Veteran military, commercial pilot Glidewell training next generation of fliers

Jill Glidewell has seen just about everything on a flight deck.

From weathering hurricanes and typhoons in a U.S. Air Force C-130, to flying celebrities and passengers giving birth on commercial flights, the military veteran and longtime Delta Air Lines pilot has been through it all while at the throttle for more than 40 years.

The seasoned pilot is now a flight simulator instructor in Auburn University’s School of Aviation.

“I teach the simulator and Crew Resource Management,” said Glidewell, who has more than 22,000 hours of career flight time. “I tell everyone my goal isn’t to teach them how to fly, but how to be a crew member — how to work together, how to solve problems and how to talk to each other.”

And she should know. Glidewell was a WC-130 command pilot in the Air Force, becoming one of the first four women to be a C-130 aircraft commander. After leaving the military as an aircraft commander, she flew all of Delta’s Boeing aircraft, serving as an international pilot the last 20 years of her career and navigating her way to exotic destinations such as Europe, South America, Australia, Asia and Africa.

She uses her experience and fun-loving personality to teach Auburn students to work together in the flight deck with other crew members and function to the best of their ability as pilots.

“We teach them how to start engines, how to taxi, how to communicate, that kind of thing,” Glidewell said. “We give them emergency scenarios, but we talk more about who they should talk to, what they should say to the flight attendants and things like that.”

Mom’s words lead the way

A collegiate softball and basketball athlete at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, Glidewell — then Jill James — had a career mapped out, until she didn’t.

“In my mind, I was going to be a basketball coach,” she said. “I had two brothers who were pilots, and my mother said, ‘You’re not going to be a basketball coach. Your brothers love being pilots, and that’s what you’re going to be.’

“You never argued with my mother, so I said, ‘Yes ma’am’ and joined Air Force ROTC. I was the first woman in the Midwest to get a pilot slot in the Air Force ROTC, and I became a pilot.”

Taking off from the start

Her mother was right, and Glidewell excelled as an Air Force aviator. She went through pilot training in Del Rio, Texas, and quickly established herself as a trusted aviator, even appearing in a “Women in Aviation” feature in the November 1983 edition of Cosmopolitan magazine.

She flew countless data-gathering missions in Guam and Biloxi, Mississippi, in the C-130, an aircraft known as “the hurricane hunter.” Glidewell and her fellow pilots would fly the plane into major storms and release weather information collection devices.

“We’d go in at 10,000 feet and would drop a device to measure pressure and winds,” Glidewell said. “We’d drop it in the eye of the storm and gather all the data. We’d have pictures and see how big the waves were and what knots the wind was. We would go through the eye two or three times, and they could figure out which way it was moving.”

Flying a large aircraft is difficult enough, but deliberately flying one into a massive storm is a whole other level of intensity.

“We were concentrating so much, it never even affected us,” Glidewell said of the pressure. “Only once was I ever concerned, and it was in a super typhoon. I was in the Guiness Book of World Records for being in the lowest-pressure storm for 30 minutes, but then my friend beat me out because the pressure dropped when he went in.”

Glidewell even flew search-and-rescue missions in tandem with the U.S. Coast Guard, several times helping locate disabled vessels in the Pacific Ocean. Her extensive career has given Glidewell a unique perspective to witness some spectacular events from the sky, including the Northern Lights and NASA’s Space Shuttle mission launches.

“My favorite Delta missions were bringing the troops home from the Middle East and watching them reunite with their families,” she said.

Propelling the future

Glidewell moved to Auburn with her husband, Armond, a 1984 Auburn alumnus and longtime American Airlines pilot, after years in Texas and joined the School of Aviation’s faculty in 2022. Their son, Seth, also is a pilot.

She enjoys helping prepare students for a career in the skies.

“I have a friend at Endeavor Air, and she says they love getting Auburn students because they know how to be crew members,” Glidewell said. “The five of us who teach the simulator, we’re all retired airline pilots, and it’s very rare to see that. Our goal is to make it where their experience prepares them to walk into a program ready to go.”

Most of all, Glidewell hopes her students find a life in the skies as fulfilling as hers.

“I want them to find where they belong and to have a career like I had, or my husband had or my brothers had,” said Glidewell, who serves as advisor for the university’s Women in Aviation chapter. “I want them to listen to me and learn the lessons I learned over 32 years. I want them to love it.”