Martha Conant traveled regularly for her job with Hewlett-Packard in Denver. On that Wednesday, she was on her way to Philadelphia to work with a client. She didn’t even look at her ticket until she was at the airport. She had been assigned a seat in the last row. She checked the display boards and saw that she could wait a couple of hours for a nonstop flight instead of this one, which was making a stop in Chicago. After thinking it over, she decided that she could get some work done on the plane. She kept her reservation for United Flight 232. The date was July 19, 1989.
Conant took the second seat in from the port* aisle in the center section at the back of the plane. She wore a black skirt and a pink sweater. She carried a briefcase and a purse. Conant anticipated people milling around the bathrooms behind her as flight attendants bustled about with their carts in the galley. She resigned herself to a few unpleasant hours and decided to lose herself in her work. Martha Conant opened her briefcase.
She didn’t pay much attention to the preparations for departure and the takeoff: a routine flight among many routine flights. She glanced up once or twice at the in-flight movie, a documentary about the Kentucky Derby or the Triple Crown—something about horseracing narrated by a sportscaster named Jim McKay. The in-flight meal was a “picnic” lunch, as United Airlines called it that summer: a plastic basket with a red-and-white-checked napkin in which were nestled greasy chicken fingers, a package of Oreo cookies, and a paper cup with a few cherries in it. Conant had just eaten one of the chicken fingers when an explosion shook her from her reverie. Her first thought was that a bomb had gone off, and her heart went into her throat. Susan White, the young flight attendant in the port aisle, went to her knees with an armload of drinks as the plane slewed to the right. Conant felt the tail drop out from under her as the plane began climbing.
At forty-six, Conant had curly auburn hair, brown eyes, and an endearing smile. She had hoped to have a good portion of her life ahead of her as well, yet she realized that she was likely going to die that day. Fear contracted within her torso like a black spider. After a minute, though, a steady male voice came over the loudspeakers and explained that they had lost the number two engine, the one that ran through the tail above and behind Conant’s head. But, said the voice, the plane had two other engines, one on each wing. They could proceed to Chicago at a slower speed, a lower altitude.
Conant tried to think. She tried to convince herself of the reassuring story Dudley Dvorak, the second officer, or flight engineer, had broadcast throughout the cabin. Shortly after the explosion, the four flight attendants in her part of the plane disappeared into the galley to whisper among themselves. Now they emerged again with their carts and resumed serving drinks. Five rows ahead of Conant, Paul Olivier, a businessman who was also the mayor of Palmer Lake, Colorado, was surprised that the flight attendants continued serving. He would later recall Susan White, who would turn twenty-six that October but looked like a teenager. “She was just shaking,” said Olivier, “visibly shaking.” She asked if he wanted something to drink, and he ordered a vodka. White opened the liquor drawer on her cart. It was neatly lined with mini liquor bottles, all arranged by type. She selected a vodka, placed it on his table with a glass of ice, and closed the drawer. “Make it a double,” said Olivier. When White pulled out the service drawer the second time, her shaking hand seemed to have a mind of its own, and the little liquor bottles scattered all over the floor. On her hands and knees, she gathered up the bottles as they rolled around on the carpet. Once she collected herself and her bottles, she stuffed them into the drawer any way they’d fit and slammed it shut. Observing her rattled state, Olivier told White, “It really looks like you need one of these.”
Embarrassed, White hurried to the galley and started straightening up. She raised her eyes from her work and saw the head flight attendant, Jan Brown, coming toward her. From Brown’s face, White knew that the situation was much worse than her friend Dvorak had let on in his announcement.
“Pick everything up,” Brown said sharply.
In an attempt at levity, White said, “No second coffees?”
At forty-eight, Brown was a seasoned flight attendant, having been on deck a dozen years. At the age of twenty-one, she had been hired as the flight attendant on John F. Kennedy’s family airplane, The Caroline. To Brown, Susan White seemed as eager and good-natured as a puppy. “Susan always half-laughed, half-cried,” Brown said many years later. But Brown, who had been frightened out of her wits by something—White did not yet know what—was in no mood for joking. “No, no second coffees.” White could see that she was dead serious and felt a knot form in her stomach. Brown, though technically her boss, liked to joke around. And they always served second coffees. White quickly began securing the galley, as Jan Brown briefed the three flight attendants and then hurried back up the aisle to attend to her duties.
From the way the flight attendants were moving, Conant knew something bad was happening. They looked pale and drawn. She had no idea that three of them were now holding hands and praying in the galley behind her. Conant’s emotional system had come to full alert. She began taking more notice of her surroundings. A man sat on her left, a couple in their fifties or sixties on her right. She observed the last row of two seats against the window on her left. She saw a handsome young boy in a Chicago Cubs baseball cap seated in the window seat with a woman next to him. Conant was looking at Dave Randa, nine, and his mother Susan, forty. The rows were staggered, so mother and son were ahead of Conant with nothing behind them but White’s jump seat, which faced the lavatories. A few rows forward on her right, Conant noticed that she could sometimes see the ground where she expected to see only sky.
Her thoughts went to her family. She had a husband and three children. Rich, twenty-one, was her eldest. He was living at home and working at a job. Her middle son, Rob, had graduated from high school a month earlier. At the age of eighteen, he had taken a trip out to California. Patrick, sixteen, was at home on his summer vacation.
“I was thinking about what a not-very-good mother I was,” Conant recalled. “And what a not-very-good wife I was. And I found myself bargaining with God.” She had become preoccupied with her job, “and my values had gotten screwed up.” She felt that she had put a distance between herself and her family. “I was not as connected with my family as I could have been. And in those moments when I was contemplating not returning to my family, it became crystal clear to me that I needed to make some changes.” She was not a religious person. She belonged to no church. God had meant nothing to her before. Yet she said, “It felt like a time of reckoning.” She had earned degrees in both chemistry and computer science. She was smart and attractive and worked for one of the great high-tech companies. She thought she had it all, as she sat there with the realization gnawing at her that the plane she had boarded was likely going to crash. She desperately longed to be back on the ground, to feel her feet touching the soil. To see the green earth and feel the heat of summer. To hug her children, her husband.
The aft cabin around her remained quiet during those seemingly endless minutes. With the engine in the tail silenced now, she could barely hear the other two engines squalling on the wings so far away. The air seemed to be whispering over the skin of the plane. The man on her left was silent, within himself. Conant didn’t know him. His name was John Hatch. He was forty-six years old. He later said that he went through “a lot of self reflection” in those moments. He thought of his family, his wife Sandra, and his three children, Sheila, twenty, Mark, fifteen, and ten-year-old Ryan. “I made a lot of promises that I probably haven’t totally kept,” Hatch said. He traveled extensively and worked hard. He silently promised to be a better husband, a better family man, to spend more time with his kids. “I knew we were in serious trouble.” A man who liked control in his life, he was abruptly and utterly without it.
The man and woman to Conant’s right were quietly whispering to each other. What’s going on? What do you think will happen? And like Hatch, Conant went into what she called “this state of review,” a kind of melancholy reverie in which she envisioned the life she would lead if she survived, a life in which she was devoted to her husband and children. Perhaps a life that included God in a more meaningful way. Her view of her life opened up to include her parents and her sisters, and she realized that she was mentally saying good-bye to each person she loved. She believed that her feet would never touch the earth again. And she was deeply saddened by what she felt was her imminent and final departure from this sweet old world. She said in her mind, “God, if you let me out of this alive, I’ll clean up my act.”
“Being in the last row of this massive tin can that didn’t seem to be under control,” she later said, “I was pretty convinced that I was not going to make it out of there.”
About twenty minutes had passed since the explosion, and now the passengers could see a mesmerizing mist spraying out from the wings as the crew dumped fuel in what Conant now understood was a last desperate bid for salvation.
Far ahead of Martha Conant and nine-year-old Dave Randa, nearly two hundred feet away on the flight deck, William Roy Records, the first officer, was flying the Denver-to-Chicago leg of the trip in this McDonnell Douglas DC-10, with Captain Alfred Clair Haynes in the left seat acting as his copilot. Behind Records, Dudley Joseph Dvorak was manning the gauges and monitoring all systems. Jerry Lee Kennedy, thirty-six, a deadheading pilot, recently hired by United Airlines, had been visiting the cockpit to observe the operations. One of the flight attendants came up to ask if he wanted to eat his lunch in the cockpit or in his first class seat.
“You’re welcome to stay up here,” Captain Haynes told him.
“Thanks,” Kennedy said. “But I’m tired of eating off my lap.” He said his good-byes to the crew, thanked the captain, and returned to seat 1-A. In the row behind Kennedy, Walter Sperks, eighty-one, and his wife Marie, eighty, were returning from a trip to the Colorado Rockies, where they had spent their honeymoon fifty-two years earlier. Mass would be said for them a week later at 10:30 Wednesday morning in St. James Catholic Church on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago.
On the flight deck, the crew ate lunch in their seats, as usual. They were a bit more than an hour into the flight. The plane was on autopilot. The trays had been cleared away, and Haynes was nursing a cup of coffee. The crew had few tasks to perform until the time came to descend into Chicago. “Everything was fine,” Haynes said many years later. “And there was this loud bang like an explosion. It was so loud, I thought it was a bomb.” He had no recollection of the plane shaking or jerking, but he said he spilled his coffee “all over.”
Records lurched forward and took the control wheel (called the yoke), saying, “I have the airplane.” The plane slewed hard to the right. It shuddered and shook violently and almost immediately climbed three hundred feet, as the tail dropped sharply.
Dudley Dvorak radioed the Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center in Farmington, Minnesota, saying, “We just lost number two engine, like to lower our altitude, please.”
While Records struggled with the controls, Haynes called for the checklist for shutting down the failed engine. He asked Dvorak to read it to him. The first item on the list said to close the throttle, but “this throttle would not go back,” Haynes said later. “That was the first indication that we had something more than a simple engine failure.” The second item on the list said to turn off the fuel supply to that engine. “The fuel lever would not move. It was binding.” Haynes realized that the number two engine, the one that was mounted through the tail, must have suffered some sort of physical damage. The crew as yet had no idea what had happened, but Haynes felt a deep wave of concern surge through him. He knew that he was facing something far more serious than the loss of power to an engine. Events unfolded at lightning speed. Only a minute or so had elapsed since the explosion when Records said, “Al, I can’t control the airplane.”
United Flight 232 on final approach. Note the daylight coming through the hole in the leading edge of the horizontal portion of the tail (near the tip). What appears to be a small white spot is actually a foot-long hole. Because no slats or flaps were deployed on the leading and trailing edges of the wings, the crew was forced to attempt a landing at twice the normal speed. From the collection of Carolyn (Zellmer) Ellwanger
The DC-10 had stopped its climb and had begun descending and rolling to the right. Records was using the control wheel to try to steer, but the aircraft wasn’t responding. He was commanding the aircraft to turn left and to bring its nose up. The aircraft was doing the exact opposite. Haynes saw this dissonant image. It didn’t take a pilot to know that something was dreadfully wrong. Moreover, the pilot can’t wrench the controls to the stops in high-speed cruising flight. Doing so would cause the airplane to break apart. Records later recalled the startled look on Haynes’s face: “I think the picture was worth a thousand words when he looked over at me and saw what was going on.”
As the plane continued its roll, Haynes said, “I’ve got it,” taking hold of his own control wheel. Both Records and Haynes now struggled with the failing steering, while Dvorak watched his instrument panel. Something bizarre was happening. The gauges were showing the pressure and quantity of hydraulic fluid falling lower and lower.
“As the aircraft reached about 38 degrees of bank on its way toward rolling over on its back,” Haynes later explained, “we slammed the number one [left] throttle closed and firewalled the number three [right] throttle.”
Dudley Dvorak recalled the moment: “I looked forward, and we’re rolling to the right. I just said, ‘We’re rolling!’ And Al, in one quick movement, took his right hand off the yoke and swatted the number one engine back, and on the way back up, pushed the other engine up and was back on the yoke in just a matter of seconds.”
If Haynes had not decided—somehow, reflexively—to steer the plane with the throttles, the crippled DC-10 would have rolled all the way over and spiraled into the ground, killing all on board. After a few agonizing seconds, “the right wing slowly came back up,” Haynes said. He had no idea what made him use the throttles. Nothing in his training would have suggested it. The DC-10 manual does briefly mention “the use of asymmetric thrust,” but Haynes had no memory of having read that entry. He responded automatically, as a reflex that has remained a mystery to him ever since that day. Now as Dvorak watched his instruments, he was horrified to see the pressure and quantity of fluid in all three hydraulic systems fall to zero.
Before takeoff from Denver, Jan Brown stepped out of the galley amidships, between the forward and aft coach cabins, to check on the unaccompanied minors. She always worried about the children. Reviewing her manifest, she noted that a number of younger children would have no seats. Each would have to ride in someone’s lap. As the chief flight attendant, Brown constantly worried about safety. She wore the white shirt and tie of her uniform, as always, but she chose the navy slacks over a skirt because she knew that the natural materials, cotton and wool, offered protection from fire. Anyway, skirts in an emergency would be disastrous. She was amazed that United even allowed the flight attendants to wear them and had told her superiors as much. Her sandy-colored hair was done in a bob, framing her face at the jawline. When a fireball came through the exit door beside her jump seat about two hours later, it would turn that hair into “a complete frizz job,” as she would put it. But that hair would also save the smooth tan skin beneath, while her wool and cotton clothing would protect her body.
The flight had arrived in Denver from Philadelphia on the last leg of a four-day trip. The pilots had departed and a fresh crew came on board: Haynes, Records, and Dvorak. Brown planned to go up to the cockpit to introduce herself, but Haynes came back to the galley and beat her to it. The fact that he bothered to brief her had reassured Brown. Haynes said that he expected a smooth ride, maybe a few bumps on the descent into O’Hare International Airport. Brown decided to speed up the lunch service at the beginning of the trip in case the flight attendants had to strap in toward the end.
Brown liked everything to be perfect on her flights and lost no opportunity to make it so. If she was serving passengers in first class, she would write a personal note to each one and tuck it inside the white linen napkin on the service tray. She always called her work “the service,” a nearly religious experience, as it must be: after all, she was about to be lofted among the clouds, miles over the earth, even as her congregation sipped coffee and broke bread, virtually in heaven itself.
In fact, Brown had become something of a legend among DC-10 cabin crews. In what she called “the old days,” an elevator would take flight attendants down to a lower galley and into a splendid kitchen with convection ovens. Brown said that flights from Chicago to Boston were often so empty in those days that she’d bring her muffin tin and all the ingredients and bake for the crew down there, in what they called “the Pit.”
“They’re still talking about it to this day,” she said, “about my blueberry muffins and my apple pancake.” In addition, she said, flight attendants liked to go down to the Pit to smoke.
On July 19, 1989, Brown made the preflight safety announcement. She first carefully checked what she called her “demo card,” the safety instructions found in the pocket on the back of every seat. She checked it because one time a fellow flight attendant had taped a piece of paper to her card. In big block letters, it said, “I NEED A DATE!” Satisfied that no one had tampered with her card, she told her passengers that she was well aware that many of them were seasoned travelers and had heard this briefing dozens of times. She asked those adults to set a good example for all the first-time fliers—and especially all the children—and to please pay attention. It was the bane of a flight attendant’s existence: no one paid attention. Brown, however, took the possibility of a crash seriously. “I was really so concerned, because when we’d have to stand at our demo position, looking at our area of responsibility, I’d just look at people and think: I can tell who are the survivors, because they’re the ones who are watching this. We know how to get out of the aircraft in sixty to ninety seconds, but you won’t if you’re in the dark.”
Once the plane was airborne, Brown served the port side in the forward coach cabin, known as B-Zone, rows 9 through 21, while Rene Louise Le Beau worked the starboard aisle across the five-seat center section from her. Then Brown and Le Beau quickly began picking up the service trays so that everything would be put away early. As busy as she was, Brown couldn’t help noticing Le Beau, thin, petite, and striking. Her hair was such a brilliant red, it always attracted attention. That day she wore a large navy-blue bow in it for a startling contrast. Both Brown and Le Beau lived in Schaumberg, Illinois. Le Beau, twenty-three, had not been scheduled for this flight. She was put on at the last minute because the plane was so crowded.
Brown had rehearsed how to react in any kind of emergency. She was acutely aware that a United Airlines 747 had lost a cargo door five months earlier. As the door had ripped away, it had taken a large piece of the cabin wall with it, and nine people were sucked out over the Pacific Ocean and never seen again. When Brown heard the explosion on this flight to Chicago, she went to the floor and held onto the nearest armrest, fearing that the cabin might lose pressure and suck someone out.
“I held on until we stabilized.” Brown was about two-thirds of the way down her aisle. “And since I was facing aft, I could see Sylvia Tsao holding Evan.” At thirty, Sylvia had her twenty-three-month-old son in her lap. “She was working up into panic, and I was like: ‘No, I don’t have panic on my airplanes. We’re all calm. No matter what, we’re all calm.’ ” For just as Haynes was captain of the ship, Brown was the captain of her cabins.
When she felt that the plane was stable, she stood up and went to Sylvia Tsao. In a low and gentle voice she said, “We’re going to be okay.” She explained about the plane still having two good engines. As she spoke, Dvorak announced the same thing: they would descend to a lower altitude and fly more slowly to Chicago. Jerry Schemmel, twenty-nine, sat in the next row back, across the aisle from Sylvia. He was the deputy commissioner for the Continental Basketball Association, which oversaw the teams that fed new players into the National Basketball Association. Schemmel watched Brown and Sylvia and baby Evan Jeffrey. He thought about how he would respond once the plane was on the ground: he would help them get out.
Brown crossed the aisle from Sylvia and Evan and reassured another woman “who looked petrified,” in Jan Brown’s words. Then the chime rang at her station, indicating that someone was calling on the interphone. From where she stood at the 3-Left door between B-Zone and C-Zone (rows 22 through 38), she could see most of her crew and knew that the call was not coming from any of them. From long experience, she knew that if the captain was calling her at this point in the flight, it could be nothing but bad news. She picked up the handset, and Dvorak’s voice confirmed her fear. He told her to report to the cockpit. She hung up and walked deliberately up the port aisle, trying to look calm, “knowing that passengers were still watching, that they were very concerned. So I gave my best casual walk.” As she passed into B-Zone, she walked by the Osenberg family, Bruce and Dina and Ruth Anne, holding hands with Tom Postle, a lay minister who had his thick old Bible out. The couple and the man with the Bible appeared to be in their forties or fifties. The girl Dina was college age. They were all praying together, heads bowed. The Wernick family, Pete and Joan with their six-year-old son Will, watched Brown go forward. Brown passed Joseph Trombello and Gitte Skaanes; Margo Crain, Rod Vetter, and Ron Sheldon in row 19; and Aki Muto in the next row back, a tall Japanese girl in a white blouse and light-blue skirt, college age, with jet-black hair, alabaster skin, and big dark eyes, like a doll’s.
“I knocked on the door like we’re trained to do,” Brown said. “And they opened the door. And the whole world changed just in that instant when that door opened.” She saw no panic, she said. “I just took it all in, but it was what was in the air. It was so palpable. I remember thinking: ‘This isn’t an emergency, this is a goddamned crisis.’ And I don’t usually talk that way.”
As Brown spoke to me about this in her brightly lit modern kitchen over coffee and chocolate chip cookies, which she had taken out of the oven moments before, her face contorted in the agony of her remembered horror, and I could see the goose flesh rise on her forearms. Her face mobilized into anguished expressions, and at times as she recounted what she had gone through, her sad winter-brown eyes rolled heavenward as if she had reached the exasperating edge of all experience.
Dvorak sat at a console facing the starboard side of the aircraft. On his right was the cockpit door, which he had opened for Brown, and beyond that, the bathrooms, the first class galley, and then the first class cabin, A-Zone. As Brown stepped into the cockpit, holding onto the back of Dvorak’s chair, she watched Haynes and Records each wrenching his control wheel back and to the left, as the plane tipped more and more steeply to the right. The two pilots were not only trying to steer with the yoke, they were each manipulating one of the throttles, as the plane repeatedly tried to roll over on its back. “I could just feel the strength that was being put into that motion from both of them.”
The words that were exchanged between Haynes and Brown have been lost to history. The Sundstrand model AV557B cockpit voice recorder operated on a thirty-minute loop, and after the explosion, forty-four minutes elapsed before the plane crashed. The first ten minutes and thirty-six seconds of the recording were overwritten during the last minutes of the flight. Nevertheless, as reported by both Brown and her captain, Haynes said, “We’ve lost all hydraulics.”
As Brown explained to me, “I don’t know what that means, but I do know that we are banking to the right and I am looking out Bill’s window, and I’m guessing we’re at thirty-seven thousand feet. And I think this situation means we could go straight down.” Brown was not the sort to panic. But “I have not found the appropriate word that can describe the pure terror of an airplane that was always my friend, that I knew in the dark. If the lights went out and I was working in the Pit, people would lift the hatch and call down, ‘Are you okay?’ Oh, yeah. I could still keep working, because I could see in the dark. But now it’s a metal tube, and it holds my fate. And there’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to hide.”
She stepped out of the cockpit and shut the door behind her. She stood in the septic smell of the lavatories, “and I prayed, ‘Oh, please, God, let me be someplace else.’ ”
Jan Brown and I sat on stools at her kitchen counter. At the age of seventy-one, she was trim and neatly dressed. She smiled wryly and said, “Oh, wow. Quick answer. Okay, one foot in front of the other.”
She went on: “I told myself, ‘Jan, you’ve got to be tough, you’ve got to be calm, and we can’t let the passengers know.’ ”
She walked down the aisle, pale and shaken and almost in a stupor of fear and grief. She felt grief, she later said, for all the people, the children. “I couldn’t look at anybody,” she said. “It’s like I just withdrew into myself, because I was working a plan, and I didn’t want anybody to read the absolute terror in my eyes. I remember thinking as I came out of the cockpit and was walking through first class that the video was still running. So it gave the appearance of normalcy.”
Brad Griffin could see her from his first class seat, 2-E. When Brown came out of the cockpit, he saw how ashen and defeated she looked. All her faith cast out, she’d been gutted. Griffin didn’t know what he was seeing. He didn’t realize that her captain had told her in no uncertain terms that the plane was going to crash. But he knew that her expression and demeanor signaled something dire.
As she passed through first class, she decided she could not call the crew together for a briefing. It would be too obvious to the passengers. She would talk to her flight attendants quickly and quietly wherever they happened to be. In the forward galley she caught Virginia Jane “Jan” Murray and Barbara Gillaspie, the two first class flight attendants, and began telling them what Haynes had said. Rene Le Beau came forward and caught part of what Brown was saying, and Le Beau’s pale and childlike face took on a stricken look beneath her bright red hair. Then Brown added, “And I don’t know how this is going to turn out, so be prepared.” Then she squared her shoulders, forced herself into an attitude of professionalism, and began walking down the aisle, trying to figure out how to protect all those babies that people were holding in their laps. She proceeded to the aft galley and told Susan White, “Pick everything up.”
And White responded, “No second coffees?”
At around the time Dudley Dvorak declared that November 1819 Uniform* had an emergency, Mark Zielezinski, thirty-six, the supervisor in the control tower at Sioux Gateway Airport, was attending a meeting in an office down in the bowels of the building that housed both the tower and the terminal. John Bates, an air traffic controller, was downstairs in the break room eating his lunch. In the tower cab—a fishbowl of glass atop the terminal building with a 360-degree view of the field and the surrounding land—the phone had rung a minute or two earlier, and a controller from Minneapolis Center had alerted Sioux City to the fact that the crippled plane was coming. Bates heard someone holler down the stairwell that an emergency was on its way. He didn’t think much of it. “An emergency at Sioux City was a daily thing,” he said, because the airport was an Air National Guard base. The pilots of the A-7 Corsair II fighter-bombers were taught to treat most anomalies as emergencies to be on the safe side. In fact, two emergencies had already been declared that day. Bates packed up his lunch and went trudging up the stairs anyway. As he arrived, Kevin Bachman, the approach controller, heard a voice from Minneapolis Center come over his headphones.
“Sioux City, got a ’mergency for ya.”
“Aw-right,” Bachman replied in his native Virginia drawl. At twenty-seven, he was a fairly new air traffic controller, having joined the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) at the end of 1985 and having been rated as a controller for Sioux City in May of 1989. Bachman listened to the breathless, speedy voice of the controller trying to bark out the information that had clearly scared him out of his wits. “I gotta, let’s see, United aircraft coming in lost number two engine having a hard time controlling the aircraft right now he’s outta twenty-nine thousand right now on descent into Sioux City right now he’s—he’s east of your VOR* but he wants the equipment standing by right now.”
Bachman could see United Flight 232 on his radar screen, a bright phosphorescent target with the plane’s altitude and an identifying transponder code beneath. “Radar contact,” he said.
Zielezinski picked up the phone and called downstairs to Terry Dobson, the manager of the tower. Dobson hustled upstairs. Once he understood the situation, he reported the emergency to the regional office of the FAA in Kansas City. Kansas City in turn notified FAA headquarters at 800 Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C., across the street from the Smithsonian Institution and the National Mall. Then someone at the tenth floor command center at FAA headquarters telephoned Terry Armentrout, the director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), located two floors below in the same building. The NTSB is responsible for investigating all air crashes, and from the sound of it, this emergency would soon fall into that class of events.
As Bachman listened for word from United Flight 232, the voice of the Minneapolis controller came on the air again sounding more rattled than before. “He’s havin’ a hard time controllin’ the airplane right now and tryin’ to slow down and get to Sioux City on a heading right now, as soon as I get comfortable, I’ll ship him over to you, and he’ll be your control.”
“Awright,” said Bachman.
Then Al Haynes said, “Sioux City Approach, United Two Thirty-Two heavy,* we’re out of twenty-six, heading right now is two nine oh, and we got about a five-hundred-foot rate of descent.” He meant that the plane was passing through twenty-six thousand feet, traveling roughly west, and losing five hundred feet of altitude every minute. The handoff from Minneapolis Center was complete.
Bachman gave 1819 Uniform the standard briefing, including weather, barometric pressure, and a compass heading to fly to reach the airport. He told Haynes that he could expect to land on Runway 31.†
Haynes responded, “So you know, we have almost—no controllability. Very little elevator, and almost no ailerons, we’re controlling the turns by power. I don’t think we can turn right, I think we can only make left turns.” Then he paused and corrected himself. “We can only turn right, we can’t turn left.”
Bachman said, “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, understand, sir, you can only make right turns?”
“That’s affirmative.”
An airplane is a submarine of the air. Like a boat, it is steered by rudders, but since it moves in three dimensions, it has rudders for moving left and right (yaw), rudders (called elevators) for moving the nose up and down (pitch), and even rudders (called ailerons) to roll the airplane into a bank when it turns. On small planes all of those movable surfaces can be controlled by cables, a direct physical connection between the pilot’s hands and the controls. On jumbo jets, the control surfaces are so large and the airstream produces forces so great that the power of human muscle cannot overcome them. Hydraulic power is needed to move those surfaces.
If the driver of a forklift wants to lift a thousand-pound pallet, he moves a lever and the object rises off the ground. But the lever isn’t moving the pallet. The lever turns on the hydraulic power. The same is true of the DC-10. When the pilot moves the yoke, he is moving cables that move switches that turn on the hydraulic power to move the rudder or elevators or ailerons. Hydraulic fluid, not fuel, is what keeps the plane flying in a controllable fashion. If the plane runs out of fuel, the crew can deploy a wind-driven generator into the airstream to power the hydraulic system and then continue to fly as a glider. Without fluid in the hydraulic lines, Captain Haynes and crew were unable to steer with the precision needed to land safely. They had no way to extend flaps or slats to slow the airplane for landing. And even if they managed to get the craft on the ground, they had no brakes. Although most of the passengers did not yet know it, the great ship known as November 1819 Uniform was going to crash.
Bachman could see that on its present track, the plane would wind up eight miles north of the airport. It would also fly over the most populated part of Siouxland, as the locals call the neighborhoods at the confluence of the Missouri River, the Floyd River, and the Big Sioux River. Siouxland encompasses parts of Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska, and its spirited and capable people are used to responding to emergencies. Because the rivers flood with grim predictability, because farming involves chemicals and chemical plants explode, and because calamity has always seemed bent on routinely visiting Siouxland in one form or another, the people there pride themselves on being able to face adversity. It was as if Siouxland comprised a cargo cult of sorts and had been planning for the arrival of United Flight 232 for years. The Woodbury County Disaster and Emergency Services (WCDES) had actually simulated the crash of a jumbo jet during training.
As Bachman watched, he could see that the DC-10, rather than heading for Sioux City, was now heading back around into the airspace controlled by Minneapolis Center. He picked up the phone and called the controller out in Farmington.
“Yeah,” Bachman said, “that United, he can only make right turns. I’ll have to jockey him back around to the right into your airspace, too—”
“Yeah, you’ve got him for anything you need.”
As Bachman watched the radar track, he decided to adjust the heading and told Haynes, “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, fly heading two-four-zero, and say your souls on board.”
“Say again,” Haynes said.
“Souls on board, United Two Thirty-Two Heavy.” Bachman was asking how many lives were at risk.
“We’re gettin’ that right now,” Haynes said.
A little less than a minute later, Bachman asked again. “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, say souls on board and fuel remaining.”
“We have thirty-seven six fuel,” Haynes said, “and we’re countin’ the souls, sir.” He meant that the plane had 37,600 pounds of fuel in its tanks. (Fuel on planes is measured in pounds, not gallons or liters.)
Dvorak heard a knock on the door and opened it to find a first class flight attendant, Jan Murray, standing there. Her eyes grew wide as she saw the state of affairs on the flight deck. Without entering, she called out that a United DC-10 flight instructor was on board and had offered to help.
Haynes said, “Okay, let him come up.” Murray backed away fast, shaking from the shock of what she’d seen.
Addressing Bachman on the radio, Haynes began, clipped, staccato, breathless, “We have no hydraulic fluid, which means we have no elevator control, almost none, and very little aileron control. I have serious doubts about making the airport. Have you got some place near there that we might be able to ditch? Unless we get control of this airplane, we’re going to put it down wherever it happens to be.” In fact, as the flight data recorder would later show, in the first seconds after the explosion, the autopilot tried to correct the upward pitch of the aircraft with the elevator, and the controls responded. As the plane rolled right, either Records or the autopilot moved the yoke to the left to lift the left aileron and stop the roll as well. About twelve seconds after the explosion, though, the horizontal stabilizer started to move down and then froze. One minute and five seconds after the explosion, the nose pitched up again, and in response Records moved the elevator for the last time. The left inboard elevator went from –3.94 degrees to –1.55 degrees and then remained there for the rest of the trip. The crew was then completely disconnected from all flight controls.
The airplane, Bachman realized, was going to crash. He had no idea how to respond. He said, “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, roger, uh, stand by one.”
In the control tower, John Bates was still watching from the sidelines, waiting to see if his services would be needed. When he heard Al Haynes’s last transmission, he thought, as he said later, “Wow, this is an honest-to-goodness real emergency instead of what we considered to be play emergencies with the [Air] National Guard.” And now with the hair rising on the back of his neck, Mark Zielezinski rearranged the duties of his air traffic controllers to meet the demands of the situation. Dale Mleynek worked ground control, directing traffic on the surface of the airport. Charles Owings controlled aircraft in the local area, for 1819 Uniform was not the only airplane in the sky around Sioux City that day. And Zielezinski put John Bates on flight data, which is a catchall position for such tasks as delivering clearances to pilots and updating the recorded broadcast of the weather. The ground controller can normally handle flight data, but because of the emergency, Zielezinski wanted the two jobs separated. As the person on flight data, it would fall to Bates to determine what level of emergency response to request from the agencies in the area, such as fire departments and ambulance services.
The airport was already on Alert Two status, as it had been since word first arrived that the crippled plane was on its way. Now with Captain Haynes announcing that he might ditch, Bates immediately turned to Bill Hoppe, the new tower supervisor, a fifteen-year veteran as an air traffic controller. Bates trusted his judgment. “Alert Two or Alert Three?” he asked Hoppe. “There’s nothin’ in the books for this one. They say they’re going to put the plane down wherever they can.”
“I don’t know,” Hoppe said. “What do you think?”
Alert Two means that emergency equipment will be put on the field, but that might be for any sort of emergency. The plane itself might not be in trouble. Instead, someone on board the flight might be having a heart attack. Alert Two does not anticipate a mass casualty. Alert Three means that a plane has crashed or is about to crash. Because Woodbury County, home of Sioux City, had a disaster plan that involved an emergency response from all the surrounding communities of Siouxland, the two controllers reasoned that declaring Alert Three was the most expedient way of rapidly calling as much emergency equipment as possible to the field. Bates was in a real bind because he had to make the call. If he allowed Alert Two to remain in effect and people survived the crash, there might not be enough rescuers and equipment to take care of all the injured. Lives could be lost. If, on the other hand, he elevated the status to Alert Three and the flight landed uneventfully, the 270 organizations that responded would have wasted time and money for nothing. “I would have been in real hot water,” Bates said.
But at this, the moment of truth, Hoppe and Bates looked at each other and blurted it out in unison: “Alert Three!”
“We broke a rule was what we did,” Bates told me later. “The call was made simply because the plane was out of control. It was going down. We just didn’t know where.”
From the time Haynes told Bachman the condition of his plane to the moment Bates and Hoppe made the decision to call Alert Three, only fifteen or twenty seconds had passed. Then Bates used the special phone line to the fire department dispatch center in downtown Sioux City to explain the situation. Those dispatchers, in turn, notified other emergency agencies. In addition, Gary Brown (no relation to Jan), director of WCDES and an emergency medical technician by training, “escalated it above the normal Alert Three,” as he later said, requesting even more equipment than the emergency plan called for. Sirens took up a wailing chorus all across the corn-green countryside, as eighty pieces of emergency equipment from forty communities began converging on the Sioux City airport.
Since the field was an Air National Guard base, its equipment and the airport fire and rescue vehicles were the first to move. All of the emergency services involved in disaster planning had been assigned positions where they would wait in case of an emergency on the airfield, and the heavy equipment now went roaring across the field to those locations, blowing diesel smoke. Mleynek coordinated the movement of the vehicles on the ground. The Air National Guard fire-fighting equipment used no sirens or lights. As the base fire chief, James Hathaway, put it, “There is no one out there, just jack rabbits and us.”
At about 3:40 the emergency dispatcher had called the Marian Air Care helicopter, known as MAC, that was on standby on the pad at Marian Health Center. He had alerted the crew to go to the pad immediately and then ordered the helicopter to take off and fly to the home of Dr. David Greco, land there, and pick him up. Chuck Owings, the local controller up in the tower, called MAC, too, and asked its pilot to stand off about three miles from the field when he returned and wait in loitering flight for the crippled plane to come in. By that time, emergency vehicles from the nearest communities had begun to arrive and line up at the main airport gate. Gary Brown drove his truck full of emergency medical equipment and technicians out onto the field. Bates could see Gary’s big white Ford trucks from above, as Mleynek cleared them into position. They parked on the ramp* with immediate access to the runways. They would be among the first to respond if the plane made it to the airport. As Bates looked out the window of the tower, he felt an acute sense of alarm. The landscape below, normally vacant and dead quiet at this time on a summer day, steadily filled with emergency equipment.
In the meantime, across the sunlit room, Jimmy Weifenbach was bringing in six Air National Guard A-7s that had been out on maneuvers over Kansas. When Zielezinski split the radar coverage in two, he gave Kevin Bachman his own scope for handling only United Flight 232. The approach controller would normally handle all traffic out to about forty miles, but that day, everything but United Flight 232, including the A-7s, went to Weifenbach, who would hand them off to Owings for the last minute or two of flight.
Also, the supervisor of flying for the Air National Guard, Dennis Nielsen, was talking to the pilots of the A-7s and listening to the transmissions from the tower. Although he couldn’t hear what Captain Haynes was saying, because his military radio operated on a different frequency, he realized that an emergency was under way and had directed the A-7s to return to base.
The first two A-7s landed to the northwest on Runway 31. They taxied into the de-arm area at the end. Dale Mleynek called Al Smith, the lead A-7 pilot, and said, “Bat† Three-One, Sioux City Ground. After de-arming, hold short runway three-five at Lima.” (Taxiway Lima is the one labeled with the letter L.) Smith and his wingman Romaine “Ben” Bendixen began to realize that they were in a bad place, indeed. Mleynek transmitted the same words again about forty-five seconds later, and Smith responded, “Three-One, Wilco.”
Within two minutes, Mleynek ordered the fire equipment to be shuttled off to the northwest side of the field, since the DC-10 had no brakes. As the trucks moved off, Smith called Mleynek and said, “Ground, Bat Three-One, we’re ready to taxi back now.”
Mleynek gave them permission to taxi and added, “Bat Three-One use caution for two emergency vehicles just off the right side of Taxiway Lima.”
The fire-fighting equipment pulled off the taxiway onto the grass to wait. As other emergency vehicles came onto the field, Mleynek directed them toward their staging positions. Smith called to make sure that he was cleared to cross Runway 17-35, and then proceeded to the ramp, where the two fighter-bombers passed Gary Brown’s white truck and the KTIV Channel 4 News cameraman, Dave Boxum, who was setting up his equipment outside the fence.
Al Smith and Ben Bendixen climbed down from their cockpits and began crossing the Air National Guard ramp. “I was walking northbound slowly with my head down somewhat,” Bendixen recalled, “not anticipating that United 232 was going to land as soon as it did.” He thought that it would approach from the south and land on Runway 31. He couldn’t see the northern part of the field because his view was blocked by the National Guard buildings and a group of old World War II hangars. He walked along in the heat, carrying his helmet, heading for the room they called maintenance control, where they would shed their flight gear. Then he heard—and almost felt—a sound that he would never mistake for anything else, and he turned to see the rising smoke and fire.
* Looking forward from the back of the aircraft, port refers to the left side and starboard refers to the right. See seating chart at laurencegonzales.com.
* Like ships, all airplanes have to be registered somewhere. Those from the United States have a registration number (a “tail number”) beginning with the letter N—hence, November in the International Phonetic Alphabet used in aviation. The tail number of the DC-10 flying as United Flight 232 that day was 1819U, so that plane was uniquely known as November 1819 Uniform.
* VOR is a radio navigational aid. The initials stand for VHF omnidirectional range.
* The word heavy reminds pilots of smaller aircraft that they can be upset by the wake of larger planes.
* The words ramp and apron are used interchangeably to refer to the paved areas at an airport that are neither runways nor taxiways.
† Runways are named for the cardinal direction they face. If a pilot is landing on Runway 31, his compass will say 310 (North being 360). If a pilot is landing in the opposite direction on the same runway, the compass will read 130, so it would then be called Runway 13, even though it’s the same stretch of concrete.
† According to Colonel Lawrence Harrington (retired), a lieutenant colonel named Gordy Young gave the 185th Tactical Fighter Group the call sign “Bats.”