RogerBW's Blog

2019 non-fiction. On 17 April 2018, the Boeing 737-7H4 registered N772SW suffered a catastrophic engine failure at 32,000 feet over Pennsylvania. Only one person died. This is the story of the captain's life.

Shults was a US Navy pilot before she flew commercially, in A-7s and A-6s and later in F/A-18s, and the repeated grinding message here is on multiple levels. First, of course, the blatant sexism she encountered, with some superiors taking every possible step in order to make her look bad, including explicitly lying about matters that were already on the record and trying to set her up to have fatal accidents; but second, and I think it's a thing Shults herself may not quite have worked out, that the real problem here is organisations with single channels of authority. If your direct military superior has it in for you, all you can do is appeal to that same military superior, who just ignores you… or, in practice, hope you made enough friends that informal channels can make up for the lack of a proper reporting system (which saved Shults's career several times both in the Navy and in commercial flying). Yes, I know, in an actual combat situation you want a single chain of command, but this tendency to believe the higher-status person even when there's directly contradictory evidence reminds me of why so much abuse in Catholic and American Evangelical communities has only lately been discovered.

The thing about the book that really grates for me, though, is Shults' approach to religion. She was evidently brainwashed into it at age twelve at a "church camp", falling for the usual "if this is so pretty how can it have happened by chance" argument, and at least as far as the book goes it seems to provide her entire life of the mind: if in doubt, think about God, if good things happen thank God (and never take any credit for your own skill), if bad things happen assume it's God's plan (though you can still fight them if you hear a voice in your head telling you to), and whatever happens read the Bible again and again. (She doesn't mention reading anything else apart from technical documents after she became a Christian, though in her youth she was fortunate enough to find a copy of West With the Night.) Shults was fortunate: she ended up in churches that actually allowed women to do things other than be seamstresses, brood mares and unpaid childminders. But when reading about someone who clearly has enough brain to learn a complicated technical job it's dispiriting, and somewhat frightening, to see that she has this large unquestioned evidence-free hole in her life.

Once you get past those things… the actual flying stuff is pretty good, particularly the incident that made Shults famous. The account differs in several ways from the version you'll get from other places, including what's been released of the cockpit voice recording, so that's worth bearing in mind. The flying is what I came for, and if the story of growing up poor on a ranch isn't terribly interesting, it does at least explain something of the person who got into the flying situations.

The excellent site Fear of Landing has a good technical description of the events (in two parts), and Wikipedia talks about the accident investigation – I suspect I'd love to read a book about that too, even knowing the answers.