“Where’s your groom?” the older couple asked Alexis Albin as they waited to board the plane from New York’s LaGuardia to Dallas on Tuesday morning.
Her burlap tote bag, with the word “Bride” written in big cursive letters, almost begged for such comments. She told them her groom had preferred seating on their Southwest flight. He had gone up ahead, promising to save her a spot, since the airline doesn’t assign seats.
The collection of passengers that morning at Gate B5 was like any other, drinking coffee, engaging in small talk and checking their phones as they stood in line for Flight 1380.
Celina firefighter Andrew Needum and his wife, Stephanie, were returning from a long wished-for trip to the big city with their two young children and their parents. Their morning had been spent wrangling the group to try to get to the airport on time.
Andrew’s mom and dad were the ones who’d joked with Alexis at the gate. They told her they were in New York for a family celebration to mark the grandmother’s 60th birthday.
Alexis and her new husband had spent a weeklong honeymoon in New York, seeing Broadway shows, a Yankees game, and the Statue of Liberty. Now, all the two medical students wanted to do was return home to Shreveport and get back to their usual routine.
Matt Tranchin, a former White House aide and community organizer, was eager to be back home in Dallas after a business trip. His wife was in her final weeks of pregnancy with their first child. A son.
Retired school nurse Peggy Phillips had a phone full of videos from a visit to see her daughter, who was performing in Broadway's "Hello, Dolly!," and time with her seventh grandbaby, who had just started to crawl.
They didn’t yet know, but by the time they touched ground, their experience would move them beyond polite conversation and connect their lives.
A damaged engine on Southwest Flight 1380 led to about 20 minutes of fear and confusion for its 144 passengers as the plane made a rapid descent and emergency landing in Philadelphia. During the ordeal, the passengers themselves would be called into action to help others.
Some would try to save the life of a fellow passenger. Others would unbuckle their seat belts to help strangers put on oxygen masks. And even from their seats, passengers turned to their neighbors with prayers and words of comfort.
But when boarding early that morning, recent bride Alexis just wanted to find her husband. All Matt hoped was to not get a middle seat.
Smooth takeoff
Kristopher Johnson wasn’t supposed to be on Flight 1380.
A doctoral candidate and assistant principal in El Paso, he had flown to New York to present research at an education conference. As a new dad with a hectic schedule, he decided to return home a day early, on Tuesday instead of Wednesday.
One of the first people on the plane, he settled into seat 1C where there was a lot of legroom.
He heard the flight attendants broadcast “the spiel” over the intercom: How to buckle the seat belts. Where the exit doors are located. How to find and inflate the yellow life vests. How to put on oxygen masks.
“I listened kind of halfheartedly. Because I’ve heard it so many times,” he said.
Alexis had found her husband, Tyler, in seat 12F. She took out her neck pillow, leaned on her husband’s shoulder and settled in for a nap. Tyler pulled up a Keanu Reeves action movie he’d planned to watch, but realized it hadn’t downloaded. Instead, he took out his noise-canceling headphones and turned on some music.
The plane had a smooth takeoff.
It was approaching cruising altitude. Behind the Needum family’s seats in rows 7 and 8, flight attendants started to take drink orders.
Kristopher, an experienced but nervous flier, reclined in his seat and put on his headphones.
“Don't be discouraged. Oh, I realize it's hard to take courage....you can lose sight of it all...” began the tune sung by Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick.
Kristopher’s eyes closed, and he began to slowly drift off.
A few moments later, the unforgettable jolt.
Chaos and confusion
Passengers heard a loud bang, and then things started happening very quickly.
Seats shook. The plane descended suddenly and rolled dramatically to the left.
People screamed. Oxygen masks fell from the ceiling. A voice shouted in a foreign language. A man closed his eyes and prayed.
“It felt like a really bad roller coaster ride, where it just fell out of the sky,” Kristopher said.
Or when an elevator first moves downward. “My stomach went up and came back down,” said Peggy, the retired nurse.
Or like a car tire bursting. “Just bumpier,” said Benjamin Goldstein, who was in seat 11E. The Rockland County, N.Y., software executive was traveling to Dallas for a conference.
“You knew it wasn't good,” he said. “You just felt the aircraft was unstable and going down.”
But then, things stabilized a bit.
As passengers fumbled to get their oxygen masks on, a flight attendant walked up and down the aisle with an oxygen tank in her arms and a mask on her face. She checked to make sure oxygen was flowing to each passenger.
The rush of air whooshing through the cabin made it difficult to hear announcements over the intercom. So row by row, the flight attendant told them the plane was headed to Philadelphia, and they were about 20 minutes away.
Someone yelled that the plane door had been opened. "The door!? Who would do that!" Benjamin thought as he lifted himself in his seat to look back.
His mind began to race.
“When’s the next shoe going to drop? This is really, really bad.”
The firefighter and the cowboy
Some passengers heard a commotion around row 14. Had someone had a heart attack?
Benjamin watched as the “biggest man on the plane,” standing more than 6 feet tall in a Stetson hat and cowboy boots, headed back where a small group was clustered.
A woman in seat 14A, later identified as Jennifer Riordan, had been partially sucked through the opening of a shattered window. Other passengers fought to keep her inside the cabin.
The woman sitting near her was a professor from Oklahoma named Hollie Mackey, a local TV news station would later report. She grabbed on to her belt loops, wrapped an arm around her waist and tried to pull Riordan back in.
But she wasn’t strong enough.
The man in the Stetson hat, Tim McGinty, a cattle ranch broker from Brandon, Texas, arrived just in time.
Andrew Needum, the Celina firefighter traveling with his family, heard the commotion behind him after helping a young mother and her baby with their oxygen masks.
He checked on his children, then glanced across the aisle at his wife, who had her oxygen mask on. "I looked at her eyes and she basically gave me the approval to go back there," he said.
He joined Tim in an effort to get Riordan back in the plane. Together, they succeeded.
As soon as she was pulled from the window’s opening, there came a second sound — a loud whoosh — and a flood of cold air.
Sunlight entered through a hole where a window used to be. White and gray, fluffy particles floated through the cabin, drifting down like snow. Was it from plane's insulation? Ashes from an explosion?
Someone tried to cover the hole with a jacket, but it was sucked out of the window and blew away.
A call for help
As a nurse trained in crisis management, Peggy knew having too many cooks in the kitchen sometimes complicates things in an emergency. So she stayed in her seat, though she had heard the noises from a few rows behind her.
She sent a quick text to her daughter. “Plane trouble. I love you.”
Then a voice over the intercom asked: “Does anybody know CPR?”
“It was like a one, one-thousand, two, one-thousand, three one-thousand ... and she stood up,” said Benjamin, who was seated in the same row as Peggy. "There's courage in just getting up in that environment."
When nurse Peggy went back three rows, she saw the extent of the woman’s injuries.
“Severe, very severe,” she’d say. “Massive trauma, massive trauma.”
"The injuries that were sustained were just not compatible with life," she thought.
But that didn’t stop them from trying.
The injured passenger was laid across the row of seats. Firefighter Andrew had put his back against the gaping hole in the window and begun chest compressions to try to restore a heartbeat.
Peggy lifted the woman’s chin and tilted her head back, an effort to maintain an open airway.
When Andrew’s arms grew tired, Peggy took over.
“Everything else disappeared,” she said. “It's like I didn't hear anything else, I didn't see anything else. I just blocked everything else out.”
But small kindnesses would not be forgotten. One that Peggy would later recall happened after the ordeal was over, when they had finally made it to the terminal in Philadelphia.
“Your shoe is untied,” a fellow passenger pointed out.
The weary nurse stood in a line to wash her hands, tinted red from her attempts to revive the woman. The stranger knelt and tied the laces.
“It was so simple. But it was so touching that she would do that for me,” Peggy said.
Final messages
As the plane dropped by thousands of feet, Matt, the expectant Dallas father, began looking around the cabin, trying to decipher what was going on.
He heard a passenger crying behind him. He saw a handful of people gathering three rows ahead, on the left side of the plane. He fixated on them. What were they doing? Was there a hole in the plane? Was it getting bigger?
In the seat beside him, Dallas marketing executive Marty Martinez took out his phone, bought Wi-Fi and began to record video on Facebook Live. “Something is wrong with our plane!” the post said. “It appears we are going down! Emergency landing!! Southwest flight from NYC to Dallas!!”
Matt realized he had internet access and grabbed his own phone.
“I reverted from feeling like I was afraid to die to ‘This is the end,’” he said. “What do I want my final words to be? What’s the last thing I want to say to my wife, my parents?”
He began writing a goodbye message to his pregnant wife and unborn son.
"Our baby boy is everything. You are my everything. Marrying you was the best moment and decision I ever made. If I don't make it, please know I'm truly happy. Because of you. Your love."
With every minute that passed, Matt wondered when the plane would hit the ground, how much time he had before he died.
His phone rang. It was his wife, frantic. “Sweetheart, I see land,” he told her.
Would they touch down safely? Or were they about to crash?
A pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker, telling passengers over and over again to brace for landing.
When the plane landed on the ground, passengers cheered. Matt began to cry. He picked up his phone, his wife still on the line. “We made it,” he said. “I’m alive!”
On the ground
Tyler unbuckled as soon as the plane rolled on the tarmac. “Alexis, I love you, but I have to go help,” he told his new bride.
He rushed toward the woman lying in row 14 and the strangers administering CPR.
“I’m here to help,” Tyler told Andrew. He took over efforts to resuscitate her.
“We all kept going, knowing that it probably wasn’t going to change the course,” he said. “It was the only thing we could do at the time.”
A crew of medics and firefighters came onto the plane and carried the woman out on a stretcher. Other medics went row to row, asking if anyone was injured.
Tyler returned to his seat on the plane. He looked down at his hands. They were bloody and shaking. They’d keep shaking until he returned home.
Southwest Capt. Tammie Jo Shults stepped out of the cockpit and introduced herself to passengers. “Someone asked her, ‘How did the plane fly?’ And she said, ‘Like a rock, ’’ Alexis remembered.
Passengers began to file off the plane, still in shock, as they walked down a flight of stairs and took shuttle buses to an airplane terminal.
Shults “hugged every single person who walked by,” Tyler said.
She even made time to speak to the Needums’ 5-year-old daughter, and explain to her that flying was safe.
“She reassured her that in her 32 years of flying that her oxygen masks had never come down. So she told our daughter that she was special, to try to make it a positive,” said the little girl’s mother, Stephanie.
Matt noticed another pilot, standing by the cockpit. It was Darren Ellisor, the first officer of the crew. “I gave him a hug, looked him in the eyes and walked off,” he said.
Coming together
Passengers of Flight 1380 were taken to a terminal at Philadelphia International Airport that appeared old or out of commission. It had little furniture and no signs of the typical airport bustle.
First responders went person to person, asking if passengers had any scrapes or bruises. Airport employees passed out blankets, folding chairs, bottles of water and snacks. An FBI official asked passengers for their names, dates of birth and details about the flight.
At first, the passengers scattered to different corners of the room, with some sitting on the floor and others in passed-out folding chairs. They made phone calls to their parents, spouses, children and friends.
But slowly, they started to come together, and share stories. Some showed photos of their families and swapped phone numbers, vowing to stay in touch.
“You go through an experience like that, it connects you, it bonds you,” Matt said. “It’s something that no one else can fully appreciate or understand.”
The tragic experience had revealed some of their best qualities.
“I saw passengers patting each other and helping each other get out of seats and giving words of encouragement,” Peggy said. “It's really amazing the bonding with total strangers that happens after something like this.”
"Something like this just reminds us that every day is
and that we're lucky that we're here," Benjamin said.
Some passengers decided to stay overnight in a Philadelphia hotel. Others headed back to New York or asked to be booked on a flight to Dallas.
Southwest Airlines arranged for a special flight to Dallas for the Flight 1380 passengers. They’d board a plane flown by veteran pilots.
A customer approached a Southwest employee at the airport and asked to be booked on the 6:45 pm flight, too. “Sir,” they told him. “That plane is for the survivors.”
