MacIntosh and Benzon and Wizniak, along with William Thompson of GE, quickly developed an idea of what might have happened to 1819 Uniform. They were not sure yet and would not publicize the idea, but they would talk about it among themselves. More than anything, this idea seemed the only possible explanation for the events that they knew had occurred: a big bang as fan disk 00385 departed, followed by a complete loss of hydraulics less than two minutes later. By the Friday after the crash, if not sooner, the investigators were contemplating this scenario: United Flight 232 had been cruising blandly along on autopilot at thirty-seven thousand feet when something made that disk burst. The seven-foot number one fan broke into two big pieces, as Wizniak had seen from the witness marks on the containment ring. In addition to the two big pieces, that explosion also unleashed a sleeting storm of other metal parts. Given that the disk had burst above and behind the heads of Martha Conant, Yisroel Brownstein, Dave Randa, and John Hatch, they and the other passengers seated in the tail were lucky they weren’t hit by flying debris—or worse. In November of 1973, the number three engine on the right wing of another DC-10 had exploded at cruise altitude. A fragment hit a window and broke it. The passenger seated next to that window was sucked out as the aircraft depressurized. He was never seen again.
When the DC-10 was being designed, McDonnell Douglas assured the FAA that the possibility of an engine exploding and disabling the flight controls was, in the words of FAA Advisory Circular 25.1309-1, “extremely improbable.” As Gilbert Thompson of the FAA explained it, that means “a failure condition that is not expected to occur over the entire life of an airplane type, total number of airplanes.” The FAA and the industry even put a number on it: one in a billion. And indeed, modern jet airliners are reliable, yet it was already known at that time that some jet engines would inevitably explode.
In the hours and days after the crash, as Wizniak studied the number two engine lying sadly on the ground with its front fan missing, he was aware that smaller disks made of titanium, compressor disks, had failed catastrophically in the past. General Electric must therefore have known that it was likely that the big disk on the front of the engine might fail one day. In any event, the federal regulation known as 14 CFR 25.901 states, “No single failure [of a power plant] or malfunction or probable combination of failures will jeopardize the safe operation of the airplane.” The CF6 engine known by serial number 451-243 missed adhering to that rule by a fairly wide margin. On the other hand, it was not the engine that ultimately led to the crash. The DC-10 itself, not its power plants, had to have a deeper flaw to bring down the whole craft. In spelling out “special conditions” for granting McDonnell Douglas certification for the DC-10, the FAA wrote, “Probable malfunctions must have only minor effects on control system operation and must be capable of being readily counteracted by the pilot.”
Captain D. B. Robinson of the Air Line Pilots Association would later write to the NTSB, “This accident was never supposed to have happened.” The accident, he said, “contradicts the design philosophy under which the DC-10, B-747, and L-1011 were predicated and certificated by the FAA.” In addition, the FAA had recommended shielding hydraulic lines specifically because rotating parts were known to burst. MacIntosh, Benzon, Wizniak, and others now suspected that some of the parts that were liberated when the disk burst had gone through the tail and had cut the hydraulic lines. It would take a team effort and more than a year to prove that idea.
Now some two hundred people from various agencies were supporting that team effort, scattering all over Siouxland to accomplish the tasks that would ultimately contribute to the final report about the accident. Some were at the hospital interviewing passengers and members of the crew. Others had gone to the dormitory at Briar Cliff College to interview survivors there. Yet others had gone to Jan Brown’s hotel room to interview her. Some of the investigators had begun to review the tape recordings of transmissions to and from the control tower, while others searched through the maintenance records kept by United Airlines. In addition to the NTSB, the FAA had numerous people working the crash, along with many other organizations already mentioned.
Some of them were walking up and down the airfield along the path of destruction and were beginning to find pieces of hydraulic tubing that might provide evidence concerning the hunch that Wizniak and others had. The stainless-steel lines appeared to have been sliced, but the investigators needed harder evidence. Since they were investigating a Crowd Killer, it wasn’t good enough to stand out in a cornfield eye-balling the part and venture a guess.
Benzon told me that the NTSB wasn’t in the business of proving what had happened. “Probable cause is our goal,” he said. And yet the Board’s meticulous work would look like proof to most people. MacIntosh, in his role as investigator in charge, felt personally responsible for amassing mountains of evidence. John C. Clark, an investigator who would play a vital role on the team, said, “I was impressed with MacIntosh. He knew how to run a good investigation and knew a lot about all of the disciplines. He would keep the various groups integrated and keep the parties in line.”
Looking over the wreckage on Thursday and Friday, then, MacIntosh hit upon one step he could take in the process of clearly demonstrating the cause of this crash. He decided that he and his team would find all the parts they needed and then reassemble the tail. “There was a great reluctance,” he said. “Not too many people were really interested in putting the tail section up.” They thought they could determine all the trajectories using mathematics. But, said MacIntosh, “I was Mr. Nasty and said, Hey, we’ve got enough stuff here that we ought to be able to reconstruct that.” United supported him, since that company viewed itself as the victim. “GE and Douglas were a little more reluctant to do that,” he said, since it was their engine and airplane that had failed. United enlisted its Heavy Maintenance Group from San Francisco. MacIntosh arranged with Lawrence Harrington to acquire cranes to lift the tail. The team removed all the pieces of the tail from the airfield to a hangar and began putting the puzzle together to see what it showed.
MacIntosh, Benzon, Wizniak, Gregory Phillips, the chairman of the Systems Group, and others were hoping that this would answer the question of how the plane had lost all of its hydraulic fluid. However, the biggest concern gnawing at John Moehring of GE, as well as the NTSB investigators, was how and why that fan disk came apart in the first place. A piece of the plane could have broken off to be sucked into the engine. A mechanic could have left a tool inside the engine. Or a quirk of the titanium metal itself may have betrayed them all. To know the answer, they had to find the disk, which lay in pieces somewhere in the sea of corn and soybeans that is the state of Iowa. There had to be some way to reduce that area to a reasonable size for a concerted search to be conducted.
While Jan Murray, the first class flight attendant, hung upside down in the burning wreckage, trying to pry the harness latch from underneath her ribs, her father Don was fishing with a friend on a lake in South Carolina. As his friend watched in alarm, Don Murray turned white and said, “We’ve got to go home. Something’s wrong with Jan.” He put away his fishing gear and hurried to shore. When he arrived home, he saw a crowd of people at his house. His heart sank. He rushed inside.
“I just heard from Jan,” said his wife Jane. “Everything’s okay. There’s been a plane crash, and she was on it.” They knew their daughter was alive, but they did not yet know her condition.
Jan Murray, too, had had a premonition. The night before the crash, she had been flying to Philadelphia and was seized by an overwhelming sense of loss and separation from her family. She couldn’t explain it. She loved her job and her traveling way of life, but that night she felt so desperately homesick that she called her aunt and uncle when she reached her hotel room. During the next day’s flight, she was behind the bulkhead working with the equipment to start the in-flight movie, when she broke down weeping for no apparent reason. “It was just this lonely separation, and it was from my mother, and it was a feeling that I’m not going to see her again. I just broke down in tears. I gathered myself together before I came from behind the partition, but that was so unlike me.”
Now in the hospital, she understood her premonition. She also learned that she had broken her arm and several ribs. Wearing a cast, she stayed in a hotel that night with Donna McGrady as her roommate. She wandered aimlessly through the hotel, unable to sleep. She stumbled into the conference room where Jan Brown had seen the chart with “the other Jan Brown’s” name on it. “Even though I was in shock and nothing was really going in or out,” said Murray, “I remember that being very upsetting.”
In fact, she was in a state of shock for a long time after returning home. “I talked about it constantly, relived it constantly. You think about it constantly and you talk-talk-talk, and you probably wear your friends and family out about it. It’s all you—it-it-it—it took over my thoughts. I just remember reliving, I guess, the acute part of the crash a lot, reliving the impact.” She tried to return to her life, but “everything was exaggerated. It’s like, things that we go through life, day in and day out, and sort of take for granted were just all huge.” Her voice broke as she said, “It was like, just, you know, a tree was beautiful.” And then she laughed and cried at the same time, overwhelmed by the vision she had, as if a gauze curtain had always hung between her and the world, and the crash had ripped it away. “It was like everything was so, so saturated, and . . .” And she trailed off to nothing. She found herself going through the motions, almost robotically, “for a good year,” she said. “I wanted my life back as it was—I thought. I wanted to be innocent Jan Murray again, and I wanted to go back, because I loved my job—I loved it! And I loved the lifestyle. And I wanted it back. Like it was.”
She went to therapy, and after about eighteen months, she returned to work. One of her best friends joined her on her first flight. “I was apprehensive, but I was determined.” Yet she quickly discovered that any mechanical trouble with an airplane, any trivial hitch in her routine, would throw her into a panic. The last straw came in Newark, New Jersey, when she was about to fly on a Boeing 727. Although it was a terrific plane with flight controls that could revert to manual operation if the hydraulic systems failed, it had an engine through the tail, and for Murray that was reminiscent of the DC-10. As the catering crew brought the meals on board, one of them mentioned that there appeared to be fan blades missing from the number two engine, the one that was mounted through the tail. The flight was delayed while mechanics examined the power plant. United switched planes, “but that was the end of my career,” Murray said. “That was the day that it was clear to me that I was not going to fly anymore. I wasn’t the same person.” She went back to school to renew her certification as a registered nurse. “I knew that I was going to have to make a different path in life.”
She continued, “The biggest impact the crash had on me is I am so claustrophobic that I won’t ride elevators, I won’t fly, and that stays with me.” To this day, if the right stimulus is present, Murray can go back there in an instant, into the middle of that wild slamming catastrophe. “It’s not like I dwell on it on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “From the get-go, I tried to just grab the good out of it. I mean, you gotta grab the good.” While acknowledging how devastating this was for others, she said, “I tried to see that maybe this was playing into me having a different path in life.” When she was flying, she had no time for anything else. During that time of frenetic travel, her best friend knew the man she thought would be a good match for Murray. Her friend kept saying, “When you’re ready for the right person, I know who he is.” Murray paid no attention. Once she realized that she could no longer fly, however, she took the time to meet him in 1993. They married in 1994. They have two boys, John and Hayden. She believes that if she had continued to fly, she never would have had that family. “I think I was left here to be a mom for these boys.”
The plane crashed on Wednesday. On Friday an attorney named Philip H. Corboy filed the first lawsuit on behalf of Joseph Trombello in Cook County Circuit Court, naming United Airlines, General Electric, and McDonnell Douglas. The lawsuit alleged that United was negligent in its maintenance, that GE built a flawed engine, and that McDonnell Douglas manufactured a poorly designed airplane. Many more lawsuits would be filed in the coming weeks and months, and many would make similar allegations. But because of the curious nature of aviation litigation, no proof of those allegations would ever be made available to the public.
David Rapoport, who represented the three members of the cockpit crew and a number of flight attendants, told me that “The issues of fault were fully worked up and by that I mean there were exchanges of documents by all parties that were sued. There were expert witnesses disclosed and deposed. And much of the material that was generated in that several-year-old, multi-headed series of cases is under protective order that remains in place.” In other words, General Electric, United Airlines, and McDonnell Douglas succeeded in convincing a court to keep all the evidence secret, even while they paid out millions of dollars to the victims to head off potential trials that would expose all the evidence in a public court of law.
Although the NTSB would amass thousands of pages of evidence and testimony in the months and years after the crash, none of it would be aimed at assigning blame. “At NTSB hearings,” Rapoport wrote in a scholarly paper, “questions directed to issues of fault and liability are not even permitted.” In fact, at the time of the lawsuits arising from the crash of United Flight 232, it was common practice for defendants to insist on an order of protection before they would produce any documents at all in discovery proceedings.
Today, said Rapoport, “the many depositions, the thousands of pages of documents that included many things in addition to what were in the public docket from the NTSB, are all still under protective order. My opinion is that there are important things that haven’t made it to the public domain.” Treading a fine line between telling the whole story and breaking the law, he added, “I think I could make the general comment that there was much information developed in the private litigation implicating relative degrees of culpability” of all major defendants. I suggested to Rapoport that McDonnell Douglas was at fault for designing an airplane with serious deficiencies, that General Electric was at fault for building a defective fan disk, and that United Airlines was at fault for missing the defect in its final inspection of the disk. “Does that ring true?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I think you have the right cast of characters.” Although the investigators did not know it when that first lawsuit was filed, a mechanic had not left a tool in the engine to cause the explosion. Nor had a piece of the plane broken off to be sucked into the number two engine. The fan disk itself was defective and exploded, initiating the sequence of events that caused the crash.
Rapoport, who as a plaintiff’s attorney had every reason to want to assign blame, said, “My way of thinking about it would place no or minimal culpability on” the man who last inspected 00385. “Because I believe the entire system of inspection was flawed. I am not convinced that he was asleep on the job. I do recall that plenty of energy went into blaming the airline.” And indeed, in its findings of probable cause, the NTSB in effect blamed United Airlines.
The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the inadequate consideration given to human factors limitations in the inspection and quality control procedures used by United Airlines’ engine overhaul facility which resulted in the failure to detect a fatigue crack originating from a previously undetected metallurgical defect located in a critical area of the stage 1 fan disk that was manufactured by General Electric Aircraft Engines. The subsequent catastrophic disintegration of the disk resulted in the liberation of debris in a pattern of distribution and with energy levels that exceeded the level of protection provided by design features of the hydraulic systems that operate the DC-10’s flight controls.
It’s difficult to know what that statement means. It seems almost deliberately murky. And indeed, the NTSB not only investigates, but also negotiates with the parties involved, those companies for which a great deal of money is at stake.
Rapoport concluded, “I would say that the engine was sold with inadequate instructions for use in order to ferret out dangers that the manufacturer either knew of or should have known about.”
An aeronautical engineer who had worked in flight testing with Boeing in his early years, Richard F. Schaden went into law and for thirty years tried cases involving airplane crashes, both military and civilian. After 1819 Uniform crashed, he represented Brad Griffin, among others. “It was unique in that we knew the crash was going to happen close to a half hour before it did happen,” he said. “So from a lawyer’s standpoint, you have all that anticipation of disaster. . . . The intervening mental anguish was the big legal issue.”
But, he said, of primary concern to him was the faulty design of the DC-10. A faulty GE engine could have blown up on other jumbo jets and might not have caused a crash, as was the case with the L-1011 departing Newark. Schaden flies the Falcon 900 EX business jet, which is a three-engine system like the one on the DC-10. “The basic configuration, I think, is a good design,” he said. “The issue of having all the hydraulic systems go through one location where there’s a single point of failure—that was the biggest design issue. . . . It was a lack-of-redundancy problem. It was a lack of failure analysis at the time of the design. The DC-10 is the only [plane] that I know that would have [the hydraulic lines] in that location where they were so vulnerable.”
About the failure to find a defect that might have caused the fan to fracture—whatever that defect might have been—Schaden said, “The method used for inspecting [the metal] was pretty weak at that time, the nondestructive testing they used. Titanium as a metal doesn’t really exist. It was a manufactured metal, and the manufacturing process was not controlled very well. The titanium billets that were made back in those days are pretty much all in golf clubs now. Just so they could get rid of most of that defective titanium. There was just so much of it around, and it was expensive to make.”
Schaden’s strategy for litigating his cases for United Flight 232 was to avoid the federal court system and what he referred to as “kind of a bad food fight.” There was ample opportunity to make money, and “everybody started jumping in the business back in those days.” Lawyers retired on the money they made on 1819 Uniform. He completely sidestepped that process, filing his lawsuits in the city court in downtown St. Louis because that’s where the corporate offices of McDonnell Douglas were. “That allowed me to get a more effective jury for my clients as a plaintiff’s lawyer and also to stay out of the food fight of the multi-district litigation.” The defendants tried without success to kick him out of courts in St. Louis and force him into the federal courts. “We had pretty much an all-minority jury in an inner-city venue in downtown St. Louis,” he explained. “And that was the last thing that the industry wanted. Federal court juries tend to be much more conservative. They tend to be suburban, because they can draw from a large geographical area.”
Schaden said, “When I stood up to make an opening statement, they settled all the cases.”
Jason Henry, the young lifeguard who worked in the morgue, was not the only person who was made uneasy by the methods used in identifying the bodies. “As we first got started,” Brad Randall said, “a funeral director representative came up to us just in a panic, because we had sat down with Steven Smith and his colleagues, and we’d decided we were going to take the jaws out of everybody. And she [the funeral director] was just aghast.” In her profession, she was ordinarily in the business of making people look better, not worse. Even one of the young forensic dentists questioned the need to remove all jaws and fingers. He went on in his career to help develop methods of identifying people by their teeth that did not disfigure the dead and would allow for an open coffin at the funeral. The fact that dentists removed the jaws of perfectly intact and viewable victims gave forensic dentistry a bad name for a number of years after that crash. And that scandal encouraged the development of new techniques. At the time of the crash, performing forensic dentistry on one person was not an easy task. Trying to identify more than a hundred dead people was daunting indeed. “Unclenching a dead person’s jaw is extremely difficult,” Randall said. “And it’s a good way to break teeth and that sort of thing.” However, techniques are available today that allow the mouth to be propped open and a digital X-ray taken without any disfigurement. Also, FBI technicians no longer routinely cut people’s fingers off to obtain fingerprints.
Marliss DeJong and numerous others defended the practice of removing jaws and fingers, saying that it was the fastest and most foolproof way to identify someone. “When you have all these families saying I want my family member, you want to process them as fast as you can,” she said. “And you cannot make a mistake.” If they mixed up one identity, they would automatically have two that were wrong, and the entire process would fall into question. Indeed, the Omaha daily newspaper ran a headline three days after the crash saying, “Iowa Examiner Slow but Sure in Identification of Jet Victims.”
Randall said, “Yes, we could have gotten by without doing that. It would have slowed things down and made it a lot more difficult for charting and X-ray. And we just decided that the cosmetics that were lost doing that were worth the increased accuracy we were going to get. And the families were more concerned about a rapid identification than having a body slightly disfigured.”
After a body had been put through the stages of the process for identification, either it was returned to a refrigerated truck to await autopsy, or if a pathologist was available, it was sent directly to the table. At one point on Friday, nearly three dozen people were simultaneously operating the X-ray, fingerprint, dental, autopsy, and embalming areas of the big partitioned-off postmortem room, amid garbage pails and buckets used for fluids. Pathologists worked with their scrubs soaked in sweat, while others took photographs or made videotapes of the proceedings. Some wore flowered aprons that were clearly meant for a cheerful kitchen, presumably because the morgue had run out of surgical aprons. Many others wore jeans and golf shirts.
When a plane crashed, the medical examiner was required by law to autopsy only the flight crew. The pilots of Flight 232, of course, were alive. Nevertheless, Herbek, Randall, and Bennett decided to autopsy all of the dead. Randall said, “They were real quick and dirty autopsies. We were just opening them up, looking for trauma, looking for horribly obvious natural disease, and that was it.” When an autopsy was completed, the body was moved across the hangar to the area where morticians and funeral directors waited with stainless-steel tables, “and they [the bodies] were immediately embalmed,” Herbek explained. “And again, the trackers were with these people the whole time.”
Patricia Collins, a forty-eight-year-old mother of four and a homemaker, worked part time as a switchboard operator in a local office building in Sioux City. She volunteered, as Jason Henry did, not knowing what might be asked of her. But her experience could not have been more of a contrast to Henry’s. She said that the faces of most of the bodies she processed during her two days as a tracker in the morgue were covered with a black substance that Herbek believed to be the oily soot produced by imperfectly burned jet fuel. A member of her team would dip a cloth into solvent and scrub the faces clean before Thomas Randolph, sitting on a folded white towel on the wooden ladder, photographed them. If the clothes weren’t already burned off, they were snipped off with scissors. Collins stood at the head of the body, as Jason had done with Jane Doe, while a DCI agent recorded any pertinent information, such as possessions, tattoos, and identifying marks or scars, as the team turned the body over for examination. The team catalogued anything the person was wearing, such as earrings, rings, watches, necklaces, even the change in their pockets. “No matter what was in the pockets—it could have been a toothpick, it could have been a screw—everything was taken and put into the sack for the family.” Then the brown-paper grocery sack was labeled with the body number. Kenneth Berger, for example. His wallet held a Sears credit card, a Maas Brothers card, and a card for The Athletic Club. Fragments of his skull were placed, like broken crockery, in a ziplock bag.
Collins still carries the memory of a nine-year-old girl who came under the cameras. The only nine-year-old girl who died in the crash was Cynthia Myers. Collins may have been wrong about the age, but the girl she attended could not have been Cynthia Myers, who died of smoke inhalation and would have therefore been badly burned, according to Randall. She had been in seat 24-C. It was a bad place to be. The portside ceiling collapsed starting at about row 22 and going back through row 28, and some of the people in those seats were trapped, though alive. Cynthia Myers had blood carbon monoxide saturation of 70 percent and would not have been able to escape the fire.
Like the Venus attended by Jason Henry, the little girl Collins saw was perfect. “She was our son’s age,” Collins said, “and she had on the same Nike tight biking shorts that he wore. They were black with a blue and white stripe up the side of the leg. And they were kind of Spandex, kind of tight fitting. And every other fingernail was painted blue like a little kid would do.” The girl was striking, because like Jane Doe, she seemed completely uninjured. She was barefoot. Her dark-brown hair was shoulder length. She wore two braided string friendship bracelets. “Beautiful, beautiful girl. Just a beautiful little girl that you or I would love to take home,” said Collins. That face was still rising up before Collins more than two decades after the crash.
“And then the gums and the entire teeth [were] sawed out,” Collins said. “That was put into a plastic bag. After they did the jaw and the teeth were extracted, then they went into another area, which I did not watch, but they took all the fingertips.” Fingerprints were actually taken first: “And then from there, the body went into a holding area. My [identifying] sheet was attached to the bag, and the body parts were put into the bag, the bag was zipped and [wheeled] into an embalming area, and they were laid just right in a file—one, two, three, four, five—right down the rows.”
She said that what impressed her most was the respect with which she felt the bodies were treated. “There was very, very little talking. We treated these bodies like it was our mother or our father. One of the bodies came in, and there was a cricket on it. And so I didn’t say anything but I pointed to one of the helpers and I just kind of shook my head, and they went and took that cricket off. We had utmost respect for the bodies.”
Robert Monserrate of the DCI also worked in the morgue and said nearly the same words. At the prayer service for the first anniversary of the crash, a man and his son approached Monserrate and asked how the investigators knew that the badly burned body the family had received in a casket was the boy’s mother, the man’s wife. “We sat down at one of the tables and I told him how we recovered the bodies from the runway, the plane. How we transported the remains to the morgue, how we photographed the bodies, looked for any identifiable marks or jewelry, how we did the dental [identification], X-rays, fingerprints and such. How we had the utmost respect for all their loved ones, how we assigned a person to follow their loved one through the identification process and how there was no question in my mind as to our accuracy in identifying everyone.”
After accompanying five bodies on the day after the crash, Collins threw away her gloves, washed her hands, and sat idle in a separate room. “We did five bodies. Then we would take a forty-five-minute break. Five bodies, forty-five-minute break. And I did this for two days.” She said everyone in the break room was contemplative and sad. “We felt that we were fulfilling a mission, felt that we were doing good, but it was a very sad time. And we smelled. The bodies that came in, they reeked with jet fuel. The bodies had not started to decay, but the odor from the jet fuel was horrible.”
Collins said that working in the morgue, seeing the gruesome things she saw, caused no psychological trauma in the long run. Her husband Dick was in the Air National Guard, and he worked on a search team looking for bodies in the cornfields. At home in the evenings, they showered to try to rid themselves of the smell and then sat talking quietly together, sharing their experiences from the day. They became each other’s psychological counselors. They sought no outside help and had no ongoing emotional troubles. She attributes this in part to her Christian faith and in part to the sense of a sacred mission that she felt in her work. “When they got done,” she said of the morticians, “they would fold the people’s hands over their stomachs. Everything was done very, very tactfully and very—really, devoutly. I’m a pretty strong Christian, and there’s a lot of things about this that are so beautiful of the respect for the human body, and we did that to the fullest.”
J. Kenneth Berkemier, a funeral director from Sioux City, helped in that process. He rolled his eyes when he contemplated the volumes of paperwork that needed to be completed. He was sixty-one at the time of the crash and owned a cemetery as well as a mortuary business. He dealt with many bodies in his career, but never so many all at once. “We had a staff of funeral directors,” he said, “funeral directors’ wives, funeral directors’ mothers,” and here he laughed. He had thinning brown hair in a dramatic comb-over and wore oversized glasses and a suit and tie that made him look very much the picture of a funeral director. He said they recruited “anyone who would be familiar with the technicalities of death certificates, burial permits, transit permits, cremation permits, all the necessary things that had to be done before that body could go out. And those things all had to be produced and double-checked last minute.” Those documents then had to be put with the shipping papers and sent out to the location on the airfield where the body was placed in a casket. Although all the workers in the morgue were dressed in the most casual way, the funeral directors wore suits in the July heat out of respect for the dead. They drove the bodies one by one in hearses. The first bodies were recovered from the field on Thursday, July 20. By Sunday, all but three of the dead had been identified. Those three were identified on Monday.
As Patricia Collins and her team brought bodies to him, Berkemier dispatched them for embalming. Burned bodies were placed in a container called a Ziegler case, which is a casket of 20 gauge steel with a channel gasket in the lid that allows it to be hermetically sealed against the smell that Margo Crain and others would never forget. The Ziegler case was put inside a conventional casket, “and in this instance, we used sealed caskets also,” Berkemier said, “so those bodies were double sealed.” The casket was placed in a shipping case, all of the paperwork attached, and then the body was either flown directly out of Sioux City or transported by hearse to Omaha, Nebraska, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for shipping home to the family.
Collins said that she wanted to make sure that the families of those who lost their lives in the wreck of 1819 Uniform would “realize that we took the best care of their people. I did it joyfully and sadfully. I was very happy to do it, but it was a very sad thing. It was a sad day, a very sad day. And it was very humbling, and it’s a day I’ll never forget.”
Monserrate said that having the opportunity to explain to the father and son what had become of the wife and mother was therapeutic for him as well. “I know that he was very happy to learn the facts of what we did and how we took care of their loved ones. What he did not know was how much he really helped me and met my need to know that we made a difference and helped bring closure to families that lost loved ones out there.”
Ellen and Adrienne Badis were on their way home from Honolulu to the East Coast by way of Denver and Chicago. Ellen was about to turn thirty-six, and Adrienne had recently turned forty. They traveled with their two children, Eric, six, and Aaron, two and a half. Ellen wore a pale-blue sleeveless sundress, and Adrienne wore a striped dress shirt and black slacks. Ellen was thin and pretty with light brown hair. Dark and round-faced, Adrienne looked the Filipino he was. The couple doted on their two boys. Before they left for the Honolulu airport, they posed for a portrait wearing leis of pink flowers with the sunlit sea behind them. Ellen wore a small lei as a headband.
When they arrived at the terminal, they discovered that their plane had mechanical trouble and was not going to take off. By the time they arrived in Denver the next morning, most of the eastbound flights were fully booked. The only seats available were on United Flight 232. Moreover, the seats weren’t together. Ellen and Aaron wound up in B-Zone, while Adrienne and Eric were in C-Zone. Eric had been given 23-G, and Adrienne was supposed to be seated in row 28. Hoping for the best, Adrienne led Eric back to row 28 and sat in the vacant seat beside him, 28-F. When Jerry Schemmel arrived, annoyed to see someone in his seat, Adrienne asked, “Do you have 28-F?”
Trying not to let all the frustration show from his long morning of delays, Schemmel said yes, it was his seat.
“This is my son,” Adrienne said. “He’s supposed to be in 23-G. We’d like to sit together. Would you mind taking 23-G? It’s an aisle seat.”
“Sure,” said Schemmel. “No problem.” He trudged forward to take Eric’s seat, and probably saved the boy’s life by doing so.
Eleven rows ahead of her husband, Ellen was concerned that her fidgety two-year-old was bothering Pete Wernick and his wife Joan. She switched seats with Aaron. When the engine blew, Ellen told me, “It was the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, still to this day.” Although the plane climbed right after the explosion, her perception was that it “just nose-dived,” as she put it.* “We immediately went down a mile, five thousand feet. And I thought that was it, we were all going, we were going to crash. And I started praying.” Ellen broke down weeping, almost unable to get the next few words out. “And then he gained control of the plane.” She gasped for breath, reliving the terrible moment, as she said, “and we leveled off . . .” Joan Wernick tried to reassure Ellen, telling her that planes can fly with two engines or even with only one. As Ellen watched the flight attendants telling mothers to put their children on the floor, she silently gave thanks that she and her husband had bought tickets for their children. She put a pillow beneath Aaron’s seatbelt, and Aaron almost immediately fell asleep with gum in his mouth. As the plane neared Sioux City, Sharon Bayless, sitting across the aisle, leaned over and suggested that Ellen remove Aaron’s gum.
“I felt terrible that I’d left gum in his mouth,” Ellen said. “He was asleep and he’s a child and a toddler at that.” As she described to me what happened next, her voice became a low growl, as if she were struggling to push the words out, and those words became almost like a sad lamenting song. “I went down as far as I could and, and, and braced, and when we hit, I just, ah, said, oh, the sound is just more that you’ll never forget, the sound of metal shrieking and of earth and dirt and the smell of the, of the rubber, and the, the, the fumes and the, um, it’s just, uh, something we’ll never forget, but, ah . . . And it was just so long. Just, it was just terrible. So I said, ‘Oh, gosh. We—have—crashed,’ you know. And then, and then—there was this . . . smooth . . . No more noise!” Here Ellen’s voice became almost jubilant. “It was . . . I, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, my gosh, if this is—I’m going to heaven! This is—if this is it, then this is wonderful!’ And then it came back again—the noise, the same noise. And it went on, and it seemed to go on and on and aw, I just could not, aw! I—and then after that—” Ellen’s voice collapsed in on itself, as she ran out of words. She said she thought she might have lost consciousness in her seat.
Her next memory was the sound of Aaron screaming. She thought, “Oh, my gosh—I’m alive!” She looked to her left and saw Pete and Joan and their six-year-old son Will, a few weeks from his seventh birthday, and saw that they seemed uninjured. “We were all squished, leaning forward. We could not lean back.” Her senses were not her own. She found that she was looking at Aaron’s toes. His legs seemed to dangle up toward the ceiling. “It was dark,” she said, “but I had some light that I could see that his profile was there. And I heard him crying, so I knew that he was okay.” But her mind was awash in confusion as she thought, “Oh, gosh, what—what do we do? What do I do? How do we get out of this—How do we get out of these seat belts? What? Somebody help me! Because there we were, dangling from these seat belts, which were, of course, our lifesavers.” She had yet to realize that she was upside down. She “fumbled and fumbled and got up in there where the belt buckle was up in our stomachs and I finally got it opened and fell—oh, my gosh! Fell down, and then I just didn’t—I just didn’t know what to do. I was just starting to say, ‘Somebody help me, please, help me with my son!’ ”
People were now dropping from their seats in twos and threes. The crowd of bodies quickly became impenetrable amid the debris. What had been the left side was now the right, and the people a few rows back were trapped in the crushed ceiling as the plane filled with smoke. The people around Ellen began struggling and crawling toward the light, so Pete and Will Wernick and Ellen found themselves caught up in this mass of protoplasm, squirming in the disturbed hive. “And there were wires,” Ellen said, “and there were bodies and lots of wires, and then I got to the opening and then there was corn. And then I jumped, and then I looked, and I just can’t believe I didn’t have my child.” She had somehow escaped the burning ship without her two-year-old. Aaron hung somewhere inside that dark interior, dangling from his seat belt like a ham.
* Although the plane climbed three hundred feet immediately after the explosion, many people had the sensation that it dove.