At one or two o’clock on the morning of July 20, when the Grumman Gulfstream touched down at the Sioux City airport and taxied to the ramp, more than a dozen people descended the stairs, including the chairman of the NTSB, Jim Burnett, and a young engineering intern from Auburn University named Laura Levy, with her laser transit packed in its case. Immediately after their arrival, while everyone else retired to hotels and motels, MacIntosh and Benzon took a group on a tour of the crash site. The group included Ted Lopatkiewicz, Jim Burnett, Randy Curtis, Gary Brown, Frank Hilldrup, and Dennis Swanstrom, among others.
“Indeed, it was nasty,” MacIntosh remembered years later. As they walked through the night swinging flashlight beams, their feet shuffling through blowing paper and yellow insulation and sparkling computer tape, they passed the throttle quadrant that the crew had used to fly the plane. About the cockpit, Benzon said, “Well, it wasn’t there. It was twisted-up seats, pilot seats, and part of the throttle quadrant. We were aware that the crew had survived, and we were very, very surprised after looking at what was left of the cockpit.”
Frank Hilldrup, twenty-nine, chairman of the Structures Group, had joined the NTSB the previous fall. Wielding a flashlight, he made his way across the naked swath where the broken fuselage had skidded, cutting corn. He came to the severed end of the coach cabin from which the tail had departed. He stepped inside amid fire-fighting foam and melted metal, and shined his flashlight around to see the condition of the plane. He was shocked to see people hanging upside down or sprawled on the ceiling—many, many people, who some nine or ten hours earlier had been eating chicken fingers and watching the Kentucky Derby. His flashlight set the shadows of the people dancing, arms thrown up as if in some gruesome mockery of jubilation. He felt “a jolt,” he said, and backed out of there.
MacIntosh followed Runway 04-22 all the way to the threshold where the right wing hit. There he saw a long hole a foot and a half deep gouged through the concrete by the right landing gear, and he understood the tremendous force with which the plane had hit. Again he shook his head, marveling that there was anything left of the plane and its passengers. This was definitely a Crowd Killer, and yet most of the crowd had survived.
Under a bright moon that had been full the day before, augmented by floodlights, the group proceeded down Runway 22, across the uneven slabs of concrete, mismatched and shifted through the decades. They stopped at the intersection of 17-35 near what remained of the tail. MacIntosh cast his flashlight beam up into the seats where John Hatch and Martha Conant had been sitting. He saw the torn and twisted metal, the tangle of wires hanging down, the fiberglass batting inside ripped aluminum foil, the bent magazine rack on its side where Susan White had braced her foot, and the lavatory thrown open where the blue toilet water had vomited out at her. In the jaundiced illumination, they saw the stains on the upholstery where Susan and Dave Randa had been splashed with someone’s blood.
One of Gary Brown’s volunteers, Dave Kaplan, watched as an investigator from the NTSB recovered the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder and brought them to the command post. “I remember holding the CVR thinking to myself the answer to what just happened here is in my hands,” said Kaplan. The devices were put in Gary Brown’s truck and another WCDES volunteer, Don Dandurand, was assigned to keep them secure. “I should add,” Kaplan said, “that Don spent the night on the field in the truck, surrounded by the dead, the wreckage, the smell and keeping an eye on the CVR. Don later told me it was the worst night of his life.”
They all knew that there had been an explosion, but no one suspected that it was “nefarious,” to use MacIntosh’s word. It was the failure of a machine, which by design had a large amount of energy roaring around inside it. That energy, which normally bled out the back of the engine in a controlled fashion, had somehow come bursting into the open all at once. Beyond that, they knew little, and they were not inclined toward speculation. They couldn’t work until dawn, and the hour was late.
Benzon and MacIntosh drove across the river to the Flamingo Motel in Nebraska. “We had to pass near a cow rendering plant,” Benzon said. “It actually hurt your nose to take a whiff as we drove by. By the time we arrived in Sioux City, all the motels were so crowded with reporters and their entourages that Bob MacIntosh and I had to room together.” The Flamingo was, as Benzon called it, “a dump of a place. Flamingos in Iowa? We called it the Flamin’ O, as one letter of the neon sign was not working or was always blinking, and so it had, well . . . a scatological connotation.” Benzon described their evenings during the investigation as “two middle-aged guys sitting around in their underwear, discussing what to do and where to go next and watching the late evening press coverage on an old black-and-white television.”
Margo Crain was not sure what happened after she returned baby Sabrina Lee to the Michaelson family. By that time, fifty to seventy people, by her estimate, were milling around the area of the Grassy Knoll a short distance from the RTR antenna site. Sam Gochenour had called for transportation, and now Crain found herself riding through the wreckage in a National Guard bus, “with not a run in my hose,” as she put it. She said the ride “seemed to take an eternity. The gruesome, violent aftermath that . . . the bus had to pick its way through, was enough to turn anyone’s head. However, instead of turning away, I couldn’t help but stare.”
Once at the mess hall, Crain sought out a quiet corner and sat on the floor by herself. She had been driven through a field of dead bodies and was in shock. She had lost track of Rod Vetter, the only person with whom she had any acquaintance. Now she sat with her knees ricked up and her arms clasped around them, watching the people circle aimlessly. Garry Priest, the young executive she had admired in the boarding lounge in Denver, approached. She had followed him down the Jetway, remarking to herself how handsome he was. She was not quite ten years older than Priest, but he looked young to her. He had a black eye and a burst blood vessel that caused the white of his eye to turn a shocking crimson. He looked like a wounded warrior, stoic and brave. Now he squatted down beside her in his tight jeans and asked if she was all right.
“I guess,” she told him. “As well as can be expected.” Priest sat beside her on the floor. To Priest, Crain seemed a much older, if exotic, woman. She looked at him and said, “Actually, no. I’m not. I don’t think any of us are really all right, are we?” The two sat staring at each other, and in that moment Margo Crain and Garry Priest were fused as if they’d been welded in the fires of the crash.
“It’s amazing,” Crain later observed, “how in one instant you are complete strangers and the next instant you are bonded for life due to a life-changing split second. Your body chemistry and outlook on life are forever altered.”
A guardsman announced that phones had been set up. Crain and Priest took their places in line to make calls. When her turn came, Crain couldn’t remember any phone numbers, but in time she found her sister Babette’s number.
“Babette,” she said. “It’s me and I’m all right!”
“What do you mean? What happened? Where are you?”
“Have you been watching television?”
“No.”
“Our plane crashed. I’m in Iowa.”
“What!”
“Yeah, I’m sure it’s all over the news by now. Don’t worry though, I’m fine. I walked off without a scratch. So if you’re watching TV, there’s coverage, and I just wanted you to know I’m all right. I’m in one piece.”
Babette tuned in the news and gasped as she watched the plane break up and explode and burst into flames. Crain reassured her that she was not injured and asked her to call the family. Her mother-in-law was taking care of her children.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Babette asked again.
“Yes, I’m fine. There are a lot of people here helping us. I love you. I’ll see you soon. I’ll call you again when I have a chance.”
Crain wanted to be with Priest. But they were separated at St. Luke’s Hospital. Priest was taken to one doctor and Crain to another. Then Crain found herself in an ambulance with several other uninjured people. She did not know where Priest had gone. The ambulance wound its way up into the hills around Sioux City to a stately edifice on a bluff surrounded by pine trees and with a view of the city below, as if she flew in an airliner once again. While she watched out the window, she felt a deep sense of disorientation. The other passengers were chatting in that nervous, manic way, saying, “How do you feel?” and “Where were you?” or “What did you see?” One passenger, a woman Crain called Chatty Cathy, could not seem to stop herself from rambling on and on about the crash and the inconvenience and how she was supposed to be at home by now. “And I just wanted her to shut up.”
Once in the dormitory at Briar Cliff, where Aki Muto was making string figures with Eric and Alisa Hjermstad, Crain was calm but also in such a state of shock that everything seemed surreal. She said she had sudden powerful surges of emotion in which she felt invincible and capable of anything. The room was like a nun’s cell in a convent with drab white curtains, a boxy rectangular shelf on the wall for school books, a narrow desk at which to do homework. Two single beds and a napkin’s worth of floor space. A volunteer from the Red Cross had given Margo Crain and her roommate Ruth Pearlstein soap and shampoo. Crain also received a pink sweat suit two sizes too big and tennis shoes that were far too large for her feet. Her own clothes were covered in mud and blood and smelled like burning flesh and kerosene. She didn’t know what time it was. “My eyes burned like I was still inside the burning plane. Everything was blurry and it hurt to keep them open.” Yet she was afraid to take out her contact lenses, because then she would be unable to see at all. “I needed some form of vision to make sure that things were real and not just a dream.” The night was hot and humid, and the dorm was not air-conditioned.
At last she went to the communal shower and took off her reeking clothes. While she stood under the cascading water, the adrenaline high faded, and the feeling of invincibility drained from her, leaving behind the reality of what had happened. She gave in to uncontrollable sobbing, as the carnage came rushing back, along with the realization of how close she had come to dying on that ordinary Wednesday afternoon.
Richard Swetnam, thirty-seven, was on vacation on his farm across the line in Nebraska. He had recently visited his family in Kansas City and attended his twentieth high school reunion there. Now he was spending a pleasant, if sweltering, day spreading gravel on his driveway. Late in the afternoon, Swetnam dumped one last load and returned to the house. His kids were watching cartoons on the TV. He stood behind them and saw Charles Kuralt interrupt the program with a news bulletin: a DC-10 had crashed at the Sioux City airport. Swetnam’s heart kicked into a canter. He thought the reporters were mixing up Sioux City and Sioux Falls. Then the phone rang. It was a friend calling to ask if he knew anything about the crash. Swetnam looked out the window and saw his neighbor’s truck coming up the drive. Like Swetnam, Brad Risinger was an air traffic controller. Swetnam put the phone down and hurried outside. When he approached the truck, Risinger said, “They’re going to need your help.”
“Lemme just get out of these filthy clothes,” Swetnam said, and ran back into the house. He kissed his kids good-bye and within a few minutes was seated in Risinger’s truck bouncing along the new gravel and out onto the narrow country road. Risinger had been an air traffic controller in the Army before he went to work for the FAA. He’d had experience with fatal accidents. Now he tried to give Swetnam an idea of what to expect. One thing was certain: the controllers who witnessed the crash would have to be relieved as soon as possible. As they headed north on Main Street and then northeast along 170th Street to U.S. Highway 20, Risinger snapped on the radio, and they heard the first rumors that someone may have survived the crash. The two air traffic controllers exchanged a skeptical look.
They reached the control tower at about 5:00. “You climb the stairs, you know,” Swetnam said to me, “and then as you round the corner on the stairs, you know, y-you look to the north and—” Air traffic controllers do not—must not—stutter. They speak clearly and precisely, and they talk fast. But when Swetnam told his tale, he was reduced to a barely coherent stammer, as he was thrust back into that deeply shaken state. “And, uh—and the, you know, there was still smoke—and there was just—just . . .” Words failed him, and he fell silent. “You know. Debris everywhere. And I-I, the one thing I-I remember—uh—was, ah, just. . . . You know, there was a little bit of a breeze, and there was just—ye—it’s amazing from one airplane how, how—much, ah, ah—it seemed to be tape or something. It just, it just, they were, it, they kinda shined in the sun, it was blowing. And-and-and it just it, it was, it was weird, you know, a-a-and it just, it was everywhere. You know and there was paper blowing and stuff like that, but I-I-I remember the—the tape.”
Swetnam took over the approach control position that Kevin Bachman had been working. Risinger took over local control for aircraft that were landing. Everything had been deathly quiet for a long time, “and then it got busy,” Swetnam said. “Helicopters were coming in from everywhere.” Even though the airport was closed, the emergency flights were allowed to operate. In addition, Swetnam’s position, covering the thirty or forty miles out from the airport, was flooded with requests from the news people who had rented all manner of aircraft. “Everybody in the world was flying in,” Swetnam said. “And everybody wanted to take pictures of the crash site before they landed.” The airspace was closed up to five thousand feet, but Swetnam couldn’t stop planes from flying over the field above that altitude. To avoid the possibility of another crash, he put the aircraft in holding patterns from five thousand feet up, with one thousand feet between the aircraft.
As the news organizations finished their work of documenting the scene from above, they began requesting that Swetnam direct them to airfields where they could land, “which was another problem, because some of the bigger planes required runways that we didn’t have. The other two airports around Sioux City are just for small airplanes.” Sioux City had runways that were long enough, but the airfield was closed. Handling a dozen aircraft at any one time, Swetnam began sending the smallest airplanes to nearby Martin Field, an airport for light planes. He had to send the larger planes thirty miles northeast to Le Mars or thirty miles northwest to Vermillion, South Dakota, where the runways were longer. Once he sat down to work, Swetnam recalled, “you forgot that an airplane just crashed here.” He handled one aircraft after another for an hour and a half, and then he rolled his chair back and took a breath. He looked around, “and all of a sudden, reality hit again, and you realize, Aw, yeah, we just had a crash here.”
The press planes were gone long before dark. That evening and into the night, only three planes arrived. One was the 727 that brought in the Go Team from United. It would later carry Charles Martz, Martha Conant, Rod Vetter, John Hatch, and other survivors who wanted to fly to Chicago. The Lear jet carrying the Go Team from General Electric landed around 9:30. The Go Team from the NTSB would arrive in the early morning hours.
By 10:00 that night, Swetnam said, “Everybody else was gone. I was the only one there.” After the departure of the United 727 the scene fell silent. Swetnam sat staring out the window at the grim vigil under the nearly full moon, the arc lights, as the sheriff’s police and Air National Guard stood watch over the scene. Swetnam had been too busy to feel or think until then, but now there was no escaping it. “They set up all these big floodlights to keep the place illuminated. And you know, you just have time to—to really think about things and-and-and that—yeah,” he said with a sigh. “And then, and then, you know that they didn’t move any of the bodies. So you know that there’s a-ah lot of dead people out there. And ah, and so, yeah, that-that was probably the first time for me that it affected me. You could see, you know, sheets out there, and you knew, you knew that the sheets were covering people.” It was probably two in the morning by his estimate before the Gulfstream carrying NTSB Go Team landed on Runway 31. And that was the end of Swetnam’s turn as the lone controller for Sioux City that night. A controller named Rod Hensel arrived to relieve him.
John Bates said of Hensel, “He was a good friend to every single one of us there at Sioux City.” The fact that everyone loved him made it doubly painful when, five days before the crash, Hensel’s four-year-old daughter had died suddenly of a fast-moving infection. He had been on funeral leave. Sioux City, however, is a small town, and the tower ran out of controllers. Hensel was called to duty. Bates said, “What happened to him was a crime. You can imagine what sitting there with [all those] bodies on the field was like.”
Bates had gone off duty from the control tower some time after nine o’clock. The temperature had fallen to 73 degrees, but the air was still humid as he crossed the parking lot toward his car. When he arrived home, all of his neighbors were out in the street with six packs of beer, waiting to greet him. As Bates spoke of this twenty-three years after the crash, he choked up and his voice cracked as he said, “It was one of the kindest things I ever saw.” Bates, though, gently urged his neighbors to go home, then he went inside, “and told my wife everything. Everything.” They stayed up late together, talking, and then Kevin Bachman called, weeping and saying it was all his fault. Bates spent the better part of two hours on the phone, trying to convince him that he had performed bravely and professionally. Neither Bates nor Bachman slept much that night. “All I could see in my head was the friggin’ plane crashing over and over again,” Bates said.
While Bates was replaying the crash for his wife, Mark Zielezinski, still in the control tower, “had to continue moving the traffic.” He was not relieved because he was technically management and not a controller on duty during the crash. Late that night, with Swetnam on duty, Zielezinski was able to go home at last. “The adrenaline was flowing so high,” Zielezinski recalled, “that when I got home, it was probably eleven o’clock that evening and at that point I finally came to the realization of what had happened.” And then he let go, and as Bachman and Bates and so many others had done, he wept.
Leo Miller, the Sheriff of Woodbury County, faced the daunting task of securing the scene for the night. The plane crashed in an inherently secure area, the surface of an airport. By late afternoon, the DCI—the Department of Criminal Investigation—had strung a bunting of yellow ribbon, emblazoned with the words Crime Scene, around everything, as if to cordon off heaven and hell alike. In addition, Miller decided to place a ring of protection around the crash site. He was concerned not only about people who might try to get into the crash site—reporters, looters, morbid curiosity seekers—but also about animals who might come to prey on the dead. “We also put a security net around the inside, around the wreckage itself,” he said. “It was quite difficult for two reasons. One, the amount of distance which it covered.” The debris was spread over more than thirty-five hundred feet of ground. Another difficulty was that bodies and parts of bodies, as well as pieces of the airplane, lay obscured in the corn. The sheriff ordered a combine brought in to cut a wide swath around the wrecked fuselage so that no person or animal could creep up on it without being seen.
In the hours after the crash, Chaplain Clapper had stayed at headquarters, talking to rescuers and fire fighters and lending a sympathetic ear to anyone who needed it. He listened to a fire fighter tell of a woman he had found strapped into her seat, screaming. When he cut the seat belt, she fell apart. She was being held together by the seat belt. She died at his feet.
As evening came on, he decided that he needed to go home, clean up, and “put on my uniform so they could see the cross.” Clapper hiked out to the road and stuck out his thumb. He said, “It wasn’t hard getting a ride. I think people were in a helping mood that day.” At home, he indulged in a big hug from Jody. The girls were already in bed, but he went in and kissed Laura and Jenna anyway. They had enjoyed Peter Pan in the theater at the Southern Hills Mall. Then Clapper showered, put on his chaplain’s uniform, said good-bye to his wife, and drove back to the base.
“I spent that night walking around the perimeter.” He saw police, FBI agents, and fire fighters sitting out on their equipment watching for flare-ups from the wreck. The pools of yellow illumination from the lights somehow made the shadows seem that much deeper. As Clapper moved around in moonlight and arc light, he said, “I found that when you’re keeping vigil with the dead, sometimes it can be a very emotionally noisy space.” He would stop and chat with anyone who wanted to talk, “and they’d start telling me what they saw.” In many cases, the crash brought back old traumas. The cops talked about bad road accidents. The fire fighters talked about their worst fires. Clapper spent nearly two hours with one member of his Guard unit. The man needed to talk about a child he had lost. “We carry all of our brokenness and our tragedy with us,” Clapper said. “And when you open the door on tragedy, perhaps because a new tragedy has come into your life, all those old tragedies start spilling out.”
On through the night he wandered among the dead and their attendants. And as a gray light bled into the eastern sky, Clapper strolled with one of the security guards in quiet contemplation. After a time, they came upon a section of the plane where bodies still occupied some of the seats inside. And in the long cables of newborn sun from the east, “I could see something that made me cry.”
“Hey, Chaplain,” said the security guard. “Are you okay?”
Clapper later said, “I guess that was the most okay thing I could do was cry. I had seen this large man. And he was embracing a young boy. Both dead. And to me, to catch that vision of love even at the moment of death was very powerful.”
Once the sun had risen, Clapper went back to his office and slept on the floor for two hours. Then he splashed water on his face, found a cup of coffee, and went out to the ramp, where Air National Guard men and women and fire fighters were preparing with teams of pathologists, photographers, scribes, and volunteers to document and remove the dead. They were boarding pickup trucks for the ride out to site. Clapper climbed into the bed of one of the trucks and said, “Unless there’s some objection, I just want to have a word of prayer before we start this.” No one in the subdued and exhausted crowd objected. After a short prayer, Clapper began, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” As he recited the twenty-third Psalm, he looked out over the crowd of workers and the destruction and chaos beyond, the torn metal, the scorched runways, and the rich land with all the people scattered there. And the chaplain saw, indeed, that “we were there, in the valley of the shadow of death.” His voice cracked during the recitation. At the time he was embarrassed, but later he said, “Maybe sometimes God’s word has to come through a cracking voice in this world.”