Mark Hogg

Brains not included. Temporarily out of stock due to manufacturer imprisoned for faulty production…these people are LOONS

Captain Tammie Jo Shults wasn’t supposed to fly that plane that day. But her husband, Dean, a fellow Southwest Airlines pilot, knew their son had a track meet at the end of the week and Tammie Jo coached him in the throwing events. So, like he’d done so many other times, Dean switched their schedules to make sure she could get back in time. That’s how Tammie Jo Shults ended up piloting Southwest flight 1380. The runways at New York’s LaGuardia Airport are usually a mess of congestion, but that morning, April 17, 2018, Shults and First Officer Darren Ellisor were cleared for takeoff before they even got to the runway. Within minutes, the Boeing 737-700 was up into the clear spring sky, heading for Dallas. The New York City skyline faded behind them. The trip was supposed to take about three and a half hours. About 20 minutes in, though, as they climbed past 32,000 feet somewhere over Eastern Pennsylvania, there was a sudden, life-changing explosion. In the cockpit, it felt like another plane had hit them on the left. They were thrown sideways with a force Shults had never experienced, even in simulators, and now they could feel the plane skidding through the air. Then everything started shuddering so hard they couldn’t read the instruments. The whole world was a violent blur. Within seconds, the aircraft was diving toward the earth and starting to roll. That’s how Shults knew they’d lost an engine. Nobody in the main cabin could have known what an extraordinary person was captaining the plane. Shults had flown for Southwest for more than 20 years by then. Before that, she’d been one of the first few female fighter pilots in the Navy, a station she achieved through incredible skill, determination, and grace. She’s also a mother of two and longtime Sunday school teacher from Boerne, a quaint town in the Hill Country. As she and Ellisor struggled to get the plane upright, Shults noticed smoke coming in from the air conditioning system. She could barely breathe. She didn’t know it at the time, but a window in row 14 had blown out behind a wing, and the cabin was quickly depressurizing. The sound was a blistering, unconquerable roar, like ice picks through the eardrums of everyone on board. There was also a cockpit alarm blaring, warning them about the loss of oxygen. At this point, nobody in the crew knew what happened or how far the plane could fly, but Shults knew they needed to land as soon as possible. Ellisor spotted the Philadelphia airport on the radar, about 50 miles away. It was familiar: Southwest flies to Philadelphia, so both the captain and first officer had landed there hundreds of times. Philadelphia also has long runways, emergency medical capabilities, and a metropolitan fire department. In a calm, firm voice, Shults told the passengers that they were landing there. In the first five minutes, the plane descended about 19,000 feet, at a rate more than twice as fast as usual. They were near 8,000 feet when the flight attendants told the cockpit what had happened in row 14. “Is your airplane physically on fire?” the air traffic controller asked. “No, it’s not on fire,” Shults said, as composed as someone chatting about the weather. “But part of it’s missing. Shults continued: “They said there’s a hole and someone went out.” “Um, I’m sorry,” the air traffic controller replied. “You said there’s a hole and somebody went out?” With only one engine, limited power, and a strong drag to the left, Shults knew she’d only have one chance to approach the runway. As she lined up to land, the cockpit voice recorder caught her saying, softly, “Heavenly Father.” Reports would later show that a fan blade in the engine under the left wing had spontaneously failed, leading to the catastrophic explosion. Here’s how Ellisor later put it: “Tammie Jo is more than a hero; she is a role model to young and old, in her community and across the country.” Shults was back in the air a few weeks later. She missed flying.

Number of Employees the companies these men created pay… Musk: 150,000 Bezos: 1,576,000 Page: 200,000 Dell: 100,000 Brin: 200,000 Bernie Sanders: 0 He’s never created anything. Other than wealth for himself. Bernie is taker. He’s a life time leach sucking the blood of the taxpayers. A parasite to America.

Every time a German Messerschmitt pilot wanted to escape a Spitfire on his tail, he did the same thing. He pushed the nose down. In a dive, the German engine kept running — it used fuel injection. The British Spitfire's engine cut out. For one and a half seconds the Merlin went dead, the aircraft shuddered, and by the time it caught again the German was gone. Worse: if a German was behind a British pilot and the British pilot dove to escape, the German could follow and keep shooting while the British engine was silent. Pilots were dying because of a carburetor. The engineers at Farnborough knew about the problem. They were working on a long-term solution — a redesigned carburetor that would take years to perfect and manufacture. A woman named Beatrice Shilling fixed it with a washer. She was born in Hampshire in 1909 and was the kind of child who spent her pocket money on Meccano sets and tools. At fourteen she bought her first motorbike. Her mother, with the inspired instinct of someone who understood what her daughter actually was, found the Women's Engineering Society and arranged an apprenticeship at an electrical firm. She went to Manchester University — one of the first two women ever to study engineering there — graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, stayed another year for a master's in mechanical engineering, and in 1936 joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough as a scientific officer. By the late 1930s she was one of the best carburetor engineers in Britain. She was also one of only three women to hold the British Motorcycle Racing Club's Gold Star — awarded for lapping the Brooklands racing circuit at over 100 miles per hour on a motorcycle. She had reportedly told her future husband, an engineer named George Naylor, that she wouldn't marry him until he earned his own Brooklands Gold Star first. He earned it. They married in 1938. The problem with the Merlin was specific and lethal. The SU carburetor used a float chamber to regulate fuel flow. Under negative g-forces — the forces experienced in a sudden dive — the fuel flooded to the top of the float chamber and starved the engine for 1.5 seconds. Just enough time for a German pilot to turn the tables entirely. The RAF had known about this since the Battle of France. The formal solution — a redesigned pressure carburetor — was in development but wouldn't be ready for years. Shilling was thirty-one years old, working in carburetor research, and she designed a fix in weeks. A brass thimble with a precisely calibrated hole in the center — later simplified to a flat washer — fitted inline in the fuel line just before the carburetor. It restricted maximum fuel flow to just enough to prevent flooding without cutting off power. The key breakthrough: it could be fitted without taking the aircraft out of service. No downtime. No factory return. The old guard at the RAE looked at it and called it a plumbing fix. They called her a plumber. The first batch of 5,000 units was made by a Birmingham firm that normally manufactured plumbing fixtures, which they found embarrassing. The RAF pilots who flew Spitfires with Messerschmitts on their tails called it something else. They called it Miss Shilling's Orifice. With deep affection. By March 1941 she had organized a small team and was personally touring RAF fighter stations across England — traveling between bases on her old racing motorcycle — fitting the device to every Merlin engine they could reach. Squadron leaders all over the country were demanding installations. The word spread faster than the official channels could keep up with. The Germans noticed. They couldn't explain why British fighter pilots had suddenly started following them into dives. They were baffled by the new aggression. They didn't know about the washer. The restrictor remained in use until 1943, when the full pressure carburetor finally arrived. It had kept British pilots alive for two years in the middle of the war they couldn't afford to lose. After the war she worked on the Blue Streak missile. She studied what wet runways do to braking distances. She helped design a bobsled for the RAF Olympic team. In 1967 she solved overheating problems on an Eagle Mk1 Formula 1 car. She never received a top promotion at the RAE. Such positions, she was told, were for men. She received an OBE in 1949. The citation said "services to aviation." It did not mention the washer. She retired from the RAE in 1969. She kept racing motorcycles and sports cars. She modified and tuned both in her home workshop until she couldn't anymore. She died on November 18, 1990. She was 81. The Battle of Britain is one of the most documented events in British military history. Hundreds of books. Dozens of films. Memoirs by the pilots who flew in it. Almost none of them mention the carburetor problem. Almost none of them mention her. The pilots who benefited most never knew her name. They just knew that when they pushed the nose down, the engine kept running.