On April 17, 2018, passengers of Southwest Flight 1380 settled in for the trip from New York City to Dallas. After about twenty minutes in the air, an engine fan blade broke loose, destroying the engine and causing flying shrapnel to break a passenger window, partially pulling passenger Jennifer Riordan out of the plane.

But the pilots didn’t know all that. In that moment, all they knew for sure was one engine had failed and the plane was depressurizing fast, while also careening to the side and then downward. 144 passengers and 5 crew members were in a modified free fall.

Tammie Jo Shults, a veteran Navy pilot, and her first officer Darren Ellisor, a veteran Air Force pilot, began triaging the emergency.

“As long as you have altitude and ideas, you’re O.K.,” Shults famously quipped later. “And we had both.”

After talking with air traffic control and her copilot, Shults announced they were going to land at Philadelphia. “We all had something to wrap our minds around: a destination. And with that destination came hope, which changed all of us.”

Early dreams

As a child, Shults struggled with anxiety starting in first grade.

Her parents never fulfilled the prescriptions doctors recommended, but instead asked her to help with chores around the house or family farm whenever she began to seem overwhelmed. “This natural reality check—how to deal with nerves and stress—started me on a lifelong emotional workout program,” she writes in Nerves of Steel: How I Followed My Dreams, Earned My Wings, and Faced My Greatest Challenge. She learned to set aside her worries, do something physical, then return to her problems when she had cleared her head.

Her childhood years on the farm were full of opportunities for outdoor work or play. Even as a child, Shults was fascinated with planes that flew overhead from the nearby military base.

“Pilots from the base practiced dogfighting (called air combat maneuvering) almost daily in the endless blue that was overhead…When pilots are dogfighting, they need a ground reference point, and their choice of our three-story hay barn anchored them overhead. The noise from the jets would start as a distant rumble, then at times end with the crack of a sonic boom, which, on a few occasions, broke windows in our barn…Dad never uttered a harsh word when the noise filled our ears or caused the ground to shake. He’d smile and say, ‘The sound of freedom.’”

Soon Shults decided she wanted to be one of those pilots someday, but to a farm girl in a time when pilots were nearly exclusively men, that dream seemed almost too hard to believe. Almost.

An unknown future unfolds

For years, Shults struggled with surrendering her dream or going for it. She read Jungle Pilot, about military-turned-missionary pilot Nate Saint, and decided her best option would be to join the military.

Her parents urged her that God had made her for a purpose and she would find out what that was, but even after college, Shults was unsure of her next steps—mostly because military recruiters kept turning her down.

Though Shults didn’t know her future, God did. As Corrie ten Boom once said, “Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.”

Finally, Shults decided to try one last time. Though recruiters from multiple military branches had refused her before, she called a Navy recruiter on her way home from graduate school for a visit. A few weeks later, Shults headed for her first Navy training.

Years later, Shults realized that the delay caused by recruiters’ rejections had worked in her favor: if she had not joined the Navy as late as she had, she would not have had the opportunity to fly some of the aircraft she loved, and she would never have met a Navy pilot named Dean.

Dean and Tammie Jo married in 1994.

Road blocks

As a female Navy pilot in the 1980s, Shults faced many different opinions on women in the cockpit from the start of her training. Her first class had the highest number of women applicants the class had had to date—three—prompting the nickname “Class of Girls,” despite the over seventy men who were also in the class.

Throughout her time in the military, Shults served under leaders who took care of their people, as well as some leaders who didn’t. She also experienced some leaders who tried to end her career—including some who very nearly did. She learned not to depend on others for her self-esteem.

“I had to remind myself that my value was based solely on what God, not man, thought of me.”

When Shults was a Navy instructor, an antagonizing commanding officer ordered her to a year of OCF duty—supervising out-of-control flights, the test that proved a student could handle an aircraft that was out of control. To do this, the instructor (Shults) would fly the plane to a comfortable altitude, then stall the engine or somehow create difficulty that the student would then have to guide the plane out of. It was a petty move to assign an officer to a year of OCF duty, but Shults chose to make the most of it. Through hundreds of out-of-control flights, Shults honed her skills as an exemplary pilot in tough situations.

Eternal hope

Once Shults and Ellison had a destination in place, they began working toward it. They went over multiple emergency-procedure checklists and called air traffic control to coordinate their landing, making countless split-second decisions over the next twenty minutes before landing in Philadelphia. Sadly, Jennifer Riordan later died from her injuries. But so many more lives could have been lost.

“For me, the realization that Darren and I might not be able to keep our aircraft together long enough to descend through 32,500 feet and land brought a clear thought to the front of my mind: perhaps this was the day I would meet my Maker face-to-face. My mind rushed to that conclusion but stopped short of that cliff of fear because I spend time with Jesus every day. I wouldn’t be meeting a stranger.”

God prepared Tammie Jo Shults for Flight 1380, but that April day was not the only significant moment in her life, just as our lives are full of countless situations and events. Through our school experiences, jobs, interests, relationships, communities, and innumerable other influences, God prepares each of us for a future we can’t see. For a future destination.

We don’t always know the direction our life is headed. Actually, we usually don’t. But God is guiding us through every situation to a definite destination. Knowing our destination—heaven—gives perspective and hope in the middle of the hardest moments of our lives. Knowing our identity and our eternal home makes all the difference.

“[H]ope didn’t change our circumstances one bit. We were on the same rough ride, with plenty of unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries staring us in the face. But when Darren and I knew where we were going, we could start working on a plan. As people accepted the truth that we weren’t in an out-of-control free fall, hope started to calm everyone in an otherwise terrifying situation—to the point that we could all sidestep panic and do our best thinking. No, hope won’t necessarily change our circumstances, but it will change us.”

Image Credit: Fox News