Calm and Grace of a Heroine Pilot; Comey Book Reignites Bipartisan Criticism
CHURCH: Welcome back, everyone. Well, U.S. air safety inspectors have launched an investigation into the terrifying 22-minute nightmare that killed one passenger on a Southwest Airlines jet and ended with an emergency landing. It has prompted airlines around the world to inspect their Boeing 737 planes. The Southwest flights problems started when the engine on the left wing broke in midflight. It shattered a window next to passenger Jennifer Riordon, who died from her injuries. An investigator explained how difficult it was to land the plane after the accident occurred.</s>ROBERT SUMWALT, CHAIRMAN, NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD: The aircraft began a rapid uncommanded left roll for about 41 degrees of right angle. So usually when you're flying on an airline you get rarely go about 20, 25 degrees of bank, this went over 41 degrees. The pilot's level for the wings and throughout the rest of the flight there was one I'm going to describe is a fair amount of vibration throughout the airframe.</s>CHURCH: And the woman who was at the controls Captain Tammie Jo Shults is being hailed a hero. She is a former Navy fighter pilot who managed to land the damage plane. Our Alex Marquardt has more on her flight record.</s>TAMMIE JO SHULTS, PILOT, SOUTHWEST AIRLINES: Yes, we have part of the aircraft missing so we're going to need to slow down a bit.</s>ALEXANDER MARQUARDT, SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT, CNN: Not a hint of nerves in the voice of Captain Tammie Jo Shults as she radioed in the emergency to the control tower.</s>SHULTS: OK, could you have the medical medics there on the runway as well, we've got injured passengers.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Injured passengers? OK. And are you -- is your airplane physically on fire.</s>SHULTS: No, it's not on fire but part of it is missing. They say there's a hole and someone went up.</s>MARQUARDT: With engine one blown up, smoke billowed into the cabin, yelling, screaming. The oxygen masks dropping.</s>MARTY MARTINEZ, PASSENGER, SOUTHWEST AIRLINE: I truly thought that these were going to be my last moments on earth.</s>MARQUARDT: Marty Martinez had no idea that amid the chaos calm and collected 56-year-old Shults was actually guiding the plane in for a landing.</s>MARTINEZ: We're all freaking out, you know, thinking, you know, wondering if we were going to make it home to our loved ones or not, but I just feel so lucky to have some with that type of experience.</s>MARQUARDT: Shults' experience, Martinez soon learned is deep and groundbreaking. As a teenager growing up in a ranch in New Mexico she wanted to fly in the Air Force but was told there were no female pilots. So she tried the Navy. After waiting a year she got in. One of the first women to be a naval aviator. Saying in a book, "I had finally broken in to the flight club." Women were barred from combat so she became an instructor, eventually selected again one of the first women to train on the coveted FA-18 Hornet fighter jet. By the time Shults retired from the Navy she'd reach the rank of lieutenant commander. So, on Tuesday morning, when the last engine blew out, it's a little surprise she showed no fear.</s>MILES O'BRIEN, AVIATION CONTRIBUTOR, CNN: Compared to her previous experiences is one of the first female F-18 fighter pilots carrier based I suspect this was one walking depart for her.</s>MARQUARDT: Shults' extraordinary landings quickly compared to the miracle on the Hudson Captain Sully Sullenberger lost both of his engines but could rely on his plane's automatic systems to keep the plane under control. Captain Shults had no automatic help bringing the plane down manually.</s>O'BRIEN: They drill this over and over again. So this becomes ingrained in their memories, their muscle memory. It becomes almost routine for them and in the case of Tammie Jo Shults it was evident that that training just came right through.</s>MARQUARDT: That historic training now being credited by Martinez and the other surviving passengers for getting them to the ground safely.</s>MARTINEZ: I tell her that, you know, thank you for giving me a second chance on life. Now I walked in and I take these breaths and I feel like I'm going to move forward with this new found sense of purpose.</s>CHURCH: Truly heroic effort on her part. And that was our Alexander Markquardt reporting there from New York. Over decades, our colleague and friend Richard Blystone brought the world to us, whether it was the Gulf War of the slaughter in Rwanda. His reporting drew us in and made us pay attention. And that maybe the greatest legacy a journalist can leave. Richard died earlier this week. He was 81. Christiane Amanpour remembers a CNN original.</s>BLYSTONE: If hell had a national park, it would look like this.</s>CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST, CNN: From the burning oil fields of Kuwait to the killing fields of Cambodia. If the narrative of news had a poet laureate it was this man, Richard Blystone. Word seems small for a person who looms so large.</s>BLYSTONE: So we flew over oceans of Civil War when we came down we walk through the islands of misery.</s>AMANPOUR: Who always had the right turn of phrase to explain the unfathomable.</s>BLYSTONE: The sharp angles of the starving reflect the implacable geometry of their predicament. They tether on a knife edge of survival that does not take much to tip the balance.</s>AMANPOUR: To make the seemingly Monday meaningful.</s>BLYSTONE: The conformity, the blind obedience, the numbing routine, the regulation, the herd mentality, the barriers shackles of feathers of curved. The obliteration of individuality. What a neat symbol of life and work under communism, just find yourself a bottle in plant.</s>AMANPOUR: And to make the apparently insignificant consequential.</s>BLYSTONE: A long way from Berlin, John F. Kennedy would come to this wall to boost spirits by declaring Ich bin Ein medley writer.</s>AMANPOUR: Elmira, New York was where Blystone started his life. The Associated Press is where he started his journalism career reporting the Civil Rights movement and later the War in Vietnam and it's there he started his family. Risking his own life to save someone else's when he rescued A.P.'s Cambodia newsman, Chaay-Born Lay, along with his wife and children.</s>BLYSTONE: When this cast was filled Jimmy Carter was president of the United States.</s>AMANPOUR: Blystone joined CNN in 1980, just before this pioneering network went on the air, becoming one of the so-called originals.</s>BLYSTONE: As for the gas.</s>AMANPOUR: A true original who witnessed seismic events at the end of the millennium and showed us what most couldn't see and stood up to men others feared.</s>BLYSTONE: Can I go a little farther, Mr. President. You have seen the magazine covers, now doubters say beast of Baghdad or butcherer of Baghdad.</s>AMANPOUR: The best of colleagues Richard was wedded to the truth and he knew how to find it in everyone.</s>BLYSTONE: And Marion Gaberik (Ph) knows not only the thrill of catching something but the pleasure of setting something free. Freedom of thoughts, freedom of speech, freedom of worship to the freedom to go down to the river and fish and rankle with those, well, maybe it does.</s>AMANPOUR: Following the collapse of communism, he traveled thousands of miles along the old Iron Curtain.</s>BLYSTONE: An Iron Curtain Churchill had it right. Not only it wasn't meant to keep the Germans from one another but to blind them from what was going on with one another.</s>AMANPOUR: Not afraid to play the fool or show the foolish side of the world.</s>BLYSTONE: I got the shop right here, the better is all reveal and they would all bet (Inaudible) if they have a beer. I can't do. I can't do. The loss has the shop. I can't do.</s>AMANPOUR: And remembering those who should never be forgotten.</s>BLYSTONE: All imperfections past they march now in foughtless order keeping the hard-won heights over Omaha Beach, a field of pattern leaving their many origins into their common destiny. A field that was then so far from tranquil. Nine thousand Americans have earned the place they rest but their marble Requiem would be sterile as stone if it didn't belong as well to all who come or are led here. Burning cling of what it was like a grasp of what it was full. For the dead they're all one nation. As soon as the place of prying eyes now--</s>AMANPOUR: CNN's own poet laureate leaves a world of mourning friends, followers, and colleagues, but we will always have his words.</s>BLYSTONE: My side in Modlareuth is in Thuringia state, your side is in Bavaria. Walls crumble and fall. Bureaucracy is forever. Richard Blystone, CNN, Modlareuth, Germany. Beirut, Paris, Lockerbie, Amsterdam, Stratford-upon-Avon, Leon, Bond (Ph), Iraq, Northern Iraq, Kuwait, West Germany, East Germany, Elton, England, Loch Ness, Wales, Belfast, Dublin, Sarajevo, Tuzla Airbase, Christian (Inaudible). From Marsaxlokk Bay in Malta. Mogadishu. From Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Richard Blystone, CNN, London.