59 Stunning Photos Of Badass Female Pilots Throughout History
Tammie Jo Shults, the pilot who safely landed a stricken Southwest Airlines flight on Tuesday, is getting justifiably praised for the coolheaded way she handled herself during the emergency.
The 56-year-old Shults, one of the first female fighter pilots in the U.S. Navy, calmly told air traffic control that part of her plane was missing and she would need ambulances on the runway.
“So we have a part of the aircraft missing, so we’re going to need to slow down a bit,” Shults told a controller.
One passenger died of blunt impact trauma to her head, neck and torso after an engine explosion caused a window to break. The aircraft, en route from New York City to Dallas, landed safely in Philadephia, though, and many of the passengers who’d been aboard later sang Shults’ praises on social media.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tammie-jo-shults-other-female-pilots_us_5ad8ddcae4b03c426dac6fb5
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BY BRYNN HOLLAND // JULY 7, 2017
Women pilots of the “Night Witches” receiving orders for an up-coming raid. (Credit: Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images)
They flew under the cover of darkness in bare-bones plywood biplanes. They braved bullets and frostbite in the air, while battling skepticism and sexual harassment on the ground. They were feared and hated so much by the Nazis that any German airman who downed one was automatically awarded the prestigious Iron Cross medal.
All told, the pioneering all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment dropped more than 23,000 tons of bombs on Nazi targets. And in doing so, they became a crucial Soviet asset in winning World War II.
The Germans nicknamed them the Nachthexen, or “night witches,” because the whooshing noise their wooden planes made resembled that of a sweeping broom. “This sound was the only warning the Germans had. The planes were too small to show up on radar… [or] on infrared locators,” said Steve Prowse, author of the screenplay The Night Witches, a nonfiction account of the little-known female squadron. “They never used radios, so radio locators couldn’t pick them up either. They were basically ghosts.”
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