By David Futrelle
A lot of people are pretty impressed with Tammie Jo Shults, the pilot who guided Southwest Airlines flight 1380 to a safe landing in Philadelphia on Tuesday after one of the plane’s engines exploded in mid-air, displaying a remarkable calm in the face of potential disaster in the audio recordings of her conversations with air traffic controllers that have gone viral on YouTube.
But not everyone is impressed. If you pick your way through the comments on the Daily Mail about the incident, you will find, alongside the hosannas, more than a few comments from disgruntled men angry that Shults has been declared a hero for “just doing her job.” Some Mail readers aren’t even sure she did that.
“A woman pilot?” one skeptic asked. “I don’t think so, bet she had a man in there helping, advising on procedure, doing the difficult bits.”
Another Mail reader insisted that Shultz simply couldn’t have been piloting the plane, because according to him it would have been against regulations. “I am a qualified commercial pilot and can advise you all that female pilots are prohibited from driving planes in emergency situations,” he declared. “The Global FAA does not allow it because women are prone to hysterics and cannot keep calm under pressure.”
Sure, buddy. And I’m a commercial pilot of the monkeys flying out of my ass.
Over on Gab, the Twitter alternative for Nazis and other unpleasant people, some greeted the news of Shults’ heroism with jokes and complaints.
But the most extraordinary response on Gab came from a woman who thought Shults was a hero — but remained convinced that she shouldn’t have been allowed to fly in the Navy in the first place.
Naturally, the fellow in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit have their own opinions about Shults, very few of them positive. One commenter blamed her for the death of a passenger who had a heart attack after the explosion broke a window and depressurized the cabin.
![rocketman1899[S] 5 points 23 hours ago* I don't know, a dead passenger, makes her less of a hero to me. I mean for all we know she could have over spun that engine, causing it to fly apart. Either way she is not a "Hero", at best she did her job. Just like countless men before that never were given that title because they didn't have a vagina.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/cyfrvgtuibhnjok.png?resize=470%2C465&ssl=1)
Thanks for your insights on heroism and responsibility, dude sitting on his ass posting on Reddit.
Several commenters, unsurprisingly, used the news as an opportunity to talk shit about women in general.
In recent days, this last guy has spent many hours on Reddit complaining about “lazy and entitled” female dentists, warning his fellow MGTOWs of the perils of standing behind women in lines, and sniffing that an attractive women with a bit of a belly is “repulsive.” But apparently his life is so difficult and dangerous that an exploding jet engine doesn’t count as a “real emergency.”
What a man, what a man, what a man, what a really crap man.
Pilots don’t earn their salary for the milk runs. They earn it for these kinds of events.
I experienced an “event” once. The pilot’s skill was superb – no crash. The pilot earned his soda pop that day. Took 4 times as long to get off the plane because we all let him know we were thankful of his and the crew’s skill. (It is a longer story, but don’t want to make this about me.)
Kudos to her & the rest of the crew. Of course there will be an investigation – it is SOP. That is why air travel is so safe – there is an active process to learn from events. And will I still think Southwest is my preferred airline? Yep. They obviously are up on crew training and qualifications. They have one of the best safety records in the industry.
The process has started. The FAA has issued instructions to inspect all equivalent engines.
BTW – I am an engineer on an avionics project. I can tell you there is *not* a “Global FAA”. Major countries have their own FAA or equivalent. Europe has an EU equivalent (ignoring Brexit changes) and, none of them have a silly rule about female pilots. A couple have silly rules about pilots with HIV. Not sure about South America and the rest of the world group FAA equivalent, but still basically the same.
And aerospace has the *best* engineering practices of all engineering fields. Medical is (generally) not that far behind, especially on stuff where failure == death. Fortunately, more women are entering the field.
And God Bless nurses!
Driving planes
How to show that you are 1000% insecure in your masculinity:
whine how women can’t do anything heroic whenever a woman does something heroic.
I had to crack up at the “international FAA” bit. I’m only a recreational private pilot, and even I know there’s no such thing. The closest thing there is the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO, and while they may have some silly regulations, I’m dead certain that “no women flying in emergengies” isn’t one of them.
And yes, I can absolutely guarantee she’d be under investigation. Every incident gets investigated.
I’m just imagining how these idiots would have reacted if the crew of Apollo 11 had been women.
Speaking of gas leaks in homes leading to explosions, there was a case a few years ago in Indianapolis where a guy, his girlfriend, and his brother decided the best way to get money to eliminate their debts was to blow up their house in a gas explosion and collect the insurance money. Let’s just say their was a small detail or two they should have looked closer at before putting this plan in motion:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Hill_explosion
And a timeline of the investigation, complete with a map of the immediate damage:
http://interactives.indystar.com/news/standing/RichmondHillsTimeline/
There was a map that ran with one of the stories at the time that showed how far out people could see/feel what happened (like, people who were, like, five miles away from the explosion could see something happened over there), but I ran out of time to try and find it. 🙁
@ Scott
You may find this interesting, if you’re not already aware of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_13
And there’s a documentary about it now on that Netflix thing.
@Alan Robertshaw
Thanks, that’s very interesting. I was kind of aware of it but hadn’t really done much reading about it.
Miss. Shults is a hero and many other women and girls who have done heroic things and probably will never get attention. Thank you all.
Speaking of heroes. Another shooting happened and this black man came to the rescue.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5643825/Three-dead-Tennessee-Waffle-House-shooting-naked-man.html
@Sinkable John, Johanna, Michael Brew:
I’ve been following Atomic Robo since before it became primarily a webcomic, when it was published by Red 5. Good stuff, at least in part because the creators have been very good at keeping it largely character-driven and balancing the comedy and drama.
The original ‘Flying She-Devils of the Pacific’ story in the main Atomic Robo book has the background of how the group formed. Basically, this was just after WWII, when a lot of local warlords were using weapons caches left behind by the forces in the Pacific theatre to set up their own little fiefdoms. The She-Devils were an international group of women who had been in their own nations’ militaries during WWII, but were being sidelined after the war in the various attempts to ‘return to normal’ and send women back to the home; they all independently decided they’d rather go AWOL than get pushed into being ‘good wives’, and banded together to try and stabilize the parts of the Pacific that nobody else was paying attention to.
The fact that one of the women was a bit of a ‘mad scientist’ herself (which was how they got the jetpacks) helped them become a serious force.
One of the things that I like about Atomic Robo is that they do show their work on the history front.
Men are called hero all the time. For fuck’s sake, ‘heroine’ exists as a word. So presumably the masculine form is at least occasionally used for dudes. Just spitballin here…