When the billet of titanium known as heat K8283 arrived at ALCOA in Cleveland, Ohio, technicians cut it into eight blanks weighing about seven hundred pounds each. Those blanks were destined to become fan disks for General Electric CF6-6 engines. The blanks, squat cylindrical columns sixteen inches in diameter and twenty-two inches deep, were put through a series of processes to prepare them for shipping to General Electric. The first was a forging operation that would make the blank the right shape to fit into a die. It would also knead the metal like bread dough to improve its microscopic crystalline structure. Then the blank was put through blocker forging to yield a crude approximation of the finished shape. Finisher forging gave the metal nearly its true shape but with enough excess material to allow for the fine machining it would undergo at GE. Heat treatment refined the crystalline structure of the metal further and gave it the right balance of strength and ductility for its life of spinning. Heating and working metal also helps dissolve impurities and further homogenizes the crystals. Gregory Williams, the manager of quality assurance in metallurgy for ALCOA, said, “All of the preforming work was done on a 3,000 ton hydraulic press between closed dies, typically heated to 500 degrees F. The forging stock was typically heated to 1,700 to 1,750 degrees F for these operations.” As the blanks went through these processes, technicians wrote serial numbers on them in crayon.
A ring of metal was cut from around the bore of each blank—the hole in the center—and another from around the outer edge. The inner ring was tested for purity and strength. The outer ring was not. Thus did the eight blanks made from heat K8283 obtain another set of papers certifying their suitability for the flight. The blanks were shipped to General Electric in May of 1971 to be machined and finished into CF6-6 fan disks and put on airliners. Those blanks now had a pedigree from TIMET and another from ALCOA. They had papers saying that they had been tested and were of a material suitable for service on a jet engine that would propel a plane carrying hundreds of people.
Those papers were wrong.
At GE, the blanks were forged to what’s known as “sonic shape” or rectilinear form. As James W. Tucker, the general manager of product operations at GE, put it, “The sides are parallel. . . . There are no dovetails machined in it.” The disks were then given another ultrasonic inspection. During this first stage of the process at GE, the technicians who were performing the ultrasonic tests could see something below the surface of the metal on one of the eight disks that had been cut from heat K8283. No one knew if it was a real defect or an artifact of the ultrasonic test itself. In the past, false-positive findings had caused GE to waste money and cut up perfectly good disks to look for defects. But the disk was pulled out of production just to be on the safe side. These slugs of metal, now weighing about 370 pounds each, were nearly ready to commit to the audacious act of spinning into flight and soaring high above the earth.
Of the eight blanks that ALCOA had made, GE machined seven into working fan disks. The disks were given serial numbers MPO-00382 through MPO-00388. Fan disk MPO-00385 was entered into the GE manufacturing cycle on September 13, 1971. It was inspected by immersion ultrasonic testing on September 29 and passed the test. (Immersion ultrasonic testing, using water to conduct sound waves, is a more reliable way of detecting flaws.) Still in the sonic shape, it was subjected to a process called macroetch in which it is submerged in nitric hydrofluoric acid. This burns away some of the metal to reveal the grain structure. A technician inspected the grain of the metal and gave the disk a clean bill of health. During the week beginning December 1, 1971, the workers machined 00385 to its final shape—a large disk with a hole in the middle and dovetail slots cut into the outer edge. The day after the disk was finished, technicians subjected it to fluorescent penetrant inspection (FPI). In this process, the disk is submerged in an oily liquid that will seep into any cracks that might be present. A powder is applied to draw the penetrant out of the cracks. The dye fluoresces under ultraviolet light, making cracks easier to see. Disk 00385 passed that test.
Two weeks before Christmas, the GE technicians put the disk through a finishing process called shot peening, in which tiny beads of metal are flung at the surface at high speed. They then used grit blasting and metal spray on the dovetail slots that would hold the fan blades. The finished disk was given a final inspection on December 11. Mechanics fitted the new disk with thirty-eight finely crafted fan blades, surgically precise in their ability to move air without undue turbulence. You can hear their almost ceramic ring and howl, an echoing bell-like sound that tolls when the captain pulls back the power as a big jet flies overhead on its way to landing. Mechanics then installed fan disk 00385 on a new CF6-6 engine. That engine, in turn, was sent out to Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, California, on January 22, 1972. Douglas installed the engine on a brand new DC-10 to carry people to and fro across the heavens.
At that point, anyone inspecting the disk could be confident that it had no defects because of all the previous testing it had undergone and all the certificates guaranteeing its integrity. In fact the fan was a beautiful and otherworldly object made of a gleaming and silver-gray and perfectly smooth metal that existed nowhere without the hand of man. With all that it had been through, with all of its papers in place, who would be tempted to look at it with too jaundiced an eye?
Yet inside the bore of disk 00385, less than an inch from the front edge, a tiny pit, a cavity, existed on the finished surface. Shortly after TIMET melted heat K8283, General Electric changed its specification to call for a different type of furnace to be used in making titanium. It also required that the metal be melted three times instead of two. In addition, the use of scrap was no longer permitted. By then, however, heat K8283 had already been made, and a piece of it—fan disk 00385—had embarked on the long and winding road that would take it to 1819 Uniform and onward toward its long fall in two big pieces into the green corn of Buena Vista County, Iowa. By another bitter twist, 00385 and its seven sister disks were the last CF6 fan disks ever made with the old-fashioned double-melt titanium process. In 1989 passengers had no way to tell if they were boarding a plane bearing new technology or old. The same is true for passengers today.
Tony Feeney, the skinny fourteen-year-old boy with the big glasses, was traveling alone on United Flight 232. He was on his way to visit his grandmother and to attend Michael Jordan’s basketball camp in Chicago. When the engine exploded, Feeney recalled, he was eating his lunch, listening to music on headphones, and reading a heavy-metal magazine. When Dudley Dvorak rushed back to look out the window at the tail, Feeney made the sign of the cross and prayed, “Holy angels, protect us.” Priscilla Theroux, twenty-seven, seated across the aisle, gave him a religious medal. The businessman on Feeney’s left tried to comfort him. Reynaldo Orito, forty-nine, told Feeney that he took this flight twice a week. “He gave me his Oreo cookies from his lunch and said that everything was going to be okay,” Feeney said.
With Orito’s reassurance and Priscilla’s sacred medal, Feeney felt more confident that the plane would land safely. As he held his ankles, though, and waited, “there was a loud impact,” he told me, “and it kind of threw everybody back in their seats, and I remember seeing the back of people’s heads as we were all kind of thrown out of the brace position and into the backs of our seats.” He was jerked upward. His arms and legs went into the air, and his body was wrenched into odd contortions that he could not control. “And the next thing I remember is just rolling along on the runway. I was thrown from the plane at impact, out of my seat.” He had no recollection of how he came out of his seat belt.
A week after the crash, Marcia Poole of the Sioux City Journal visited Feeney in his hospital room at St. Luke’s. “The teenager clearly remembers,” wrote Poole, “noticing two men several rows in front of his 32-G seat seconds before the crash.” As Feeney watched them, they gave each other the thumbs-up sign.
“I thought they had a plan,” Feeney told Poole, “or maybe they knew they were going to die.”
As he watched, the right wing struck the runway and the plane began coming apart around him. Then, according to the story he told Poole, he saw Schemmel and Ramsdell leap out of their seats and wrench open the emergency exit. “I saw them bail out,” he told Poole. Then he leaped up and followed.
“Tony described the struggle up the aisle,” wrote Poole, “against a force that was pushing him back. When he reached the exit, he hoped there’d be a cushioned ramp to jump onto.”
“But there wasn’t,” Feeney said. “And I just jumped.”
Not long after that, Life magazine interviewed Feeney, and he told a different story. “After impact, I made my way through an exit,” he said, “but I missed the emergency chute and fell to the ground.” By whatever means, Feeney came free of his seat, the fuselage broke apart immediately in front of him, and he wound up on the easement between the runway and the corn. A startling number of people who were thrown out of the plane lived, including the man seated next to Brad Griffin, Michael Kielbassa, and thirty-nine-year-old Paul Olivier, who sat in the row behind Feeney on the port side next to sixteen-year-old Nina Skuljski. When Olivier’s seat came to a stop on the runway, he was alive and Nina, still strapped in nearby him, was dead.
Feeney told me that as he hit the surface of the runway and began tumbling, “I fractured my skull. Hit my head pretty good. I have bits and pieces of memory from coming in and out of consciousness as I was tumbling and rolling.” He remembered “rolling along the side of the runway. And I remember a specific thought being, When am I going to stop rolling?” I asked how he thought he might have survived. “I was a super scrappy, skinny little kid,” he said. “I kind of came to a stop on the side of the cornfield. A rescue worker had come around that area of the crash and found me. He picked me up like you would pick up a baby. My back was broken, so I remember screaming in pain. He put me in the back of his truck and drove me to triage, and from triage I was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital” because that hospital had a burn unit. “I had third-degree [friction] burns all along the right-hand side of my body.”
His father drove about twelve hours straight through from Casper, Wyoming. He found his son in traction. Tony was in St. Luke’s Hospital for more than a month. He said that when he returned to high school that fall, he “received a lot of attention.” He tried as much as possible to have a normal experience at school. But at the same time, the crash marked his life, and it “began to be how people knew me: Oh, he’s the kid from the plane crash.” In fact, he soon acquired the nickname Skip, owing to his traverse along the runway and perhaps to the tale he told Marcia Poole.
Feeney said that when he was eighteen or nineteen years old, he saw the movie Fearless and, “that had a large impact on me.” The film was based on the novel of the same name by Rafael Yglesias, which was loosely inspired by the crash of United Flight 232. The main character, Brad Klein, played by Jeff Bridges, borrowed some elements of Jerry Schemmel’s story. In the movie, Klein emerges unscathed from the crash carrying a baby. He comes to believe that he can’t be killed. Klein takes a number of risks that endanger his life, such as driving his car into a brick wall and eating strawberries, to which he’s allergic. Feeney said he started to do “stupid things like that,” such as sitting on the edge of the roof of a tall building at night, tempting fate to take him.
“I went through periods of extreme recklessness, almost invincibility-type behavior.” Looking back at his actions during those years, “I thought: ‘Really? I was doing that?’ ”
When I asked him to be more specific, he said, “Well, you know . . . I jumped off a train.”
I said, “That’s an interesting choice. How fast was it going?”
Feeney laughed. “I don’t know. Pretty fast.” He had the idea that he could run in the air and then run out the speed of the train once he touched the ground, as you might imagine a cartoon character doing. It was a real-life reenactment of his dreamscape fantasy: following Schemmel and Ramsdell and jumping out of the crashing plane. And instead of successfully running, he experienced the same traumatic tumbling that he’d gone through when he was ejected from the plane. “I was all beat up and bloodied and couldn’t breathe. I had bloodied my face and bloodied my hips.” As the train roared off into the distance, he started crawling. After he caught his breath, he was able to stand and begin walking. Once he came to his senses, he realized that he had leapt off of a train in the middle of a desert in Wyoming. He walked back to the last town the train had passed through “and bought some pancakes and coffee and called some friends, who drove out and picked me up.”
During that period of his life, he might wake up in the middle of the night and just take off and drive across the country for no reason. “I guess that’s even how I got to Latin America. I just sold off all my possessions and ran away one day.” When I spoke to him, he lived in Costa Rica.
Both Reynaldo Orito, who gave Feeney his Oreo cookies and reassured him, and Priscilla Theroux, who gave him the religious medal, were killed after being thrown from the plane. They lay dead on the runway when Charles Martz, the ex-Navy fighter pilot, walked past.
In the moments immediately after the crash, the control tower was quiet. After the intensity of Kevin Bachman’s dialogue with Captain Haynes, the drama had been snatched away, and the tower cab became an odd and uncomfortable sanctuary high above the sea of suffering and smoke and the tiny human figures running to embrace the calamity. Occasionally the silence would be broken by a radio transmission from a pilot overflying the area high above. The controllers who had been working the crash were relieved from their duties by other controllers. Matt Rostermundt had taken Dale Mleynek’s position on ground control.
Then Rostermundt answered a call from the field, startling everyone. Sam Gochenour, a technician from the FAA, helped maintain the electronic equipment on the field and in the tower. The communications antennas that many survivors had noticed near the Grassy Knoll were his responsibility. A small building sat inside the array of four antennas (a fifth was added later), with a parking apron next to it and a gravel road leading away along the perimeter of the airfield. Those antennas, known as the remote transmitter / receiver, or RTR site, carried all of the frequencies used by the Sioux City airport. Gochenour, in his mid-fifties, had been in a lower floor of the control tower all day realigning the thirty-six channels of continuous tape recording that captured everything that was said over the air. “Here I had all the voice tapes,” Sam said, “but I wasn’t listening to ’em. I was just doin’ my job.”
Just before 4:00, he signed off the work he’d done and crossed the ramp beneath a pile-driver sun to FAA vehicle number 636, a late-model Jeep. He made the short drive down the ramp to the FAA shop, which served as the headquarters for the technicians. As he parked his car, he noticed several people standing outside the shop, watching the sky. Gochenour stepped down from his Jeep, and one of the other workers told him about the emergency. He stood beside his car and watched the horizon. “I seen it come in,” Gochenour said, “and I seen it tryin’ to land. I seen it blow up. I seen it flip in the air.”
He knew that his first order of business was to make sure that the crash had not harmed any equipment that was vital to flight operations. He returned to his car and drove to the gate. Then he saw the mobs of people and emergency vehicles. As he was considering how to reach his equipment, a recently hired technician named Tim Norton pulled up behind him in FAA vehicle number 637, a yellow late-model Dodge Caravan. Gochenour stepped out and went to Tim’s window. “Tim,” he said, “let’s go around back. Let’s don’t go through that mess up front.” They turned their vehicles around, and Tim followed Gochenour to a gate that led onto the perimeter road and about two miles around the south and west sides of the field, away from the wreck. They parked on the gravel apron beside the radio antenna towers. The RTR site was on the north side of the vast cornfield, on the far side of which the plane lay burning. Most of the emergency vehicles were approaching the crash from the south and east sides. Gochenour and Norton could see the boiling black smoke on the horizon, but nothing more beyond the horse-high corn, which blocked their view. As they stood watching, Norton, twenty-five, saw Helen Young Hayes walk out of the corn toward them. A moment later, an older man emerged behind her.
“God,” Norton said, “talk about rubber neckers.” He thought the people had come from I-29 and jumped the fence to gawk at the crash. As Hayes drew closer, though, Norton was struck by something odd about her. He realized that her synthetic clothing and her sheer nylon stockings were melted onto her body. She was burned. She had been seated between Upton Rehnberg and John Transue when the fireball came through the 2-Left exit. Norton watched her advance toward him and further realized that she was in shock. She could only mumble and stammer her response when they asked her to sit down. Then the elderly man caught up with her and said that he was having pains in his chest. When they looked up, there were dozens of people streaming out of the corn, some running, some staggering, and others moving in the rigid, awkward gait of shock.
Gochenour crossed to his Jeep, picked up the microphone, and called the tower. Matt Rostermundt answered, listened for a moment, and then turned to Mleynek. “Sam says he’s got survivors out there.” Mleynek gave him an incredulous look.
“They thought I was nuts,” Gochenour later recounted. “He thought I was crazy.”
While Gochenour called for help, Norton opened up the air-conditioned electronics building and began guiding people into the small room. He let some of the passengers drink the water that was used to refill the batteries. And then the first class flight attendant, Jan Murray, came walking out of the corn.
Before the plane crashed, Murray recalled later, “I went up to the front bathroom, because I wanted to pray. I got down on my knees in that dirty bathroom, and I just remember praying. I don’t know what I was praying for. I was just praying, I guess, to get us there safely.” She came out of the starboard first class lavatory and walked back through A-Zone to exit 2-Right, where she strapped into her jump seat. Across the airplane at 2-Left, Jan Brown strapped into her seat as well. Murray waited, listening to the strange sounds around her. “My whole life was going through my mind. I mean I thought . . . I thought probably that this was the end of my life.” And she was filled with “yearning,” she said, “to be with my mom and dad, just yearning to be home and be safe. I wanted my mom and dad so bad, it was awful, it was just an awful yearning.” Telling me this, Murray heaved a trembling sigh and began weeping. She fell silent for a long time. When she resumed, she said in a whisper, “I can remember looking at the two guys, the gentlemen that were facing me.” Bill Mackin, fifty-one, sat in the window seat with Craig Koglin beside him. As she watched Koglin, forty, he began limbering up for what was to come. “I could see him stretching and kind of getting ready for the game. You could just see him trying to relax his body and that sort of thing.”
“How close are we?” Murray asked Mackin, who had a view out the window.
“Pretty close,” he said, as he gazed at the ground rushing up.
Murray braced herself. Then both she and Jan Brown began screaming, “Brace! Brace! Brace! Stay down! Stay down! Stay down!” at the top of their lungs, and Murray found herself looking out over what appeared to be an empty cabin. “Boy,” she said with a sigh. “That was eerie, to look back and not see a head. That seemed like an eternity while we were hollering ‘Brace!’ And then . . .” She paused, as if to try to think if she had any more to say. When nothing came to mind, she said, with simple finality, “We hit.”
She heard no sound at all, but in the vivid light that poured in through the hole where the tail had broken off, she watched the doors to the overhead bins blow open, and “bags started flying everywhere.” When the tail and nose tore away, a storm of dirt and runway grit began blowing through the cabin with hurricane force, and all of it still going in slow motion. Then she was dangling upside down in her harness. The force of the crash was so great that it drove the round steel clasp of her harness into her flesh and up under her ribcage, breaking several ribs. In the confusing smoke and haze, she could feel people moving around her. “It was smoky and it was black and it was nasty.” She dug the clasp out of her ribcage and somehow managed to open it. The straps had wrapped around and around her arms, “like an ACE bandage. And I couldn’t get down. I heard people scampering by and I had heard voices. Then I remember flailing my arms, and finally I dropped to the floor. And . . . I couldn’t see anything and I was on my hands and knees and I didn’t know which way to go and I looked up and there was this tiny pole of light, so I just started crawling for that light.”
Then Craig Koglin was beside her, calmly saying, “I think we can get out here.”
As her eyes adjusted, Murray saw corn jammed up into the area where the light leached through. Koglin pulled at something, and a space opened up, and they stepped out into the high corn. “It smelled like fresh-cut grass,” she said with an astonished tone of voice as she recalled those first moments of release. “There was nowhere to go but to follow the rows of corn.”
Murray again began to weep. She said in a high keening voice, “And the sky was blue—beautiful, beautiful blue—and the clouds were puffy white clouds. I thought we were in heaven.” She fell into silent weeping for a time and then said through her tears, “I said, ‘Are we alive?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, but we’ve got to run.’ We just ran and ran and ran. We just followed the rows. The corn was higher than I was.” When she staggered out of the corn, she was at the Grassy Knoll. She took her place among the other passengers, climbing the little hill with Margo Crain and looking back at the destruction. “The plane looked like it had exploded, and I thought that we were the only survivors.” She could barely speak through her tears as she said, “There were about . . . maybe twenty passengers on that bank.” She had no idea that the plane had made it to an airport. As far as she could tell, they had crashed in a cornfield in the middle of nowhere. “It was just surreal.” She called it “a peaceful little bank after what we’d been through.” She was also unaware that the two FAA technicians, Gochenour and Norton, were trying to bring order to this chaotic scene, which spread from the Grassy Knoll to the RTR site.
She took stock of the people around her and realized that a number of them were seriously injured. Working alongside Georgeann del Castillo, her fellow flight attendant, Murray decided to triage the survivors for quick transport. She observed “a lot of blood,” she said. “It was hard to tell what the injuries were, because it was really messy,” but “We literally had a line ready. It’s incredible that we did this.”
An Air National Guard nurse named Pam Christianson had arrived on the field to help with triage. Her exact location was unclear, but she gave a sense of what sort of injuries people had sustained. She said, “The first lady I saw was literally scalped from her eyeballs back. When I first looked at her she was talking to me. I told her: ‘Don’t open your eyes. DO NOT open your eyes . . . ’ I put my hand on the back of her neck and felt her scalp and hair all in a clump. I pulled her scalp back over the top of her head as gingerly as possible.”
As Murray and del Castillo moved among the badly wounded people, they encountered Norton and Gochenour, who were also trying to organize the passengers. People had begun asking after lost relatives, and Murray looked for something on which to write their names.
“We didn’t have any paper,” Norton said, “so we were using our legs and arms and the backs of shirts. So we started writing as much information as we could down.” Murray, who was still wearing her apron from serving lunch on the plane, began to write names and telephone numbers on that.
Gochenour said, “People would come up to her and write their name and their number on her blouse.”
Norton loaded some of the most seriously injured people into his van and left for the hospital. While Murray and del Castillo helped the victims, Gochenour was faced with onlookers trying to climb the fence. “I had to go down there and run them off,” he recalled. He returned to the RTR to find a man climbing one of the towers. A woman with her two-year-old son was tearing her blue dress to give the man a piece of cloth to wave. The man on the tower was trying to draw attention to the survivors. Gochenour ran up and yelled at him to get down, help was coming.
A fire engine appeared out of nowhere and seemed to be heading right into the cornfield. Gochenour stood in front of the engine and put his hands out. He said, “You can’t go in that damned cornfield. Park it.” The fire fighter who was driving stepped down and looked around at the survivors. He saw two people he thought ought to go to the hospital immediately. He asked Gochenour if he could use his Jeep to take them. Gochenour gave him the keys, and the fire fighter loaded the victims. As he drove off, he called out to Gochenour, “When you leave, bring my fire engine!”
About forty minutes after the crash, a blue Air National Guard bus hove into view and parked near the RTR site. Murray and del Castillo said good-bye to Gochenour and joined the passengers as they filed on board to be transported to the triage area amid the wreckage. When the bus rolled away in a cloud of smoke, Gochenour sat in the heat alongside the fire engine and not a soul around. The only sounds came from the killdeers and red-winged blackbirds that flickered in and out of the torn-up corn. Gochenour went inside the air-conditioned RTR building and picked up the phone to call his boss. He explained the situation, then said, “You’d better come and get me, cause I’m not going to drive the damned fire truck.”
Gochenour waited, watching the smoke rise into the blue sky that was columned in all quadrants with the cumulus that grew out of the afternoon heat. Soon his supervisor came driving out along the perimeter road towing a rooster tail of dust from the sun-dried gravel. They drove back the way he had come, avoiding all the wreckage and carnage that Gochenour preferred not to see. “My logic was, there was enough people working on that. They did not need me. And I never seen a dead body, because I didn’t want to see one, because you have to forget it. My supervisor come and got me and we went back to the restaurant [in the terminal] and had a cup of coffee.”