AviationCircle

On June 12, 1972, American Airlines Flight 96 climbed out of Detroit for Buffalo, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 with 67 people aboard. The jet was almost brand new, one of the first DC-10s ever built. Then, barely 5 minutes after takeoff, passing 12,000 feet, there was a loud thud and dirt blew up into the pilots' faces.

The rear cargo door had torn off over Windsor, Ontario. On a DC-10, the passengers sit directly above the cargo hold, with the cabin floor dividing the two. When the door blew off, the air rushed out of the hold below, and the floor buckled and collapsed downward into the empty space. By itself, that was survivable. The danger was what ran through that floor. The cables that carry the pilots' commands back to the tail were crushed, and in the cockpit the throttles snapped to idle, the rudder jammed, and the tail engine died.

3 men were on the flight deck. Captain Bryce McCormick, 52, a veteran with more than 24,000 hours. First Officer Paige Whitney. And Flight Engineer Clayton Burke. For a moment McCormick thought they had hit another airplane. They had not lost everything, the wings still answered, but with the rudder jammed and an engine gone, the DC-10 wanted to swing and roll, and pointing it straight for a landing would be brutally hard.

Here was the thing almost no other captain could have said. McCormick had practiced for exactly this. While training on the new DC-10, he had spent hours in the simulator learning to fly the jet on its engines, throttling one side up and the other down to steer, in case he ever lost his controls. Nobody had told him to. Now that training saved everyone. He worked the 2 wing engines like a second set of controls and turned the crippled jet back toward Detroit.

The hardest part was the landing. As the DC-10 slowed, its nose dropped and the sink rate ran away, far too fast to touch down safely, so McCormick fed in power on both wing engines to catch it. They came in fast, and the instant the wheels hit, Whitney threw one engine into reverse to hold the nose straight, because the rudder was still useless. The jet rolled out and stopped near the end of the runway, one set of wheels in the grass.

All 67 people survived. Captain Bryce McCormick, First Officer Paige Whitney, and Flight Engineer Clayton Burke were each given American Airlines' highest honor.
But this story has a second ending. Investigators traced it to a cargo door that could look latched when it was not, and warned that it had to be fixed. It was not, not really. 21 months later, over France, the same door on another DC-10 blew off the same way. That flight, Turkish Airlines 981, was not lucky. It crashed and killed all 346 people aboard.

Captain Chresten Wilson has reached something no woman in United Airlines' history ever had: she is the airline's most senior pilot, number one out of roughly 18,000.

In United's roughly 100-year history, no woman had ever topped its pilot seniority list. Wilson is the first.

She almost didn't try. Wilson joined United in 1984 at 22, at a time when she rated her own chances near zero. "I didn't think there was a snowball's chance in hell that I would get hired," she told Fortune. "But I guess I met their standard."

That was 42 years ago. She started as a flight engineer on the McDonnell Douglas DC-10, then flew the 737, 747, 757, 767, A320, and 777, before reaching the Boeing 787 Dreamliner she commands today out of San Francisco. She has been a captain for 31 of those years.

There is a bittersweet edge to it. Wilson is 64. She reached the summit right at the edge of her own retirement, and will hold it only briefly before federal rules require her to step down.

She is careful about what the milestone means. "I never set out to be the first," she said. "I just wanted to go fly airplanes and do it to the best of my ability. But I also see that this is very significant. It represents progress and persistence, and I have to give thanks to the women that came before me. They opened the door for me."
When she started, women were almost nonexistent in airline cockpits. Even today they make up only about 6 percent of the profession.

Her hope is simply that other people look at her and aim higher. "I just want people to see that there's no limit."