As a child, she watched jet aircraft from nearby Holloman Air Force Base practice maneuvers in the skies above her home.

During her final year of high school, she investigated the possibility of a career in flying but was told that there were no professional women pilots.

[3] Her next assignment was VAQ-34, a Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron at the Pacific Missile Test Center located at Point Mugu, California.

[14] U.S. Representative and former US Air Force colonel and pilot Martha McSally introduced a resolution in Congress to honor Shults for her life-saving heroism and skill in landing her badly disabled aircraft.

[16] In 1994, she married Dean Shults, at the time a fellow naval aviator in the A-7 Corsair II, who also joined Southwest Airlines as a pilot that year.

[7] Shults is a devout Christian who teaches Sunday school and helps the needy, such as internally displaced persons from Hurricane Rita.

[7] Shults wrote a book about Southwest Airlines flight 1380, Nerves of Steel, which was released in the United States on October 8, 2019.