Capt. Gerald Downs of Air Trek and Tammie Jo Shults, a retired Southwest Airlines captain, tell how they each managed an in-flight crisis.
Pilots of two airplanes who successfully coped with potentially disastrous circumstances – an uncontained engine failure and a dual-engine flameout – told a Flight Safety Foundation safety seminar on Wednesday how they responded, in both cases keeping the airplane under control until it was safely on the ground.
Tammie Jo Shults, now retired, was the captain of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-700 that experienced an uncontained engine failure on April 17, 2018, and Capt. Gerald Downs was the copilot of an Air Trek Cessna Citation 550 that lost power from both engines on May 9, 2019.
“We heard an explosion and felt like we’d been hit on the right side by a Mack truck,” Shults told the 66th annual Business Aviation Safety Summit (BASS), being presented virtually this year in partnership with the National Business Aviation A…
