11/10/2025
"She did what she had always done." Most people imagine that they will somehow rise to the occasion when they face crisis. The reality is that when we are under stress, we fall back on the behaviours we have practiced. This is character. As a song I love asks,
"Who will you be when you're afraid
And everything changes?
Will you see a stranger?
Feel proud or betrayed?"
This is the space I coach in--preparing people to handle change with confidence and integrity. It's not magic, but it can be learned through practice. If you want to change how you show up, book a free consultation today.
davidbarrettcoaching.com
At 32,000 feet, the engine exploded. The cabin filled with smoke. A window shattered. A passenger was dying. And Captain Tammie Jo Shults spoke like she was asking for coffee.
“Southwest 1380, we’re single engine,” she told air traffic control, her voice calm and steady. “We have part of the aircraft missing, so we’re going to need to slow down a bit.”
Part of the aircraft missing.
Metal shrapnel from the left engine had ripped through the fuselage, breaking a window and sucking passenger Jennifer Riordan halfway out of the plane. Fellow passengers pulled her back in, but she was critically injured. Oxygen masks dropped. The aircraft began shaking so violently that passengers thought it would tear apart. People screamed. Others cried quietly, texting their families goodbye.
And in the cockpit, Tammie Jo Shults did what she had spent her entire life training to do. She flew the plane.
Before that day, before she became the calm voice that saved 148 lives, she had already spent decades proving people wrong.
Born in 1961 in New Mexico, raised on a ranch in Texas, Tammie Jo fell in love with flying at age 12 after watching planes perform at an air show. She turned to her father and said, “I want to do that.” He smiled and said, “Then you will.” But the world had other ideas.
In the 1970s, women were told they could not be fighter pilots. The U.S. Navy rejected her application not because she lacked skill or intelligence but because she was female. They told her that women could not fly combat aircraft. She applied again and again. Finally, she was accepted to the Navy’s Aviation Officer Candidate School, but only as an instructor pilot. She could teach men to fly jets, but she could not fly them in combat.
Tammie Jo accepted anyway. She taught, trained, and mastered every aircraft she could. When the rules finally changed in 1993 and women were allowed to fly fighter jets, she was ready. She became one of the first women to fly the F/A-18 Hornet, a supersonic fighter capable of both combat and attack missions.
She didn’t just fly the jet. She mastered it. She became an instructor in “Out of Control Flight,” teaching other pilots how to recover aircraft when everything goes wrong. She also served as an aggressor pilot, simulating enemy attacks for training exercises. In short, she trained the best pilots in the world to stay calm in chaos.
After more than a decade in the Navy, Tammie Jo joined Southwest Airlines. She flew commercial routes for over twenty years, quietly piloting flights across the country. Passengers had no idea that the woman in the cockpit had once trained Top Gun pilots.
Then came April 17, 2018.
Southwest Flight 1380 took off from LaGuardia Airport, bound for Dallas. Twenty minutes into the flight, the left engine exploded. A fan blade had fractured from metal fatigue. Shrapnel tore through the engine, the wing, and the cabin. One piece hit a window, creating a hole the size of a basketball. The cabin depressurised instantly.
Jennifer Riordan, sitting near the broken window, was pulled toward the opening. Passengers fought the suction, pulling her back inside. They performed CPR as the plane dropped thousands of feet. Oxygen masks deployed. The aircraft vibrated so violently that pilots struggled to read their instruments.
Inside the cockpit, alarms blared. Warning lights flashed. Systems failed one after another.
Tammie Jo took control. She declared an emergency and requested an immediate diversion to Philadelphia International Airport. The aircraft was crippled, flying on one engine, and yawing violently to the left. She fought the controls with precision, keeping the plane stable despite the uneven thrust.
Her voice over the radio never wavered. “Could you have medical meet us there on the runway as well?” she asked air traffic control. Not panic. Not fear. Just professionalism.
In the cabin, passengers prayed, texted loved ones, and cried. They thought the plane was falling apart. But in the cockpit, every movement of the controls was deliberate. Every second was calculated. Tammie Jo was balancing the forces of a dying aircraft with the calm of a surgeon.
Twenty minutes later, the runway came into view. She guided the damaged Boeing 737 down, lined up perfectly with the centreline, and touched down smoothly at 11:27 a.m. The plane rolled to a stop. Fire trucks and ambulances surrounded it instantly.
Inside, passengers burst into tears of relief. They had survived what most experts later said was an almost unsurvivable situation.
Jennifer Riordan tragically did not make it, but everyone else did.
When recordings of the cockpit audio were released, the world was stunned by Tammie Jo’s composure. Aviation experts called it one of the finest displays of airmanship under pressure in modern history. Many pilots admitted that few could have handled it so well.
Tammie Jo didn’t call herself a hero. In interviews, she gave credit to her co-pilot, the flight attendants, and the passengers who helped. She simply said, “Any pilot would have done the same.” But that wasn’t true. Most pilots never face an engine explosion, a decompression, and a near-structural failure all at once. And fewer still remain calm enough to land safely.
When asked later if she had been afraid, she said, “There wasn’t time to be scared. There was only time to fly.”
That sentence says everything about who she is.
Her entire career had prepared her for that moment. Every rejection, every obstacle, every training drill in the Navy had sharpened her skill and her focus. When everything failed, she didn’t panic. She performed.
After the incident, she returned to flying. No fanfare, no celebrity status. She simply went back to work. Because for Tammie Jo Shults, flying wasn’t about fame. It was about responsibility.
She once said, “Flying is a privilege, not a right. You respect that privilege every time you take off.”
That day, she honoured that belief by saving 148 lives.
Her story reminds us that calmness is power. That true leadership isn’t loud or dramatic—it’s composed, steady, and decisive when everything is falling apart.
Tammie Jo Shults proved that heroism isn’t about bravado. It’s about preparation meeting crisis. It’s about skill over fear. It’s about doing your job when the world is burning around you.
The sky was breaking apart, but she refused to let the plane fall.
She did what she had always done. She flew.
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