general. I was a 19-year-old Airman First Class at the
time. They signed me up for the flight.
I was the only passenger for the 500-mile trip over the Rocky Mountains. It was glorious. I had a drink and snacks served by the
sergeant who was the steward on the plane.
I arrived in Denver thinking that flying “Space A” was about the coolest
thing that ever happened to me.
C-130 Hercules Transport Aircraft
I strolled to flight operations in Denver. The next thing going anywhere east was a
C-130 Hercules on its way to Atlanta, Georgia.
I think the plan was actually to go to Warner Robbins Air Force Base,
but in the end, Atlanta was where we landed. Atlanta sounded good to me. I had
never been to Georgia and I would be on the Atlantic Coast.
The C-130E Hercules of that era cruised at 300 mph, less
when fully loaded as we were today. After the one-hour trip across the Rockies,
it would be more five hours inside the engine roar and wind noise of the four-engine
Hercules. The plane was fully loaded
with palletized cargo under straps including what looked like Army mobile radar. I walked up the tail ramp and past the cargo
to the front of the plane.
Behind me, more than 50 high school ROTC cadets filed in for
a trip to Georgia for a convention of some kind. For some of these kids, it was their first
flight. In a C-130, everyone sits in
fold-out seats made from nylon strapping material facing the middle of the
plane. The few windows were behind the
heads of the cadets. Most of the cadets had their official USAF bag lunch as
did I: two bologna and cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread, chips, a cookie, and
a carton of milk. Those lunches would
keep me busy for much of our ill-fated flight.
Before we took off, the loadmaster handed me a set of
headphones and asked me to help with the cadets. I said sure and started checking seat
belts. The loadmaster told the cadets
not to look at the cargo while we were in flight and to keep their seatbelts on
unless they had to get up. If you have
never been in a C-130 or other cargo plane with seats down the sides of the
fuselage, it is great advice not to look at the cargo, but it’s pretty much
impossible. The shaking cargo in flight will
shift even a good digestive system into reverse.
The flight was smooth for the first hour. Many of the cadets laughed and joked and ate
their bologna and cheese sandwiches. An
hour later we hit turbulence. I watched
some those happy teenage faces go pale, then green. I grabbed a stack of airsickness bags and passed
them out, open and ready for use. Then I
collected them.
The kids kept me busy for the next few hours. While I was
helping one of the kids out of the toilet, I left my headphones hanging on the
bulkhead. As we sidestepped toward his
seat, the plane shuddered. When the kid was safely buckled in, I went back and
grabbed my headset. I heard the pilot
say, “No fuel to the right wing. Engines three and four inop. Feathering
props.”
The plane was crabbing in the sky. With power only on the
left wing, the plane would try to spin clockwise, then flip back when the
counterforces built up. So we oscillated
as if there were an axle sticking up and down between the wings and we rotated
on it.
The pilot had been talking to air traffic control. He came
back on the intercom. “We’re 70 miles out. Runway at Hartsfield will be clear
for us. Ten years ago in the ‘Nam I landed a model B with one engine and some
big chunks of wing missing. We’ll be fine. Big bump, when we first touch down,
then we’ll be fine.”
We slowly descended. Our slower airspeed made crabbing less
violent. The loadmaster and I double-checked seatbelts and told all the kids everything
was fine and we would land soon. We were lying with a smile.
Ten miles out I went up to the flight deck and looked ahead
though the cockpit. Red lights were
everywhere on the airstrip. The pilots and the rest of the crew were perfectly
calm, but it seemed like the rest of the world thought a plane with two dead
engines was a problem.
We descended. As we neared the ground the pilot pulled the
nose up hard. When we touched, the plane
took one big bounce, skidded right for a couple of seconds, then settled down
and stopped quickly.
I waited until all the kids had filed out before I grabbed
my duffel bag and walked down the ramp.
Fire trucks and ambulances ringed the area. I couldn’t count all of the
emergency vehicles that were waiting for that big bounce to turn into something
worse. I sat on my duffel bag and waited
for the crew to come out of the plane.
When the pilots and the flight engineer came down the ramp, they were
talking like nothing had happened. The
loadmaster came over and shook my hand. He thanked me for helping out with the
kids.
A couple of decades later I would read Tom Wolfe’s book
“The Right Stuff” and know that the “Cool” those astronauts brought to the Mercury
space program came from learning to fly in the military.
Alan Shepard, John Glenn and the other
astronauts, the heroes of my Cold War youth, are now pilots like Tammie Jo
Shults and Chesley Sullenberger, military pilots, masters of the complex skill
of flying and who remain calm and competent when engines fail.
