She Is A Women and She Is A Hero......

In 1993 Secretary of Defense Les Aspin allowed women to fly fighter planes.

It was a controversial decision.

Maverick is a fighter pilot. Ice Man is a fighter pilot. You can't have a woman flying a fighter plane. What was he crazy?

Fighter planes are complicated stuff. These are 90 million dollar planes. You need to be able to do your job under sever stress. You need to be able to do your job right side up, and upside down, and on your side. You need to be able to do it while traveling twice the speed of sound. You need to be able to do it as your blood is rushing out of your head and into your feet.

You need to be able to do your job while simultaneously other people are trying to kill you. You need to be able to land your fighter plane on a boat, that is moving and bobbing up and down. You need to be able to do that in the dark middle of the night too.

These are not conditions for a woman to be expected to perform.

But perform woman have and Tammie Jo was one of the first to do it successfully.

When planes crash 95% of the time they blame the pilot.

Pilot error.....Bad decisions.

Not only was the Engine not working on her plane but it blew up. The wing was damaged. The fuselage was damaged. People were hurt. The plane was depressurized at 33,000 feet. The plane needed to get to 10,000 feet for people to be able to breath normally.

Were the control surfaces on the wing damaged in the explosion? Don't know. If she tried using the flaps (on the damaged wing) would they work? Don't know. Will trying the flaps make things worse? Don't know.

She needed to find the airport she wasn't originally looking for. She needed to land the plane using half the power with full load of fuel. She was supposed to go to Texas, but only made it to Philly. Planes take off full of fuel and land after the fuel has been used when the plane is lighter. It is hard to land a plane full of fuel, especially when you aren't going to use all the flaps on the damaged wings.

The room for error is very small but these were the circumstances Tammie Jo faced and she handled it all calm, cool, and collected.

She is a hero in every sense of the word.

Today you don't see her on the Today show, or the View, or any other nonsense shows. She has held no press conferences. She feels bad about the lady who died (totally not her fault) and she is still doing her job helping investigators while remaining out of the lime light.

We should all salute her. When you are in a plane you should hope you have this kind of professional (man or women) at the controls.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tammie-jo-shults-who-landed-crippled-southwest-plane-was-one-n866951

http://articles.latimes.com/1993-04-28/news/mn-28184_1_military-women