Love all the armchair pilots talking about how airline pilots train for engine failure all the time and this was routine. Except while yes they do, they don’t normally train for said engine exploding, breaching the fuselage, a passenger nearly being sucked out, and possibly damaging the flight surfaces of the plane.

I was on one of Uniteds all-women flight crew flights once. That was pretty cool.

This is why aircraft have pilots. There’s good reason she’s good at it. Multi-engine training requires pilots to land planes with a simulated engine out dozens, if not hundreds, of times. This is exactly the emergency she practices in a simulator every few months. That said, she did a good job executing the emergency…

I worked at a small charter company as a teenager. The boss there hired pretty much any woman who applied. They make better pilots.

“at the same time it’s a tribute to the designers that this was contained well enough to not bring down the entire aircraft.”

I in fact am replying to the wrong person.

Yep, kinda like “Holy fuck that is crazy, but it’s not relevant to anything we’re about to do right now so let’s shelve it and have feelings about it some other time.”

That was my favorite part.

No kidding— the whole, “Did you say someone went out?!? Never mind— we’ll sort it out when you land” :D

Tower also gave her the wrong runway at first, and she was like “so, 27R now? Okay, don’t worry about us guys. Just missing part of the plane and a person was apparently sucked out... Oh, what’s that, yeah 27L. Thanks. Have a pleasant day. I’ll just stop up here by the firetruck.”

Lister to her!! Cool as a steely eyed rocket jock cucumber. Impressive. Flying and landing a twin engine on one engine is standard training procedure for pilots, but adding in the uncertainty that structural damage might cause a wing to fly off and that she believed a passenger had been sucked out just adds to the…

If someone came over the radio and calmly said “we have a hole in the plane and someone came out” I think I too would take a moment and let that sink in.

Daaamn. Cool as a cucumber. That’s exactly the kind of person you want in charge when shit goes pear shaped. Calm, cool, collected and knows her shit. Badass indeed.

“Is your airplane physically on fire?”

I think I understand what you are trying to say but I’m sorry you are missing the mark here. And when I say miss the mark, I mean MISSING THE FUCKING MARK.

Definitely badass. Wild to hear her not even using the typical “Pilot Voice”, which apparently started when others began emulating Chuck Yeager’s cadence. Just a normal conversational tone while landing a busted ass plane full of terrified people.

There are other portions of the audio where a male voice is heard - the radios were handled by both (there must have been a hand-off at some point from one to the other).

For people in aviation it has been a bit frustrating to here the references to “the pilot” in this flight. There is a flight crew and they work…

Amazing how cool and focused these pros are as they are describing how “part of the plane is missing” and that “there is a hole and somebody went out.”

From the audio, the tower guy seems to be pretty dumbstruck when she tells him there is a hole and somebody got sucked out.

Reuters is reporting her as the Captain: