On February 24, 1989, United Airlines had enjoyed more than ten years without an accident. That day, Flight 811, a Boeing 747 jumbo jet bound from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Auckland, New Zealand, with 355 people on board, ended the streak of good luck. As the ship climbed out of twenty-two thousand feet, a forward cargo door on the starboard side of the plane blew off, ripping upward as it departed and tearing a hole the size of a garage door in the passenger compartment. The explosive decompression sucked nine passengers out. Within half an hour the Coast Guard cutter Cape Corwin was under way to the area to look for the passengers and debris, and more than a thousand people participated in the search during the next two days. The Coast Guard found two intact seats and assorted debris floating in the water, but those nine people were never found.
The last time United Airlines had lost a plane before that accident was on December 28, 1978. United Flight 173, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 scheduled to fly from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to Portland, Oregon, crashed into a wooded suburb six miles from the airport. The plane had a malfunction of the landing gear on approach. The captain began circling the area to make sure that the gear were down. Preoccupied with that, Captain Malburn “Buddy” A. McBroom, fifty-two, ignored his crew’s warnings that fuel was running low. When the engines began quitting, McBroom understood his mistake. The plane came down at the intersection of Northeast 157th Avenue and East Burnside Street, killing 10 people and seriously injuring 23 of the 189 passengers.
Those at United Airlines and the NTSB believed that the military backgrounds of most airline pilots at the time contributed to the crash. The captain of the ship was supreme, and the other members of the crew were expected to defer to him and keep their mouths shut. It was a maritime and military tradition going back hundreds if not thousands of years. This crash had a direct bearing on the fate of United Flight 232, because after the crash of United Flight 173, the NTSB recommended retraining flight crews in what came to be known as cockpit (or crew) resource management (CRM). United Airlines pioneered the training, in which captains were taught to listen to their crews, and the members of their crews were taught to be assertive if they thought that a hazardous condition was developing. United earned a reputation as one of the safest airlines and the company even trained the crews of other airlines. The CRM training was credited with helping the crew of Flight 811 out of Honolulu to return safely and with allowing the crew of Flight 232 to reach Sioux City, saving many lives. United Airlines helped to change the culture of the cockpit.
United also had another lasting influence on the industry. Before 1989, airlines were extremely averse to sharing information. When a plane crashed, airline employees were sent out to obscure the logos on the wrecked aircraft. (Some airlines still do this.) The airlines never talked to the NTSB, which was viewed as the enemy. And they certainly didn’t like to talk to the press.
When Flight 232 crashed, Rob Doughty, thirty-six, who was manager of external communications at United, was in London, helping to open up that territory to the company’s scheduled flights. British Airways gave him a courtesy flight home on the Concorde, the supersonic jetliner, and he was in Sioux City the next day. Doughty joined the United Go Team, and as he put it, he and James M. Guyette, a vice president at United, were “joined at the hip” for the next ten days. Guyette was the most senior person on the United Go Team. Some time before Flight 232, he “became concerned,” Doughty told me, “because we hadn’t had an accident in ten years, and the world had changed. Most notably, CNN would carry live footage of an accident almost as soon as it happened.” The days of painting out the logos and clamming up were over. “It was very different from the last time we’d had an accident,” said Doughty. Guyette realized that the Crisis Communications Plan for United Airlines was seriously out of date. He charged Doughty with revamping the company’s plan for how to respond when a plane crashed.
When Doughty was devising the plan, he sought help from the Air Force, which had a wealth of experience in dealing with crashes, and he consulted the chemical industry, which routinely dealt with fatal accidents. “But none of the other airlines would talk to me about it,” he said. In addition, at that time, executives from the airlines had no understanding of the NTSB and its work. At Guyette’s urging, Doughty broke ranks with the airline industry and called the public information officer at the NTSB. As a result of that conversation, Doughty wrote a white paper on how an airline ought to behave after a crash.
“It was very important,” Doughty said, “because it allowed us to anticipate things in a much more strategic fashion.” For example, it was widely known in the news business that the NTSB held a press conference every evening at six o’clock during an active investigation. In February of 1989 in Hawaii, when the new United Airlines Crisis Communications Plan was implemented for the first time, Doughty became the first public relations executive from an airline to attend one of those briefings.
“Previous to the Hawaii accident,” said Doughty, “the relationship between the NTSB and the airlines and the unions was very adversarial. Everybody was blaming everybody else and pointing the finger and so forth.” When responding to a crash, the NTSB, the pilots’ union, and the airline traditionally set up their headquarters as far away from one another as possible. But 1989 ushered in a new era. “Our communication strategy was to prove that, despite having an accident, we were still a safe airline.” The airline needed to be open about what was being learned that could prevent future accidents. In Hawaii, United set up its operations in the same hotel as the NTSB. “And we talked to them,” Doughty said, “which had never happened before,”
Until the 1980s, United had no concrete idea of what it wished to get across in its public communications. During its period of developing a new plan leading up to 1989, “I decided,” said Doughty, “why not do it the way you’d write a marketing plan or a communications plan, which starts with an objective. What is it you want to accomplish at the end of the day? And so I decided that our objective was to show that we are a safe airline and to reassure our passengers that we are safe to fly on.”
It worked. After the two accidents in 1989, United conducted market research and found that the public perception of the accidents was overwhelmingly the same: “It’s surprising it was United, they’re such a safe airline,” as Doughty put it. In fact, after the crash of United Flight 232, for the first time in history, bookings did not decline. While the ultimate taboo in the airline business had been any discussion of safety, United not only talked about it but also began promoting it. When Barbara Walters wanted to film a segment for the show 20/20 about the training of airline pilots, no one would talk to her. United agreed to cooperate, and the show became, in Doughty’s words, “a twenty-minute commercial for United Airlines.” In the end, United Airlines, especially in its response to the crash of 1819 Uniform, changed not only the way airlines dealt with accidents, but also the way in which they marketed their services. The most important change of all, though, was the training that Haynes and his crew had received in cockpit resource management. Without their concerted cooperation during the crisis, there might have been no survivors.
When Yisroel Brownstein was in the third grade, he was not doing so well in school. He now believes that he had a form of dyslexia. Whatever the cause of his poor grades, his father told him that if he improved his scores, he could fly to Philadelphia to visit his best friend, who had moved there. Yisroel worked hard, and his father redeemed some frequent-flyer miles and gave his nine-year-old son a ticket as promised. Yisroel’s parents saw him off with hugs and kisses in the boarding lounge in Denver, where they lived at the time. His father, an ultra-orthodox rabbi, gave him a prayer to say on the plane. It was a special prayer for travelers, meant to protect the boy. Yisroel entered the plane at exit 2-Left, stepping past Upton Rehnberg’s feet. He crossed over to the starboard aisle and paralleled Martha Conant’s path all the way back to the last row, where he took the aisle seat. Richard Howard Sudlow sat at the window. Sudlow was a marketing executive for a company in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and was on his way home from a business trip.
Yisroel had originally been assigned a seat in the front row of the coach cabin, but at the last minute, the Brownstein family was told that the boy had to sit in the last row. His father threw a fit at the gate, then his parents “got into a huge fight over whether or not they should change the seat,” Yisroel said. Their fighting made the already nervous child even more anxious. When he reached his seat at last, he was eager to say his traveling prayer so that he could be protected. He had rehearsed it with his father. He knew that he was supposed to wait until the plane had climbed above the clouds before saying it. Yisroel had been on an airplane once before, but he had been an infant at the time and had no recollection of it. He turned to Sudlow, whom he described as “a really sweet businessman,” and explained his predicament: he had a prayer to say and had no idea how to tell if the plane was above the clouds. Sudlow expressed a great interest in the prayer and even put his work down and took the time to learn the words of response from the nine-year-old boy in the yarmulke. After the plane took off and flew through a layer of clouds, the businessman and the child bowed their heads and recited the prayer together. Then they ate their lunch.
When the engine exploded behind his head, Yisroel went into a state of paralytic terror. The crash of United Flight 232 left him permanently scarred, not only physically but also emotionally. When I met him, he was a thirty-two-year-old psychologist who smoked Newport cigarettes—not quite chain-smoking—and talked rapidly and urgently about his experience. Heavyset and baby-faced under a black yarmulke, he wore torn black jeans. “And no one in my community would ever wear jeans,” he said. He wore his black hair spiked and had a generally edgy look about him that he said did not go over well in his ultra-orthodox Jewish milieu. He said that he was a born rebel. The crash had made him more so. When he was eighteen, he enlisted in the Israeli Army to annoy his father. The Israelis took one look at his medical records and threw him out.
Shortly after the engine exploded, Donna McGrady came down the aisle with a worried look on her face. She leaned across Yisroel to Sudlow and asked if he would be her door helper. The last exit on the starboard side, 4-Right, was directly behind Sudlow’s seat. Yisroel stood and they switched seats so that Sudlow was on the aisle. Yisroel was quaking with fear, and the view out the window made it worse. The prayer was not working. As soon as McGrady left, Sudlow tried showing Yisroel how to brace, but Yisroel found it impossible to concentrate. He was rigid with fear. He later said that his mind kept screaming, “Please stop! Please stop! Please stop! I had this sensation of begging on a psychological level.”
Although Sudlow had shown him how to brace, Yisroel could not help himself. When the order came from the cockpit and McGrady began screaming from her jump seat right behind them, “Brace! Brace! Brace!” Yisroel was unable to move. Sudlow said, “You have to brace, you have to brace. Remember what I showed you?” Yisroel could only squeeze his eyes shut and wait for death to take him. At the last moment, Sudlow took hold of Yisroel and shoved his upper body down to the floor, “and he put his body on top of mine,” Yisroel recalled. Sudlow lay on top of the child, crushing him, forcing him out of harm’s way. Then the crash began, and to Yisroel it seemed to go on forever. “It was probably a matter of seconds, but in my brain it was like an hour. I saw a lot of flame throughout.” The smell of burning foam rubber was forever imprinted in his emotional system. He said, “It’s the smell of like destroyed foam or something like maybe if somebody took it and scratched it for a long time and then you smelled it.”
During the crash, he remembered, “The first five seconds were insanely loud. The second five seconds, also. The last five seconds, I still remember hating the fact that we were rolling.” And then Yisroel leaned in toward me and whispered, “But it was silent. Almost like a comfort. But, oh, my God, we were still flying. We were still rolling.”
The quiet was replaced by a ripping sound, “almost like if you took, let’s say, like a snow plowing truck and take it onto this lawn and dig it into the grass and drive forward.” As he told me his story, we sat in my backyard in the month of May, surrounded by lush greenery, a profusion of red roses. “You know that like ripping sound of weeds. I’ll hear it, and I start shaking.”
Then everything stopped.
As Yisroel looked out from his position trapped beneath debris with Sudlow on top of him, he could see flames burning on the runway where fuel had been spilled. But the fire soon died down and flickered out.
Three seats away, Martha Conant unlatched her seat belt, dropped, and stepped out onto the moist earth. Susan and Dave Randa also rapidly freed themselves and emerged. Susan White was shouting, “Wiggle! Wiggle! Wiggle!” and dropping to the ground. The Air National Guard arrived and entered the tail to look for survivors.
Yisroel’s hearing began to return. A man was trying to save Sudlow, but the kind businessman’s back was broken, his internal organs crushed, his lungs filled with fluid. He had acted as a shock absorber for the boy. Yisroel was hollering his address and phone number over and over again. Soon he was lying in an ambulance alongside a woman who was dying.
“I was torn to pieces,” Yisroel said. “My right arm wasn’t connected besides one of the bones. My whole arm was off.” His skull was fractured in three places. His brain was hemorrhaging. On my patio, he took off his yarmulke and leaned over the wrought-iron table, “I still have a huge dent,” he said. He showed me a white gouge in his skull where hair no longer grew. In the hospital, the doctors were reluctant to put him under anesthesia for fear that he might lapse into a coma and never wake. But he survived, and two weeks later he and another boy were doing wheelies with their wheelchairs in the halls of the hospital.
“I do a lot of MMA,” he said, smoking his Newports as we sat drinking coffee. He meant mixed martial arts, the most violent and unrestrained form of boxing. Anything goes. “So I’m always, like, bruised and bleeding.” When I met him, his right cheekbone was scratched and bruised from taking a blow to the face. It was as if Yisroel had managed to find a pursuit that would re-create, in a small way, one of his most formative childhood experiences, from which he could eternally rise like a phoenix. He was mastering pain, agony, blood, injury. “Anytime I get clocked,” he said, “anytime I get hit in the face, I know exactly what it feels like. That’s probably similar to what I felt [in the crash].” His response reminded me of Tony Feeney jumping from a moving train.
Jason Henry, a lifeguard at a municipal swimming pool in Sioux City, spent the morning of July 20, 1989, lifting the dead off of Air National Guard trucks and carrying them into the refrigerated semitrailers. He had turned twenty in June. His boss had asked for volunteers to help with the crash. Henry had no idea what he was volunteering for, but he and his friend Brian Massey raised their hands. More than two decades after his experience, when Henry tried to describe the process, he choked up and could not speak for a time.
At one point, a pickup truck arrived and he and Massey lifted the body bag out of the bed. The driver told Henry, “Make sure those bags don’t get separated.” Henry looked down and saw a foot in a ziplock bag on top of the body bag.
While Henry, Massey, and other volunteers moved bodies throughout the morning, Brad Randall, Marliss DeJong, Lawrence Harrington, Gary Brown, and others were setting up the temporary morgue in the hangar. By noon the portable X-ray unit had arrived from Offutt Air Force Base, and soon the morgue was ready to begin operating. Out on the field by that time, most of the bodies had been removed, except those inside the fuselage, so Henry and Massey were recruited as “trackers.”
Herbek said, “Once the body entered our identification area,” meaning Hangar 252, “they were given a person, a volunteer with a file that was not to leave that body as it traveled through this whole process. We wanted to make sure we did not lose the file or get bodies mixed up in the process. . . . We called them trackers.”
Henry was given a yellow apron to identify him as a tracker and was ushered into the morgue. “That was a tough one,” he told me. Once again, he could not continue to talk for a time. He remembered finding himself standing at the head of a body bag, facing a maze of blue moveable dividers about six feet high. All morning he had been grateful that he had not seen what was inside those bags he’d been carrying. Now an investigator from the DCI, wearing a pale blue plastic Sanapron disposable apron, unzipped the body bag on the gurney before him to reveal a beautiful young woman with long straight blonde hair wearing jeans and a blouse. Thomas Randolph, seated on a four-step wooden ladder to one side, flashed a strobe to take a photograph of her, while the investigator, with rapid snips of surgical scissors, quickly cut off her clothes and tossed them aside. Stunned and shaken, Henry watched as a DCI agent took notes on a clipboard. Now before him Henry saw a beautiful figure, as in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, who appeared for all the world as if she might stand up and walk away, her perfect breasts gleaming in the harsh light, the concavity of her pelvis, the rounded slope of her shoulder suggesting incipient movement. The DCI investigators turned her over, looking for scars, tattoos, any identifiable feature, but she was perfect in every way. He saw not a scratch on her.
Some people later criticized the operators of the morgue for allowing someone as young and sensitive as Jason Henry to do that job. But people younger than that go to war. And Thomas Randolph, the photographer, was a DCI special agent who worked both in the crime lab and in homicide investigations as a member of the Crime Scene Investigation team. Yet a year and a half after the crash, he was suffering so severely from post-traumatic stress that he had to retire. His colleague, Robert Monserrate, told of Randolph having to help extract a mother and child from the burned fuselage. “We found them together still strapped to their seats hanging upside down,” said Monserrate. It was most likely Claudia Ellis, thirty-eight, and her eleven-year-old daughter Jaime Brines. After finishing with the recovery of bodies, Randolph worked as a photographer in the morgue, and when that job was done, he became a tracker. He followed the mother and daughter through the process of identification. “The death of that girl really upset Tom greatly,” said Monserrate, “as it did me. The difference was he never recovered after seeing her. Tom was on many psychological drugs delivered by several different psychiatrists. He tried working for Best Buy and Wal-Mart in their photo sections. I would see him sometimes when I would visit the stores but eventually stopped going to see him, because my presence would cause him great distress, since I would remind him of the crash.” Randolph continued to deteriorate and died in a nursing home at the age of sixty-four on October 21, 2005. “Sixteen years of torment came to an end,” said Monserrate.
As Henry tried to tell me about his own experience in the morgue that day, he broke down and wept and said, “I didn’t know it was still in there,” meaning the power of his memory of the youthful woman lying nude before him. Again, Randolph photographed the woman from his perch on the top step of the ladder, red trash cans with plastic liners on either side of him. Meanwhile, a DCI agent documented the dead woman’s clothing and personal effects, and then women in civilian clothes, wearing white aprons, put the property into a paper grocery sack, stapled it shut, and laid it on her gurney.
Henry remembered her body number as being 8 or else “in the single digits,” but the memory is probably wrong. Among the first ten body numbers, only two women were similar in age to the woman Henry saw: Priscilla Theroux, twenty-seven (who gave Tony Feeney her religious medal), and Connie Marie Kingsbury, thirty, bodies numbered 7 and 8. Kingsbury died of “severe skull and facial bone fractures,” according to the autopsy report. Other injuries included “multiple abrasions and contusions of body surfaces.” She also had a broken right arm and two broken hips. Her injuries would have been obvious. Theroux, too, died of so many injuries that Henry could not possibly have missed them. The next-nearest possible candidate, Elaine J. Asay, twenty-two, was body number 11, and she too had “severe abrasions over face and extremities,” as well as other injuries that Henry would have seen. Herbek and Randall said that the woman lying before Henry most likely suffered a broken neck or a wound to the head that was not visible beneath her hair. Heather Rose O’Mara, twenty-four, was a captain in the U.S. Army, a lawyer working as a prosecutor at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. She had dark wavy hair and thick dark eyebrows, so she was not the blonde Henry saw. In fact, no woman of the right age who died on that plane seems to fit Henry’s description. In the end, we can’t know who Henry accompanied through that mortuary maze. Call her Jane Doe then.
Technicians wheeled Jane deeper into the labyrinth of royal-blue partitions under the eerie high-intensity lights of Hangar 252. Surgical lights had been set up on tripods. Folding tables were scattered with papers, Diet Coke cans, fly swatters, coffee cups, and Apple computers and printers. Where folding tables could not be found, sheets of plywood had been laid across sawhorses to make more work space. Tall oscillating fans were blowing the air around, which had begun to smell strange, like a combination of fire and alcohol and something dark and forbidding, the bad breath of catastrophe. At the second station in the process of identification, Jane was subjected to a full-body X-ray. The films were whisked away to be processed. The machine would transform her beauty into ghostly skeletal images, which might reveal a broken bone that had healed years before, an implant, or some other identifiable feature of the anatomical figure that lay before the mystified boy. Henry was already confused by the process. Jane Doe was perfect, unscathed, so far as he could tell. Why not have her family identify her? But Henry was a volunteer. He was doing what he was told.
From the X-ray table, Jane was wheeled across the hangar to the enclosure where FBI technicians were taking fingerprints. They laid out small white paper plates such as might be used to serve cake at a birthday party. The plates were ranked in pairs, five sets on a table made of bare sheets of plywood on sawhorses flanked by buckets of cleanser, bottles of alcohol, and surgical scissors and tools, a puzzling array of devices, as Henry saw it, for what would seem a simple procedure.
As he watched, one of the agents wielded a pair of shears. They appeared to be for trimming trees but were in reality orthopedic clippers. The FBI technician lifted Jane’s delicate hand and proceeded to cut off the first joint of each finger. He placed each severed fingertip on a paper plate, ten fingertips on ten plates. Henry was speechless, quaking, his mind a blank as he watched. “You had a body that was recognizable and you’re making it less recognizable,” he said. “They cut all the fingertips off and then fingerprinted them and then put them into a ziplock bag, which goes back into the body bag.”
Randall later told me, “I know there was one of the guys in the fingerprint area that kind of developed a carpal-tunnel syndrome from snipping the fingers off all day long.”
Henry followed the gurney with his clipboard in hand and watched in growing horror, as an attendant wheeled Jane into the forensic dental area. With quick strokes of a scalpel, a dentist cut back Jane’s lips and sliced through her gums to reveal the bones of her face. He had to cut down to the bone, because the Stryker saw he was about to use could not cut flesh. “It looks like it’s rotating,” said Randall, “but it’s not. It’s just vibrating back and forth. It’s the same one that people use to take casts off of you. You can actually put it onto skin, and it won’t cut the skin.”
While a cameraman from the DCI videotaped the procedure, the dentist used the screaming Stryker saw to cut out Jane’s upper and lower jaws and remove them as if they were a set of dentures. The procedure is called a Le Fort osteotomy. An assistant then brushed Jane’s bloody teeth with a toothbrush, and the dentist put her jaws into a ziplock bag with a numbered tag and put the bag on a table made of plywood and sawhorses. He placed the bag in a row with many other similar bags containing the jaws of other people, each bag clipped to a printed sheet headed “Record of Dental Examination at Autopsy.”
E. Steven Smith, the forensic dentist from Northwestern University, had suggested that identifying everyone by dental X-rays would be the fastest and most foolproof approach. Herbek, Bennett, and Randall agreed. Once the dentists had cut out someone’s jaws, technicians would make an X-ray. As the families sent the ante-mortem dental X-rays to Sioux City, they would be logged into the computer, and records would be made. The real test, however, came when a dentist laid one piece of film over the other and looked at them against a light. Fillings, crowns, and other restorations would match perfectly. Anyone who had gone to the dentist regularly was immediately identifiable. And most people who can afford to fly can afford to see a dentist.
By the middle of that first afternoon, in the chaos of the morgue, someone had realized how young and inexperienced Jason Henry was—a mere boy thrust into this gruesome duty. He’d served as a tracker for just one body, but he was released. He didn’t remember much about the bus ride back to the municipal swimming pool. He was in shock and recalled sitting in the bath house with his friend, Brian Massey, “crying a bit and just staring ahead.” He began having nightmares about being in plane crashes after that. He had trouble sleeping. He travels for his work with Dow Corning now, “and there isn’t a time that goes by when I get on a plane that I don’t think about that.” He has seen with his own eyes the consequences of carelessness in the serious matter of powered flight. Yet he said, “If the same situation came up and I had to do it over again, I would. I don’t regret doing it at all.”*
* Numerous other lifeguards worked in the morgue as well.