Heroic pilot wasn't supposed to be aboard terrifying Southwest flight

John Bacon | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Southwest pilot stays calm during air traffic control call Tammie Jo Shults successfully landed a plane after an engine exploded during flight, blowing a hole in the side of the aircraft and killing one aboard.

The pilot of a Southwest Airlines flight who drew worldwide acclaim for successfully landing a plane last month after a blown engine strafed the fuselage with debris wasn't even supposed to be aboard Flight 1380.

Captain Tammie Jo Shults told ABC News’ 20/20 her husband, Dean, also a Southwest pilot, was supposed to captain the Boeing 737 that day. They swapped flights so Shults could see their son participate in a track meet.

“I’m not trading with him anymore,” Shults laughed.

Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 was about 20 minutes out of New York's LaGuardia Airport, bound for Dallas, on April 17 when disaster struck at 32,000 feet. Authorities say a fan blade on the left engine broke off, tearing the engine apart and blowing out a window.

Shults, 56, credited teamwork, training and focus for completing the emergency landing in Philadelphia 22 minutes later.

“You just realize, obviously, we're at the front end of the aircraft, so we're in charge,” she told ABC News’ 20/20. “I don't remember anything other than starting to think through what the plan is. And it worked well.”

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First Officer Darren Ellisor said instincts kicked in.

“Stuff that you've prepared for, you know, ever since you started flying … and this training just takes over,” Ellisor told 20/20. “Was there some of that fear? There probably was deep down, but I, you know, pushed it away.”

A passenger was sucked halfway out the shattered window, and it took two others to pull her back into the plane. A firefighter and a retired nurse struggled to keep her alive during the 20 minutes it took for Shults and Ellisor to complete the heroic emergency landing in Philadelphia. The efforts failed, and Jennifer Riordan, a Wells Fargo banking executive and mother of two, was the flight's lone fatality.

Shults, a former Navy pilot, and Ellisor, 44, an Air Force veteran, had met the previous day while piloting flights together. They would soon become legends together.

“Dean, being the amazing husband he is, said, ‘You go to the track meet, I'll switch and take your trip,'" Shults recalled.

Ellisor was at the controls during takeoff, which came off without a hitch.

“Everything was exactly the way it's supposed to be, just rolling down the runway, and when you get to a certain speed, you take off,” Ellisor said. “And then the hardest part was her job, talking to all the air-traffic controllers 'cause there's a bunch of airplanes out there talking, and everything was very routine."

Just as the plane reached 32,000 feet, however, the duo heard a loud bang and the plane quickly decompressed.

“My first thoughts were actually, ‘Oh, here we go.’ Just because it seems like a flashback to some of the Navy flying that we had done,” Shults said. She said they communicated by hand signals — and some yelling — because it was so noisy.

Ellisor said it was disorienting to have so many things going wrong at once — decompression, listing, heavy vibration.

"We knew that something extraordinary had happened pretty quickly,” Shults said. “We would have turned to Philadelphia anyway and started coming down, we just wouldn't have tried to get down so quickly. But getting down to richer oxygen was certainly an important task.”

Shults dealt with ground control, while Ellisor flew the plane.

“Darren handled it beautifully and not trying to force the aircraft to stay on altitude,” Shults said. “He followed the aircraft and let it stay in a nice controlled flight status. And it was a bit of a rough shudder until we slowed it down a little bit.”

Shults took the controls for the landing.

"We had to be flexible and just use things that we had learned in previous training," she said. "And we kind of just split the cockpit, and I did flying and some of the outside talking, and he took care of everything else.”

After landing, they handled their post-landing tasks. Then Shults walked through the plane to check on the passengers and the flight attendants.

“My mother had told me, ‘If I'm flying, I want to know what's going on,'" she said. "So I thought I would treat them like I would treat my own family."