The seven-foot fan on the front of the CF6-6 engine is made of an alloy of titanium. So are some of the compressor wheels behind it. As you move back through the engine, where the combustion of fuel must take place, the temperature will grow so hot that titanium cannot withstand it. The combustion chamber, therefore, is made of one of the so-called nickel superalloys designed to hold together in the extreme heat. The turbine wheels at the back, which drive the engine, are also made of nickel superalloys.
Miners in medieval Saxony were after copper and silver, but they sometimes had their wares contaminated by niccolite, a bedeviling alloy of arsenic and nickel. They called it kupfernickel, a reference to Old Nick, Satan himself. When Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, a Swedish chemist, isolated that metal in 1751, the name stuck. This hard white metal certainly could have been the culprit in the explosion. It’s more than three times as dense as titanium (and hence weighs considerably more). When it spins, the stresses on it are great indeed. And superalloy wheels had been known to break before.
But nickel was elsewhere in the plane too. The hydraulic lines were made of stainless steel, which is part nickel. When Dvorak had watched the hydraulic pressure fall from three thousand pounds per square inch to zero, when he assessed the damage to the tail, he most likely knew that something had gone wrong with those stainless-steel lines. Nickel may have been the culprit, but nickel was the victim too. No one yet knew. The trouble may have been elsewhere.
For titanium is a strange and temperamental material. Perhaps it should have been named for Old Nick, because it certainly could pass for the work of a diabolical intelligence. It seems almost as if it were put on earth specifically to tempt us into this clever trick of spinning wheels and launching ourselves into flight. For one thing, titanium is found everywhere—in sand, rock, clay, soil, coal, water, oil, plants of all sorts, and in the flesh of animals. We find titanium in lava from volcanoes, in the bottom of the ocean, and in the meteorites that fall from the sky. We can find it in our own bones. Moreover, there are plenty of places where titanium is highly concentrated in a form that is easily mined. Titanium dioxide is a common ingredient in paint. It makes it white. If the paint is colored, titanium gives it opacity. Titanium dioxide makes great sunscreen. And it’s not poisonous.
An Englishman named William Gregor originally described titanium in 1791. In 1795 a German pharmacist named Martin Heinrich Klaproth named it for the mythical Titans because of its strength. But titanium was unusable because of its strong affinity for oxygen and nitrogen. Whenever one chemist or another tried to isolate titanium, he wound up with metal that was contaminated with those other elements. It wasn’t until 1910 that an American chemist named Matthew Arnold Hunter managed to combine titanium with chlorine, making titanium tetrachloride and revealing yet another confounding mystery about that metal.
Titanium tetrachloride is a clear liquid, what’s known as a “rare transition metal halide.” Transition means that titanium is always on the way to becoming something else. It does not want to be itself, because one of its shells of electrons, the sub-shell designated by the letter d, is not completely filled, so titanium constantly longs to mate with a material that can fill that shell. Nitrogen and oxygen will suffice, but chlorine can strip those electrons away to form titanium tetrachloride.
In the business of making this elusive metal, titanium tetrachloride became known as “Tickle,” based on its chemical formula: TiCl4. Tickle must be kept in a vacuum or in a vessel that contains an inert gas, such as helium or argon. If Tickle is exposed to air, it combines with moisture and bursts into view as a cloud of corrosive white smoke that is made up of tiny droplets of hydrochloric acid. Titanium is full of tricks. It will burn in chlorine gas and will explode in red fuming nitric acid. Melt it with nitrogen, and it turns into a ceramic material that looks like gold and is suitable for coating everything from knife blades to prosthetic hips. By varying the thickness and the voltage used in anodizing titanium, it can be made pink, green, purple, blue, brown, and any number of colors in between. The trouble with those materials is that they are so brittle they crack except when used as a thin coating.
Darrell F. Socie, professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois and an expert in metal fatigue, said of such materials, “They’re intermetallic compounds, but they’re really a ceramic. They are very hard, very brittle, very strong and have no ductility.” That means they won’t bend or stretch. They break.
Titanium is a paradox, a thing that both can and can’t exist. James Wildey, a metallurgist, was thirty-seven years old when he helped investigate the crash of United Flight 232 for the NTSB. He said, “Under some conditions, titanium can be soft and weak. When soft, it can stretch without breaking. Under other conditions, it can be hard and brittle like crystal. When mixed with small amounts of other elements, it can retain much of its hardness, but unlike crystal it is very tough.” It is so tough that about half a million square feet of it, just a third of a millimeter thick, was used to build the retractable roof of the Fukuoka Dome arena in Japan.
Like meat, titanium has grain. It can flex and flow like muscle. When titanium gets hot, it can smear like peanut butter. But within that muscle of metal we find crystals. The engineers themselves may sometimes think of their metals as living things. In public testimony during the investigation of the crash, one of the designers of the CF6-6 engine from General Electric, Christopher Glynn, was trying to explain how these engines can break. He said, “You have to ask the material, ‘How do you feel about having a crack in you, and how fast is it going to grow?’ ” He described the tests in his lab this way: “It’s letting the material tell you how it feels about that.”
It is preferable that the crystal structure of titanium be perfect. However, minute imperfections, small impurities, can creep into the process of making those fans and compressors and turbines. Impurities can sometimes cause the metal to fail under the tremendous strain of spinning.
Titanium can also burn. Sometimes the spinning titanium wheels catch fire, and the flame passes from wheel to wheel and destroys the engine. That provided yet another possibility for what might have happened to the number two engine on 1819 Uniform.
As Kevin Bachman watched the DC-10 approach Sioux Gateway Airport, he was convinced that it would land safely. Hundreds of others were watching too—Zielezinski and Weifenbach, Mleynek, Bates, Charles Owings, Terry Dobson, and all the other controllers who had joined them in the tower, as well as the A-7 pilots waiting on Taxiway Lima, along with scores of fire fighters, police, and Air National Guard men and women, and Gary Brown with his binoculars raised to his eyes—they all watched as the jumbo jet unfolded against the sky into a great winged shape. As the controllers gazed out the wraparound windows of the tower cab, they saw that the plane wasn’t floating the way airliners ordinarily seem to, that deceptive illusion of slow motion. Rather this plane was howling down the approach path, dropping like a stone under the high summer sun in a sky full of majestic cumulus clouds.
In the cockpit, Haynes was still trying to hear the wind speed and direction. “Okay,” he said to Bachman, “we’re all three talkin’ at once. Say it again one more time.”
“Ah, zero-one-zero at one-one and there is a runway, ah, that’s closed, sir, that could, ah . . . probably work to the southwest. It runs, ah, northeast to southwest.”
Haynes wasn’t sure what runway he was aiming for, but he said, “We’re pretty well lined up on this one here . . . think we will be.”
As the jumbo jet blossomed in Bachman’s field of vision, he realized that Haynes was going to attempt to land on the old runway where the fire engines waited. Haynes could detect the urgency in Bachman’s voice when he spoke. “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, ah, roger, sir, tha-that’s a closed runway, sir, that’ll work, sir, we’re gettin’ the equipment off the runway. They’ll line up for that one.”
Zielezinski turned to Mleynek and called for him to clear Runway 22. Mleynek keyed his mike and said, “Bat Four-One, hold your position there. Bat Eight-One, hold your position.” A moment later, Mleynek called the fire trucks, which had assembled on the old closed World War II runway, and said, “Red Dog One and Red Dog Three, exit Runway, ah, Four-Two-Two. That DC-10 will be landing Four-Two-Two.”
One of the fire fighters responded, “We’ll exit and get outta here.”
Mleynek’s voice shot up then, as he said, “Red Dog One and Red Dog Three and Red Dog Six, exit Four-Two-Two immediately!” And in another few seconds, he said, “Red Dog Two and Red Dog Four, that DC-10 is three, uh, two mile final Runway Four-Two-Two!”
Five seconds later, Mleynek said, “All emergency equipment, remain to the right of runway Four-Two-Two. That DC-10 is on one-and-a-half mile final.”
Dave Hutton, the assistant fire chief who drove Jim Hathaway, the base fire chief, in a Jeep truck, said many years later, “We were at the southwest end of Runway Two-Two-Four. We were looking toward Runway Three-One-One-Three, waiting for the plane to land on that. About a minute before it came in, they said, ‘All crash equipment, get off that runway, because the plane’s comin’ in.’ ”
Off to the side of the command vehicle that Hutton was driving, the Corsair pilots sat watching through their open canopies as the jumbo jet appeared as a white shark shape with a red stripe, trembling in heat waves against the blue July sky, even as the fire trucks began to blow black diesel smoke and roll forward, and the mammoth ship settled in and dove toward the field.
“How long is it?” Haynes asked.
“Sixty-six hundred feet,” Bachman said, his voice rising. “Six thousand six hundred feet, and the equipment is coming off.”
As the plane neared the field, a number of fire fighters on the ground radioed, “We got him in sight over here!”
After twelve seconds of radio silence, Bachman added, “At the end of the runway, it’s just a wide open field so, sir, so the winds won’t be a problem.” The plane was landing with the wind on its tail, so it carried even more speed than it would have otherwise. Even if the plane reached the runway, it was going to go off the end.
Haynes said, “Okay.” The time was 3:59 and 34 seconds. Less than a minute remained in the life of 1819 Uniform.
The first of several alarms went off, the Ground Proximity Warning System meant to tell a pilot when the plane was descending too rapidly while too close to the ground. Haynes groaned audibly as the whooping klaxon sounded and a lazy mechanical voice insisted, “Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.”
Of that moment, Records would later say, “We discussed it on short final about pulling the power off, but Denny [Fitch] said, ‘No, that’s what’s controlling us.’ And we were rapidly running out of time to discuss it any further.”
As the right wing dropped, Records was saying, “Left throttle. Left, left, left, left, left, left left. Left, left . . .”
One second before impact, someone said the word God.
Many years later, I met Dave Randa in Geneva, Illinois, a sleepy historic river town west of Chicago. We ate lunch at an airy bar and grill called Fox Fire, because of the Fox River and the flames the chef had kindled to sear burgers and chicken and fish. The room, with its bare brick walls and curving vaulted ceiling of nineteenth-century rough-hewn pine beams, looked like a refurbished factory. Dave commented that the ceiling resembled the interior of a DC-10 after the decorative walls and ceiling had been ripped away. He was right. I had seen many of those unbuilt frames at the Douglas factory in Long Beach, California, and Dave had seen one from the inside, even as it was torn asunder around him.
Dave was tall and athletic, thirty-one years old by then, with black hair and dark eyes. In his role as vice president of a bank, he wore a business suit and tie. He looked sharp. He sat next to me at a table for four, and he was trying to remember what Captain Al Haynes had said over the loudspeakers as the plane approached Sioux City for the attempt at landing. He could not recall the word that had been meant to prepare him and his mother Susan for the worst. Dave had banished it from his memory, kept it out of his conscious mind all these years because the word had been paired with a rush of black fear, dread, and even sorrow. But I knew. I knew the word he was searching for.
I waited as he struggled against himself, his sense that he was better off not knowing, better off not remembering, and then I said the word.
“Brace.”
I watched Dave go into a flashback. I had no idea that this would happen. I had never seen such a thing before. His face changed into a mask of horror, of sorrow, and his eyes went into a strange neutral mode, as if he were looking far into the misty distance. A thousand-yard stare. It lasted only a second, a flicker, but he was rendered incoherent as he tried to speak, because, as he later said, the whole scene was there before him again, the sight of looking over the seats ahead of him, the wobbling heads of people who in moments would be torn apart between the shearing of metal and the disjointed slabs of concrete runway, the sharp and toxic smells of the crash, the sensations, the unfamiliar violent forces, wrenching, jerking, tearing at him. His clothes and his mother’s splashed with the blood of the people two rows ahead, most likely Roland Stig Larson, forty-nine, and Marilyn Fay Garcia, thirty-five. (Larson suffered a fractured skull so severe that most of his brain was missing when he was found. He was torn limb from limb.) And then the flashback was over, and Dave was back in the restaurant with me. More than twenty years after the crash, the memory lay dormant like a snake, raw and alive within his emotional system. He picked himself up and went on with his breathless narration.
“Then we’re going down. You could feel we’re good. And then we got wobbly.” As he tried to tell me about this moment, his eyes grew red and teary, and he became intense and struggled with his words. Perhaps I saw anger, perhaps a deep sadness. He could not tell it as if it had happened to him. He told it as if it had happened to someone else—that boy, that vanished boy, so long ago. This is how he said it: “And then there’s three big . . . We hit. And you could feel the dirt and the impact and glass and things fly by your face and head and everything. I mean, the dirt and smell of mangled metal and dirt and kind of that rustic—is very vivid. You know, I can still, if you’re near a manufacturing plant or something, you still have that feel and taste and smell. So I still have that.”
The “glass” Dave felt was sharp bits of concrete ground up from the runway by the metal frame of the airplane. The loamy smell of the earth came from the tail tearing up the tall weeds that grew between the abandoned concrete slabs and from plowing up the summer earth off the side of the concrete, flinging the soil into his face. And to this day the smell of summer earth hurtles him back into the lethal mayhem he survived. That’s what he meant when he said, “So I still have that.” He means that he possesses it within him. It will never go away.
As he continued his story, he became that nine-year-old boy again. Little things could always bring back the boy. In a sense, the boy died in the crash, and his spirit went on to inhabit Dave Randa the man. Most of the time these days, the man protects the boy. But sometimes the boy surfaces, interrupts the attention of the grown man, and rattles him to his core.
As we sat together in that restaurant, he had trouble speaking. He squared his shoulders and went bravely on, reverting to an almost primitive-sounding cadence of words as he groped for clarity and at last found the first person in that boy. “So we’re going down, and you hit. And then we kind of flipped, and you hit. And I think we broke off on the first or second hit. I didn’t know it until we stopped, because my head is down and my eyes are closed. And then some people were screaming. I stayed down and just said, ‘Stay low, stay low,’ you know what I mean? Not said, but I just, just said, ‘Okay, I’m still going. We’re still good. We’re bouncing.’ I don’t know that we’re on fire. I don’t know that we’re dislodged from the main cabin.” And as he said those words, he laughed in disbelief as if to refute it all.
“As we pancaked onto the runway,” Records recalled, “the number two engine came out of the mount. So with no weight on the tail, the left wing comes up, and we’re essentially pirouetting on our nose, touching down about three or four times, finally ending up scuffing the cockpit clear off the airplane.” He was awake and alert through most of the sequence. The windows burst, and “I could feel the debris coming into the cockpit.” He momentarily lost consciousness or suffered retrograde amnesia, “and the next thing I know, I’m lying in a bean* field with my left ear sideways by my right thigh.” Records’s seat had collapsed, crushing him and trapping him inside its metal frame. “I realized at that time that we had crashed and I was alive. I didn’t know whether my limbs were attached or what condition I was in. I could see a fireman in one of those big aluminum-colored suits coming across the field. So I mentioned to someone in the pile of debris who was moaning, ‘Just try to relax. I see help coming.’ ” He may have been seeing Larry Niehus, who crossed the field in a so-called proximity suit not long after the crash. But the fire fighter Records saw walked right past the cockpit.
Dvorak said that he didn’t remember anything about the crash itself but woke to the quiet that followed. “I’m in the wreckage and I could tell I’m basically upside down. Everything’s closed in around me. And I tried to kick some material that was above me out of the way, and that’s when I realized my right [ankle] was broken. I could hear Denny Fitch. I didn’t know who it was at first, but, uh, he was in shock. He was just saying, ‘Help me, save me, get it off me, help me, save me,’ just over and over again. And then I heard Bill Records. Al [Haynes] was just moaning. Bill and I had a little bit of a conversation. He asked me what I could see and I said I could see a little bit out. There’s something burning in the distance and there’s people over there that I could see and stuff like that. And then Al quit moaning, and I said, ‘I think we lost Al.’ ”
Records said, “Yeah, I think so.”
Records and Dvorak tried to talk to Fitch, but he just kept saying, “Help me, save me, get it off me, help me, save me . . .”
“And then Al came to and he was very lucid,” Dvorak said. “He was completely aware of everything.”
“Where are you?” Haynes asked Dvorak.
“I’m right on top of you,” Dvorak told him.
“You’re gonna have to lose some weight,” Haynes said. “You’re too heavy.”
Dvorak broke a piece of plastic off of Haynes’s seat and stuck his handkerchief out on the end of it, “but the wind was blowing so fast I think that it blew the handkerchief away.” Still no one came.
Haynes had been knocked unconscious on impact and was able to remember only bits and pieces of the rescue. He remembered wailing, “Oh, I killed people!” Haynes was bruised and cut up. One of his ears was nearly severed. He received ninety-two stitches in the hospital. But he had broken no bones and suffered no internal injuries. Records broke his pelvis, both hips, his sacrum, and numerous ribs. He suffered compression fractures of his spine and internal injuries, as well as a variety of bruises and contusions. Fitch suffered facial lacerations, a compound fracture of his right arm, and compression fractures in his spine, among other injuries. The tendon that controlled the use of his thumb was severed. Dvorak sustained a broken ankle and burns on his arm, probably from electrical wires when they were pulled apart and shorted out as the cockpit was torn away from the plane. As the pilots came to their senses, trapped in the wreckage, they could not understand why rescue workers were passing them by.
And yet that crew had done something considered impossible by all the engineers that McDonnell Douglas and United Airlines could assemble: they had brought a plane home without using any of the conventional flight controls. If you’re a seasoned pilot, you are one with the aircraft. Your nerves grow out into the wings and tail and your brain connects up with all the control surfaces. You can tell when you’re slowing or falling or climbing. You can tell with your eyes closed. Haynes and his crew had that deep sense of the airplane. They were in the zone. According to his wife Rosa, Fitch later commented that “he had never felt more alive as when he stepped into the cockpit that day.” But long before Fitch entered the cockpit, if Haynes had not reached over and closed the left throttle and advanced the right one as the plane rolled to the right, everyone would have been killed.
No one yet had any idea what had happened to that plane to cause this accident. There was a loud noise, an engine quit, and the hydraulics failed, leaving the plane uncontrollable. As Robert MacIntosh, the lead investigator for the NTSB, drove toward his home in Virginia, he wondered how that could happen. Seven miles beneath the aircraft at a company called Mellowdent Hybrids in Storm Lake, Iowa, workers heard the explosion when the engine blew. Like distant thunder, the sound took about half a minute to reach them. Then they turned toward the source above their rich summer fields. They looked up at the white jet and saw something amazing: great pieces of the craft spinning and falling in a hail of metal, and one big piece so large that Chuck Eddy, the sheriff of Buena Vista County, would later stand inside of it. Another piece that looked like half of a giant steel ring, said Eddy, was “whirling as it came down, sounding like a helicopter.” One of the farmers felt the ground shudder as a heavy piece of metal hit. But in the green sea of corn and soybeans, it was impossible to say where it might have fallen.
Even as Kevin Bachman shouted, “He’s gonna make it!” the air traffic controllers saw the left wing come up. The buildings between the tower and the runway hid the right wing, but Bates said, “You could see the jolt in the aircraft when apparently it hit the ground.” As the DC-10 shuddered and began grinding off its own right wing, fracturing the main spar, it emerged from behind the buildings already on fire. Then the fireball and smoke rose, obscuring the middle portion of the plane from view, as banks of seats began vaulting and somersaulting high above the flames.
Bates heard Zielezinski say, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.”
“It was so dead silent in the tower cab,” Bates recalled, “and he said it softly, but it was almost like it was an extremely loud break of the silence.” In fact, at the moment of the crash, a scream or yell can be heard on the tape recording of Dale Mleynek’s position as he transmitted, “All emergency equipment, proceed.”
When the plane burst into flames, Zielezinski said, “three of us at the same time said, ‘My God, nobody could live through that.’ ”
“At the point that the fireball came on up,” Bates continued, “the tail snapped off, hit the ground, tumbled once, and then went straight on the taxiway and stopped. Just bam! I was terrified at that point, because I remembered the A-7s were on that taxiway.” As the A-7 pilots watched, the tail came to a stop about two hundred yards from the first aircraft in line, by Bates’s estimate. And inside that tail sat Richard Howard Sudlow, his body now draped over nine-year-old Yisroel Brownstein in an effort to protect him. After the tail snapped off, the rest of the plane began to rise up onto its nose as the left wing started its rotation. “I saw it bounce,” Bates said. “It was amazing. I never could believe that an aircraft could bounce, but it bounced on its nose . . . and then it landed on its back.”
Fitch said, “We hit so hard that my hands flew off the throttles.” As he described it, “a giant hand was behind my head, and it slammed my face down into the radio below me.” Then he “bounced back up like a Jack-in-the-box. And for some reason—why I don’t know—I looked left through a veil of blood, because blood was running over my eyes.” He saw “the captain’s profile—corn stalks going by.”
Fitch described the impact. “There was this terrible sound, tearing of metal, G-loads, there was yaw to the right. And simultaneous with that change of direction was this sensation that something was like drop-kicking your backside. You feel yourself coming up and over, head over heels. The windshield went completely green and brown. Split second. Cold air blowing on my left shoulder.”
When the right wing ruptured, more than ten thousand pounds of kerosene sprayed out and turned to an aerosol. The right landing gear tore an eighteen-inch deep gash in that World War II concrete. The right engine, number three, was ripped off the wing and demolished when it hit the runway as the landing gear collapsed. As Tim Owens watched the eerie mix of sunlight and firelight flood the cabin, the seats between rows 29 and 36 began ripping free and arching high in the air or else tumbling down the runway, including those carrying the Mixons, Cinnamon Martinez, Lena Ann Blaha, who had pointed out the damage on the tail to Jan Brown, and the boy beside her, James Matthew Bohn. Gene Chimura, sixty-three, in the starboard aisle seat in row 28, suffered minor injuries. In the rows behind him, except for a few children, who, owing to their short stature, were protected by the backs of their seats, nearly everyone else was killed. Brenda Ann Feyh’s scalp was ripped off, her head crushed, as she breathed in a spray of her own blood. Her son, Jason, eight, beside her, survived. He suffered brain damage and was in a coma for nineteen days. Likewise, in 32-A, six-year-old Lauren Marsh survived, while her mother, beside her in 32-B, died when her neck and spinal cord were snapped. The pattern continued with a few exceptions back through the rows, until all but one person died in each of rows 34 through 36. Rows 37 and 38—the last two rows—remained attached within the tail, and all but two of the people seated there survived.
As Richard Howard Sudlow and Elenore E. Gabbe, sixty-three, were dying in the last rows, the single remaining engine, mounted on the left wing, was still running full throttle, because Fitch’s hands had been knocked from the controls and he was unable to shut it down. “Like a pinwheel, it’s just causing the airplane to rotate, because the engine’s pushing it around,” Fitch said. “When the tail broke off, the airplane is much heavier forward, so the airplane is now coming up in the air like a seesaw that somebody got off. And the cockpit is getting pointed straight to the earth, and we skip like a pogo stick. The first skip, when I saw the windshield go dark brown and green and I still felt the air-conditioning, we were still integral to the aircraft.” But on the second skip, “the stress caused the cockpit to break off like a pencil tip.” As that was happening, the lift on the left wing, as well as some thrust, perhaps, from the left engine, powered the plane around in a complete 360-degree rotation, spinning on its nose like a top before angling over and landing on its back.
Fitch continued his description from his point of view in the now separated cockpit: “The windshield lightened for a split second, darkened a second time. Heat and humidity and violence beyond any words I could ever hope to put forth. My next recognition was being still. I was upside down, I had mud in my eyes and my ears, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t move. I could feel the blood flowing up my face to my ears and up to my hair. Tremendous pain. My ribs were broken and they punctured my right lung cavity and stuck in there. Just couldn’t get a breath of air.” Indeed, his punctured lung would almost kill him that first night, and the repair of his severed radial nerve would eventually require a nine-hour operation.
As the crew waited for someone to notice the cockpit, the controllers in the tower stared in silence at a scene they could scarcely comprehend. Bachman turned away from his position and fell to his knees on the floor of the tower, hanging his head, as Zielezinski and the other controllers gaped in horror. “And it was just, it was just surreal,” Zielezinski said. “I mean, there was smoke floating past the tower, and you could see paper and pamphlets and whatever just floating in the smoke, you know, it was just, it was—really eerie.”
Zielezinski put his hand on Bachman’s shoulder, recalled Bachman, and he “told me that I had done everything I could.”
Bachman stood up, quaking and ill, and went unsteadily down the tower stairs and burst into tears.
As Bates and Zielezinski and the others watched, the sunny scene of summer in Iowa turned to a gray and wintry landscape. “The thing that struck me the most,” Bates said, “was the shower of paper. It was like snow.” Then the sirens began their keening wail, as dozens of pieces of equipment began to move.
Bates said, “Here’s this fire, this plane that had broken into all these pieces, and the snow coming down. Millions of pieces of paper and Lord knows what else—clothing—and it fell on the field like snow. It was just amazing.” As the fire on Runway 17-35 burned out where fuel had spilled, Bates raised his binoculars and saw a set of two seats out on the concrete. “There was a man and a wife sitting in two seats. Their legs were pointed at ridiculous angles. His left shoulder was dislocated and [his arm] wrapped back around behind his head, and all I saw was red.”
Charles Owings, the local controller, broke the silence and broadcast an announcement to all aircraft on the frequency that Sioux Gateway Airport was closed. Luckily, the traffic was light. Then the emergency dispatcher radioed the helicopter, saying, “MAC, I, we have the airplane down one half mile from the airport. Start that way please, the plane is on fire.” Owings called the pilot, too, saying, “You’d better get in here, it’s real ugly.”
The pilot said solemnly, “We see.”
As the controllers watched the chaotic scene below them from their glass-walled crypt ninety feet in the air, in a vortex of blowing ash and paper, the tower returned to silence.
“We were totally helpless,” Bates said.
* The airport property was planted in both soybeans and corn, and the cockpit had come to rest in the beans.