John C. Clark, the senior performance engineer from the Bureau of Technology at the NTSB, arrived in Sioux City on July 20 to search for fan disk 00385. Clark, along with Edward Wizniak, William Thompson, Robert MacIntosh, and others, paid a visit to Dennis Swanstrom, the base commander, and informed him that critical parts were missing out in the cornfields around Alta, Iowa. “And within ten minutes,” recalled Thompson, “his forces were at work acting.” From that point on, Swanstrom, Harrington, and the Air National Guard would play a key role in aiding Clark’s search for the missing disk. Based on what the NTSB and GE had seen of the number two engine, one thing was clear: if they wanted to pinpoint the cause of the accident, they had to find the missing disk. They strongly suspected that it lay in two big pieces in a field about sixty miles northeast of Sioux City, on ground obscured by midsummer crops.
Clark, forty-one, was an experienced investigator and well aware of the history of titanium rotating parts blowing up. If people wanted modern air travel, they had to spin big heavy wheels. And if they spun big heavy wheels, they would have to accept that some of them would fly apart now and then, as such wheels had done from the beginning. But Clark had never seen a situation in which the number one fan vanished, along with a good portion of its shaft and attachments. He already had parts from the airplane that farmers had found and some reports from those who had seen components falling from the plane about eight miles north of the town of Alta. Other pieces were sighted about two miles east of Highway M31, which runs north and south along the western edge of Alta. The lighter materials would have drifted with the winds of the upper atmosphere. Clark immediately ordered all the meteorological information that was available. The wind had been roughly from the north, blowing forty knots at thirty-seven thousand feet. Some of the lighter debris was found to have drifted to the southeast from the point of the explosion, while a piece of the airplane’s aluminum skin was found a mile north of Alta on the west side of M31. Clark was eventually able to confirm the speed of the winds aloft by looking at the radar data. As 1819 Uniform turned from east to north, Clark would learn, there was a drop in its ground speed consistent with a headwind of roughly the correct velocity.
Now he needed to use mathematics and the laws of physics to account for all the forces on the parts of the fan disk and to predict where those parts went. “I remember getting various parts and pieces,” he said. As the pieces came in, Clark kept records and plotted those fragments on maps of the farmland. Working at a long table in a conference room at the convention center in downtown Sioux City, he began by calculating the trajectory from the approximate spot where the engine blew to the locations where the pieces that they had in hand had landed. Such recovered parts yielded a lot of information. They showed the real-world behavior of parts of given shapes, sizes, and masses. Each time Clark calculated the trajectory for another part, it added to his store of knowledge about how those big pieces of the fan disk might have returned to earth. He adjusted other calculations accordingly, even while he consulted with the GE engineers, who were as eager as he was to find the fan disk.
Clark went out to the fields where the parts had been found and used the services of Laura Levy with her laser transit to assign an exact location to each part. Then he returned to the conference room and again sat at his table spread with papers to solve trajectory analysis equations. It was pretty straightforward for someone versed in mathematics and ballistics. Gravity was trying to pull the piece down. The speed of the airplane imparted momentum to the piece, pushing it forward as it was released in the explosion. The pressure of the air against the piece, known as drag, acted to slow its forward motion as it accelerated downward. “And you just keep making repetitive calculations at various time increments,” Clark said. As gravity accelerated the piece toward the ground, the drag increased, thereby reducing its acceleration. Within a few seconds of free fall, the weight of the piece would come into equilibrium with the drag, and the speed at which it was falling would stabilize and remain constant for the rest of the trip to the ground. Once drag had stopped the forward momentum, the piece would drop more or less straight down, except for the motion of drifting with the wind.
“What we’ve found over the years,” Clark said, “is that it’s best to put everything together that you think you know, do your calculations, and find that spot. You can walk right out and put your foot down right on that spot, and then start expanding your search from that point.”
At the time of the explosion, the plane had been moving eastward at a groundspeed of 560 miles an hour. If the plane had dropped a bomb, it would have been easy to calculate where it fell using the speed of the plane and the speed of the wind. But this was more complicated. As the fan disk broke apart and came out of the engine, the pieces could have gone in almost any direction at speeds of almost four hundred miles an hour. In addition, the plane’s forward velocity would have thrown the pieces toward the east.
Clark called his boss in Washington. Monty Montgomery also happened to be the chief of the Engineering Services Division of the NTSB and was an expert in computers and flight data recorders. “Monty,” Clark said, “wrote code for me when I arrived at the Board. He wrote the basic program for trajectory calculations and plotting in Fortran. I modified the basic programs for each accident, customized if you will. I would call him with my new estimates, and he would run the programs to get the trajectory calculations. He would call me with the numbers and I would plot them on a large area map—county crop maps.” Clark’s mapping of the debris that had already been collected matched the ballistic calculations. Those calculations showed where they would expect the missing parts, both light and heavy, to fall.
Another factor Clark had to consider was what might be called the Frisbee effect. Even if the disk still had blades or broken blades attached to it, and even if the disk was fractured and missing a large segment, it might fly, given the tremendous speed at which it was traveling. It might not fly elegantly, but if it produced even a small amount of lift in its spinning descent, it could, Clark calculated, travel more than three and a half miles off of a ballistic, bomblike trajectory during the seven-mile fall to the ground.
Clark had other unknowns to ponder. How would such a titanium Frisbee, possibly weighing in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds, orient itself while falling? Would it approach the earth edge-on like a coin going into a slot? Would it dish out onto its flat side the way a space capsule enters the atmosphere? What happens if you drop a paper plate from a balcony? What if you sail it instead? “Is it flying pointed end first or flat side into the wind or whatever, and that changes your drag characteristics,” Clark said.
By the Friday after the crash, he said, “radar data started coming in, so that pinpointed us down pretty close to where the event occurred. Then I started getting [information] in from the flight data recorder, and with that I knew exactly at the moment when the engine blew, and then I could marry that up with the recorded radar data and get a very precise position over the ground where the engine let go.” The fan disk and other parts had separated in pieces large enough to reflect a radar signal, and Clark could see the parts coming off at thirty-seven thousand feet. If he had his scope set up for it, James Michael Rohde, the air traffic controller at Minneapolis Center in Farmington, Minnesota, might have seen the dark images fluttering down his screen beginning at thirteen seconds after 3:16 on that Wednesday afternoon.
Clark performed some calculations and called Monty Montgomery again to feed him the data. The computer run showed that parts of the fan disk had most likely fallen to earth in either section seven or section eight of Scott Township in Buena Vista County, roughly between Rembrandt and Truesdale, two towns with a combined population of 419 people at the time. The two sections of farmland were each a mile square, but taking other factors into account, such as the Frisbee effect, Clark set the boundaries of the area to be searched, including those two sections, at eighteen square miles. Although Clark would give it an honest try on more than one occasion in the coming weeks, not all the people in Scott Township could have searched an area that large. But Clark hoped to get lucky. On Saturday he recruited the Iowa Public Service Bell JetRanger helicopter. Guided by Clark’s calculations of the areas they needed to search, the pilot flew slowly back and forth about thirty feet above the ground. Clark stared down at the corn blowing this way and that in great sweeps of downwash from the rotors.* He could occasionally see the ground between the rows, but he was also aware of the blind spot beneath the helicopter and the ease with which he could miss something that was probably at least partly buried in the Cannisteo and Nicollet and Clarion loams of those fertile fields. Throughout that Saturday, he scanned sections four through nine in Scott Township without results. In addition, Clark understood that the disk could have landed in a pond and might never be found.
That Saturday, the Air National Guard at Lincoln, Nebraska, sent out its RF-4 Phantom fighter planes to take infrared and black-and-white photographs along the flight path that United Flight 232 followed. They used both vertical and oblique cameras, but only the ones looking straight down could see anything on the ground. Most people have never seen an F-4 up close. The planes are huge, and they are extremely loud. By all accounts, those RF-4C missions scared the daylights out of every living thing for miles around, especially people who were already nervous about the crash. The Southern Hills Mall, where Greg Clapper’s wife and daughters saw Peter Pan, was deserted the day after the crash because people had heard that 1819 Uniform had flown right over it.
That night, teams of analysts and photo interpreters at the 155th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Lincoln pored over those recon photos until dawn, trying to identify anything on the ground that might have been made of metal. In the morning, they gave Clark the maps they had drawn and directions to the targets they had identified as promising.
Sunday morning bright and early, John Clark, Edward Wizniak, Laura Levy, and Jim Walker, along with pilots, crew chiefs, and nine other volunteers from the 185th, stood out on the ramp ready to board the Hueys that were parked there on loan from Army National Guard bases in Boone and Waterloo. (Huey is the nickname for the Bell UH-1 Iroquois utility helicopter that was used during the war in Vietnam.) The volunteers and investigators boarded for the short flight out to the area around Rembrandt and Truesdale, and as Walker put it, “It seemed like we landed wherever we needed to, and I’m not sure how the farmers felt about that.” As soon as the helicopters dropped them off, Walker and the other volunteers formed lines and began walking up and down section twelve on the eastern edge of Elk Township, which was the area adjacent to and west of section seven, where Clark thought the fan disk might have fallen. Walker was not prepared for the conditions that day. The corn was pollinating itself, and the air was thick with the yellow dust. “I have hay fever,” he said, and after several hours of searching, “I couldn’t even breathe, and somebody took pity on me, and when it was time to go home, I got to ride in the air-conditioned Bell helicopter with the leather seats.”
John Clark said, “On one of the searches, Laura Levy and I had been out most of the morning, and it was hot with no wind. The corn pollen was really bad, and the corn was over my head. We stopped at a gas station on a section corner, out in the middle of nowhere, it seemed. Laura needed some water to rinse out her eyes. Her contacts were giving her fits. We went in and there were a number of gents sitting around. They went outside to the pitcher pump, and with a few pumps we had all the well water we needed.”
Clark and Levy and the others were attempting to follow the directions from the photo interpreters, who had provided maps of suspected metal objects. The work was frustrating and fruitless. Clark would usually find something, but never what he was looking for. Often the team members were chasing shadows. They found pieces of metal. They found a feed sack. One time they found an object that was round and dark and had no corn on it. On the photograph, it looked as if it might be a big disk. When Clark and Levy slogged through the corn, covered in the choking yellow pollen, to reach the spot at last, it turned out to be an anthill. The search turned up nothing of value, but it demonstrated to Clark that the effort required for searching on foot was prohibitively large. Clark and Wizniak rode in the Hueys as they continued to fly up and down, back and forth. The investigators sat in the open doors, wind blowing around them, feet resting on the skids, and watched the corn blow.
Clark did go out to the spot where he had calculated fan disk 00385 to be, and he did put his foot down on the ground there. He didn’t know it that day, but he was only a few hundred yards from the disk 00385. In the vastness of the sea of corn, that amounted to near pinpoint accuracy. But being close to the disk didn’t make the search any easier. He returned to the Hueys and continued staring at the corn flowing past the door. “And I think we probably flew over that part down in that corn twenty, thirty, forty times,” he said.
Through the frustrating days and then weeks after the crash, Clark was groping around for any kind of help he could get. It was essential to locate those parts if the people involved in this event were ever to be certain of what had been done to those passengers and why and by whom. In fact, most of the investigators from the NTSB, the FAA, United, GE, and McDonnell Douglas believed they knew what had happened. But United Airlines, General Electric, McDonnell Douglas—they had killed 112 of the 296 people on that plane. (Gerald Dobson was not yet dead but soon would be.) They had destroyed countless lives. The investigators could not simply hazard a guess as to what they thought might have happened. They had to compile the best evidence they could find. The people at General Electric wanted to know as badly as anyone. They wanted Clark to find the parts so that this type of accident might never happen again.
While Clark and Wizniak and the GE engineers were searching for the missing fan disk, John Young, an investigator from the NTSB, flew to Cincinnati, Ohio, near Evendale, where General Electric made its jet engines. There he worked with GE engineers, who were poring over records. Young was joined by David Cookson from United Airlines, who was in charge of searching and sequestering records for the airline anytime there was an incident or accident. Young and Cookson had had occasion to work together earlier in the year, when United nearly lost another jumbo jet, Flight 811 out of Honolulu, the accident in which nine people died. “We had a bad year that year,” Cookson said. “John Young and I established a pretty good relationship. He was very professional.” While John Clark wanted to know where that fan disk had gone, they wanted to know where it had come from. James W. Tucker, the general manager of Product Operations at GE, an engineering expert in turbines, even traveled to the offices of some vendors to dig through what he called “their dead letter file.”
The records from that period of time at both ALCOA and GE were in a fair state of disarray, with some documents missing while others contained outright errors. Young and Cookson, Tucker, Moehring, and others were trying to determine the origin of the metal that was used to make fan disk 00385. In its final report, the NTSB called the records “contradictory” and “deficient.” It said, “The records on a large number of [General Electric] disks are suspect.” The report further stated that “several anomalies appear in the records [of General Electric], which call into question the reliability or accuracy of all the disk records from the same period. For instance, there were no records found indicating receipt of the fan disk forgings by the [General Electric] plant.”
Despite the consistently sloppy practices at General Electric, NTSB investigators came to realize that in 1971, a company called Titanium Metals of America out in Henderson, Nevada, had cast a cylinder of titanium weighing about seven thousand pounds. The missing fan disk had been cut from that column of titanium and then forged by ALCOA and machined by GE into the finished part. Disk 00385 from 1819 Uniform was one of eight that had been made from the same batch of metal. All of those pieces had been tested, and during those tests, one of the disks, not yet finished, had fallen under suspicion of having a defect. It never went into service. The seven others passed the tests, and six of them were still flying on DC-10s at the time of the crash.
“Within the very first few days after this event,” said John Moehring of GE, “we researched the records . . . of all of the disks that had been manufactured from this . . . batch of titanium . . . we sent out an order to . . . withdraw those disks from service and bring them back to the factory.”
In the evenings, after MacIntosh had led the daily meeting at the Sioux City Convention Center to review the findings of all the groups, Thompson of GE would call Moehring in Evendale and have what Moehring called “a long conference” about their progress toward an understanding of the appalling blunder that had been made in the General Electric aircraft engine factory.
Bruce Benham, thirty-seven, and his young colleague Garry Priest, had very different reactions to their impending arrival at Sioux City. Priest told me that he was not afraid. He later said that he was thinking, “Hell, this might even be kind of cool. Because, hey, we might get to go down the slide. I’ve never done that before. That might be kind of neat.”
Benham, Priest’s boss, on the other hand, was gripped with fear when he looked out the window and saw “how fast we were still going.” He bent over and braced himself, and “to be honest, [I was] wondering when I would be killed. I was consciously thinking about when the end is going to come, because I thought it was done. The end.”
When the wreckage came to a stop, Benham and Priest popped their seat belts. “I look around me and it just seems to be pitch black,” Priest said. “Any direction I look is just darkness.”
Benham echoed his assessment, describing “confusion, disorientation, darkness.”
Gradually Priest saw silhouettes of faces. “No bodies, just faces. Really kind of eerie. And at some point, off to my right, I see the orange ember of what turns out to be a fire.” He heard someone yell, “Fire!” and people began pushing past him in the opposite direction. He looked the other way and saw “a ray of sunlight. And it just made sense to go to it.” He raised his voice and said, “Calm down and go to the light.”
Benham had begun to follow Priest’s lead, when he noticed a boy still strapped in across the aisle from his seat, alone in the thickening smoke. Benham had seen the boy’s mother moments before, but now she was gone. Pete and Joan Wernick, with their son Will, were gone too. Ron Sheldon was boosting Aki Muto up into a hole in the floor a few rows back.
“I pulled him out of the seat and grabbed him,” Benham said of the boy. “I didn’t know the little guy’s name. I just said, ‘Son, please, please put your arms around my neck and hold me real tight. We’re gonna get out of here.’ His eyes were the size of a half-dollar. Beautiful little guy. He wasn’t crying. I could tell he was scared. But he did exactly what I asked him to do. He put his arms around my neck, and I took him outside.” With the boy in his arms, Benham struggled toward the hole, stumbling over luggage.
As the fuselage filled with smoke, Ellen Badis, the thirty-five-year-old mother of two, stood in the sunshine in her light-blue summer dress and came to the realization that her two-year-old, Aaron, was still inside. She turned to go back in, but the group of survivors who were ushering people out of the plane blocked her way. Now Ellen stared helplessly into the growing smoke.
Upton Rehnberg was holding back the bundle of wires that had been assembled by the hands of women at the Douglas factory in Long Beach. Rod Vetter and Jerry Schemmel were now joined by Garry Priest in helping people out. John Transue stood with Jan Brown, while survivors, many of them injured, hurried away from the burning plane in different directions. Benham stepped out into the sunlit cornfield bearing the two-year-old in his arms. He moved away from the fire and smoke and almost immediately stumbled into a woman in a torn blue sleeveless sundress, standing in the sun and staring as if in a trance.
When Ellen Badis told this story, her voice dropped until it was nearly inaudible, the terrible confession, the unspeakable omission: “I just can’t believe I didn’t have my child.” Then her voice rose almost to a scream as she said, “And then there he was! There was Aaron. And he was being held by this gentleman. The men were up on the broken fuselage, and they were helping folks off.” She was seeing Clif Marshall on top of the inverted plane, pulling people out of the hole, Aki Muto and Gitte Skaanes and the Hjermstads, Alisa and Eric.
Benham handed Aaron to Ellen Badis, reuniting mother and son in the corn.
The crash happened on Wednesday, July 19. By Friday, July 28, everyone concerned—GE, the airlines, the NTSB, and many other manufacturers of parts that go into making an airliner—knew that jumbo jets were flying around that might have potentially deadly flaws in their engines. John Young from the NTSB, along with James Tucker, John Moehring, and others had already been poring over dispatch orders, inspection records, check sheets, ultrasonic inspection logs, discrepancy reports, and correspondence. They had come to realize what a mess the records were in. From this mass of material, they nevertheless managed to trace fan disk 00385, along with its seven so-called sister disks, to heat K8283.
As the sister disks came in to the Materials and Process Technology Lab at GE, they were subjected to ultrasonic inspection, and it soon became apparent that the disk labeled 00388 was indeed defective. Ultrasound showed the equivalent of a tumor in the flesh of the metal. It was a sick area within the crystalline structure. They called it an “indication,” a spot in the metal where sound waves reflected in an unexpected way, indicating that the metal was somehow different at that location. Titanium kept jealous hold of its impurities, and here in 00388, the sister of 00385, was clear evidence of its true nature.
Pure titanium is silver-gray to the naked eye, white as snow under the microscope. The metallurgists call it alpha, the beginning of all the alchemy that will produce flight at unprecedented speed and height. With this special metal—the only metal strong enough and light enough for those spinning wheels—everyone from the towns of Rembrandt and Truesdale could be flown aloft at once, nearly to the edge of space, in a single ark.
James Wildey said, “Ti six-four (titanium with 6 percent aluminum and 4 percent vanadium) is an alloy composed of two phases. Phases are regions in the material with different crystallographic structure.” He was talking about the way the atoms are arranged to create the microscopic crystals that make up the metal. At room temperature, for example, titanium crystals have the shape of a hexagon. Pure titanium is made of grains, and the grains are made of those hexagonal crystals. When more than half a percent of another substance is added to the pure metal, the structure of the titanium changes to accommodate the new material. When titanium is melted with aluminum and vanadium and then cooled to room temperature, the alpha (pure titanium) and beta (aluminum with some vanadium) freeze back into their own crystal structures and form interleaved sheets or lamina. Under a microscope, it looks almost like living tissue, a strange weave of fibrous grains, elongated and intertwined. In titanium, “the whole thing just transforms pretty much instantly as the temperature drops,” said Wildey, “and this is what the resulting structure is. It freezes in place. And actually that’s what gives you some of the strength, because it doesn’t want to change. It’s locked into place there. Whereas the alpha is a nice, gentle, softer material, and it gives you the toughness, because it can deform a little bit and take the impact, the (transformed) beta gives you the strength, resisting it.”
Yet titanium can change its nature entirely. Magnified five hundred times, titanium can look like a bacterial infection in a petri dish. Add a little nitrogen when the titanium is being melted, and it suddenly looks like ice on a winter window. The area is much harder and more brittle than the material should be.
Wildey traveled to Evendale to examine the disk known as 00388. He would much rather have been working on 00385—the disk from Flight 232—but John Clark had yet to find it. (And indeed, Clark, along with the other people who were searching for the disk, never would find it.) So Wildey worked with metallurgists and technicians at GE to cut the sister disk 00388 into pieces to expose the tumor. The team then subjected that metal to nitric and hydrofluoric acid, industrial CAT scan, X-ray and neutron radiation, as well as ammonium bifluoride etching. They put pieces of it in a scanning electron microscope and bombarded it with a beam of electrons in a process known as energy dispersive spectroscopy, or EDS. In EDS, the electron beam bypasses the outer shells of electrons in the material and hits the inner shells. In that interaction, the atoms give off X-rays, which are high-energy photons. Wildey said, “Each atom will produce X-rays at a very specific energy based on the differences between the energy levels of the various electron shells in the atoms. So it’s a pure atomic interaction. It looks at the differences in the electron shells in each atom.” By reading the energy level, he could identify the element.
An electron microscope is a formidable instrument, unlike any other manmade object. It is a stainless-steel tower, perhaps a foot in diameter, with many knobs and devices bristling off of it. A thick cable enters the tower at the top. The tower is set in a platform the size of a businessman’s desk but made of stainless steel and weighing a great deal to prevent any vibration that could blur an image that’s been magnified many thousands of times. (Electron microscopes are often installed in basements, because the concrete floors tend to dampen vibrations.) At the bottom of the tower is a vacuum chamber with thick glass windows, and surrounding the tower are various other instruments aimed at that chamber. The big cable at the top carries twenty thousand volts of electricity into a tungsten filament to produce electrons, which are then accelerated downward in a vacuum through a series of electromagnets. The magnets act as lenses to focus the beam as it travels to the chamber where the specimen waits. The instruments around the chamber collect the X-rays that come off of the specimen under electron bombardment. The room is kept dark except for the displays, which give off a cold blue glow, while tangles of electrical cables snake in every direction from the various devices.
When Wildey’s technician activated this suite of instruments and beamed electrons into the heart of the tumor in that metal, right down to the inner electron shells of its atoms, he found something curious indeed. When he read the X-ray signature of the atoms, he found titanium, aluminum, and vanadium, as expected. However, in addition to the strong energy levels from those elements, he saw the energy of the X-rays peter out, dwindle away, to weak uncertain signals. Something else had contaminated the metal, but its signal was not strong enough to read. Wildey had his thoughts about what the material might be, but he was going to have to change his technique if he wanted to be certain of what had caused that tumor.
Ellen Badis, with Aaron freshly delivered into her arms by Bruce Benham, was convinced that the burning plane behind her would explode. She began running down the muddy rows of corn, in her sandals. “The corn was so tall and beautiful,” she said. She recalled the soft feel of the damp ground. She broke down weeping again as we talked. “I ran on and ran on, I didn’t think I’d ever—oh, my gosh, we ran and ran and—and finally we came to the opening.” Then Ellen said with great wonder in her voice, “And there was a tower down there. And a lot of other passengers were congregated. And one man was starting to climb the tower. We didn’t know where we were. And I said, ‘Here, you want part of my dress to use as a flag?’ I had a light-blue dress on and it had been ripped a little. We wanted to let folks know we were out here.” The man took a strip of blue cloth from Ellen’s dress and began waving it in the hope that someone would take notice. Sam Gochenour, the technician from the FAA, ran over and yelled at him to get down, help was on the way.
As the adrenaline began to wear off, Ellen said, “I had to go pee so bad. It was just the worst.” Someone offered to watch Aaron while she went down to a grassy bottom where trees grew, “and I just went down there behind a tree and relieved myself.” She returned to the tower and joined the group, and a blue bus eventually came from the Air National Guard. “I just assumed my husband and Eric, my oldest son, were burning, were dead,” she said. By the time she and the others were dropped off at the triage area, “I was desperate, looking for my son and Adrienne.” She found herself rushing around, clutching her remaining son, “looking at every wounded person, every body. I was just desperate to find them. I didn’t care in what condition, I just wanted to find them.” While she was peering into the faces of the dead, John Transue rode past in a bus, staring out in horror at the tableau of corpses and body parts and the dissonant image of the mother and child hurrying among them.
As Transue passed by, Ellen peered into the face of a man who was taking his last breath. A United Methodist minister named Duane Churchman, who was volunteering on the scene, saw her. He took her arm and gently pulled her away, saying, “You don’t want to do this. Come with me. I will take you somewhere.”
Beside herself, she screamed, “But I’ve got to find them!”
People gathered around to reassure her that her husband and son had probably been taken to the hospital. It meant nothing to her. Her husband and son were dead, and she just wanted to see them one last time. The clergyman took her to the mess hall. “And I was just slowly going into psychological shock,” she said. She burst into tears once more as she relived those moments. She recalled people sitting on the floor with blankets, despite the heat of July. “And there was a TV over in the corner,” she said. She asked if someone would turn on the television, thinking that she might see Adrienne and Eric. Someone turned it on and Ellen stood watching the jumbo jet explode. “And then I lost all hope after that,” she wept. “I just couldn’t believe anyone else could have survived.” As she went into shock, paramedics loaded her and Aaron into an ambulance.
Before the Badis family left Hawaii, Adrienne’s mother had bought the boys matching T-shirts in shades of blue and turquoise. The shirts bore the smiley face symbol and the words “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Both boys wore those shirts on board the plane. At the hospital, “when the ambulance doors opened, Aaron was handed off first,” Ellen said.
Before Aaron’s feet even touched the ground, an X-ray technician saw his shirt and made the connection. She approached the ambulance and asked, “Is this Aaron?” Ellen could barely speak through her tears as she recalled what the technician said to her: “They’re here, and they’re okay.”
“The knot that I had in my stomach was so—was just so relieved,” Ellen said. “I could just not believe it.” Now the technician led Ellen and Aaron into the X-ray department. “And we were reunited, and it was the best feeling we’ve ever had.”
By the time the Badis family reached the dormitory at Briar Cliff College, all the beds were taken. They had to sleep on the floor. Nearly everyone in the area where Adrienne and Eric were seated was killed, the Feeney family from Denver (no relation to Tony) and Cindy Muncey, Ruth Gomez and her ten-year-old son John—it was a bad place to be—yet father and son walked away from the crash virtually unhurt. (When I interviewed her, Ellen still had not learned how Adrienne escaped, because he had never been able to talk about it.)
While Bruce Benham’s superficial wounds were being treated at the hospital, a producer from ABC News arrived and asked him if he would appear on a television program called Nightline. Benham, Schemmel, and Priest appeared on the show and then spent the night at the house of a local weatherman. No one could sleep. Schemmel stayed up all night making phone calls to try to find Jay Ramsdell. At one point, about 3:00 in the morning, the United crisis line reported that Ramsdell was in the burn unit at St. Luke’s. “I called the hospital for a half hour,” said Schemmel, “and couldn’t get through.” When he reached someone at last, he learned that Ramsdell was not at St. Luke’s. In fact, Jay Ramsdell lay dead on the field. Television producers recruited the three survivors to appear on another show, Good Morning, America. When the show was over, a producer drove them back to the airport so that they could fly home to Denver.
Once the Badis family had returned to their home in the Raleigh-Durham area, “It felt like we had been born again,” said Ellen. “We saw things in such a wonderful light now. Everything just felt new, being back in our home again.” From then on, the Badis family never let a day go by without expressing their love for one another. “Because,” as Ellen put it, “you never knew how quick your life could be cut short.”
But the initial euphoria wore off. Ellen began to feel the symptoms. She had difficulty concentrating and developed digestive trouble. She lost her ability to function at work. By 1991 Ellen Badis had quit her job as a nurse, never to return. Ellen developed a whole range of emotional triggers that could set off a panic reaction again, such as low-flying planes or any type of concussion or explosion. “I’ve got a terrible, terrible startle reflex,” she said, “and I have to apologize in the store, if somebody drops something.” And of course, she said, “we don’t fly.”
* After the harvest, some farmers claimed that the helicopters damaged their crops while others said that the wind helped to pollinate the corn. The area enjoyed a bumper crop that year.