Will Wernick, who was not quite seven years old at the time of the crash, shared a thought that many other people on the plane, most of them children, had after the engine exploded: “One of the things I was most excited about was getting to see the emergency slides come out of the plane. I flew a lot, and I always wanted to see that.” As the bluegrass banjo picker, Pete Wernick, led his son out of the burning plane, Will was still expecting to see the emergency slides deploy. “And it didn’t happen, and I remember being somewhat disappointed that we didn’t get to see the slides.”
The Wernicks came to Sioux City for the twenty-fifth anniversary. Pete brought the banjo that had been found on the field. He played it for the survivors and their families at dinner that night. His wife, Joan, played and sang for the guests as well.
Ellen Badis said her nightmares continue to this day. “I hardly ever have a good dream. Very seldom. I don’t dream in color. My dreams are always someone or something getting me. Going to get me. And then I wake myself up screaming.” She said that she and her husband Adrienne are now drawn magnetically to disasters of any kind. She said that if a plane crashed nearby, she would open their house to survivors. Despite the old feelings it brings up, she has always loved telling her family’s story.
I asked Ellen if she thought that, on balance, going through the experience had been a positive or negative influence in her life. She answered with long pauses, saying several times, “That’s a tough one.” But she concluded, “It’s really mixed. Of course, it’s positive that we’re here, and we’re just so blessed to have made it out and walking. We have our limbs and our mental abilities. But at other times, it’s just been tough too.” She heaved an exhausted sigh and said, “I just can’t, I just can’t—it’s hard.”
Bruce Benham didn’t know it at the time, but when he appeared on the TV show Nightline with Jerry Schemmel and Garry Priest on the night of the crash, Ellen Badis was across town at Briar Cliff College, watching with Margo Crain, Susan Randa, Aki Muto, and others. As the program began, Ellen leapt up and pointed at the screen, saying, “That’s who saved Aaron!” She had been in such a state of shock when Benham handed her the two-year-old boy that she hadn’t even thought to ask who he was. She later tracked him down and wrote him a letter of thanks.
Amy Mobley, who had married Doug Reynolds nineteen days before the crash, said that as a result of the accident, “my children have really not gotten to see anything. We don’t go on vacation anywhere. Disney World, Disneyland. It would just be more practical to fly, but we just don’t do it. We don’t do carnivals. They’ve missed out on a lot.”
Rusty Mobley, Amy’s younger brother, didn’t feel that way. He said, “Nothing’s going to ever happen to me flying again. There’s just no logical way.”
Terri Hardman came away from the experience without deep psychological scars. Indeed, she felt that it might have been good for her children in a way. “I think it probably affected my children more than me, and in some ways I didn’t think it was all bad. I think they realized they were vulnerable, and I think we slowed down driving quite a bit.” She said the people at school, their friends, their neighbors, were “amazing.” She had a large social support network. “It taught me something about reaching out to people.”
“I like to take the good parts,” she said. “We became closer as a family. I think we all realized how lucky we are to be here. My kids have graduated from college, have children. I have seven grandkids. And every so often it’s brought up that—you know—there was a possibility we’d have none of this.”
Ron Sheldon boosted Terri Hardman, Aki Muto, and all those others up to Clif Marshall on top of the fuselage. Sheldon had been on his way from Denver to his home in Granville, Ohio, outside of Columbus. He was traveling with his business partner, Tom Postle, who was seated two rows behind him. Postle had a Bible in his lap and had been praying with Ruth Anne and Bruce and Dina Osenberg. On the night of the crash, Sheldon wound up at Briar Cliff College, his hand swollen “like a softball” from resting his head on it during the crash. He had been looking everywhere for Postle, but ominously, his partner was on none of the lists that were being hastily assembled.
Sheldon wandered the hot and crowded, narrow pastel-tiled passageways of the dorm and came full circle to his room with an apple and a bottle of water that he had found in the cafeteria. Scarcely had he closed the door when he heard a knock. “I opened the door and there was Tom Postle. He had a big bandage across his head and over his ears, and it had a bloody spot on it, and we had a great reunion right there, just jumping up and down and hugging and happy to see each other.” Together they went back to the cafeteria and ate soup and sandwiches and traded stories into the early hours.
The next day, they caught a flight to Chicago together, and United employees quietly hustled them off the plane to avoid the press. They changed planes for Columbus, and Postle’s wife met them and whisked them away. Sheldon had some nightmares over the years but no ill effects to speak of, either from his combat experience in Vietnam or from United Flight 232. He went to a counselor who told him he didn’t need therapy.
Ruth Anne Osenberg and her family suffered ongoing physical and emotional effects from the crash, and yet she remained tirelessly cheerful throughout the ordeal. In one message, she wrote to me, “Tucson grandsons, Hayden and Logan were here for the day a couple of weeks ago. While here they watched the movie, Madagascar, something or other. I think it was the second in the series, and I was watching with them. In it there was a part where the characters were in an airplane and the plane developed problems. As it came closer to the ground it began to hit trees etc. and was breaking apart. That’s when Grandma got up and left the room. Couldn’t believe that a children’s movie with a plane crash had me shaking inside and out. PTSD via animation.”
Dina Osenberg had finished her sophomore year of college when the crash happened. Back at school for her junior year, she discovered that she couldn’t stand being in classrooms when they were too crowded. “Two months into the school year, I dropped out.” She could not focus enough to get her homework done. “I wanted to be with my parents. There were days I didn’t want to get out of bed. There was definite depression.”
She returned to college in the new year. “It was hard,” she said, but she had always wanted to be a teacher and to work with children, so “I had to do this.” It took her five years to finish college, but she finished. As a result of the crash, she became “a control freak,” especially when it came to driving. When her sons were in the first and second grades, she wouldn’t let them take a school bus. She didn’t feel comfortable when they rode with another parent either.
About flying she said, “There’s a lot of places in this world that I want to go to, and the only way to get there is flying.” She still had a residual emotional reaction after more than two decades. “I don’t like turbulence.” Her boys loved turbulence, so she put on a happy face for them and tried to look on the bright side. And when her sons were little and she had to fly with them, she said, “From day one, I told my husband, we are buying them a seat. It’s another three or four hundred bucks. And he wasn’t always willing to spend that.” Then Dina explained to him how Jan Brown had told people to hold their babies on the floor on that appalling day. And Dina’s husband realized how really mad it was to try to take a baby on an airliner without a proper seat.
Brad Griffin had been on his way to play in a golf tournament with his brother when he was ejected from his first class seat and thrown into the corn, where Clapper found him. Griffin was treated at St. Luke’s for the second-degree burns on his feet and left arm, but the doctors failed to notice that he had eight broken ribs, three compacted vertebrae, and a collapsed lung. Brad’s family arranged to have him air-lifted to University Hospital in Denver, where he was put in a body cast. When the doctors realized that he couldn’t breathe, they cut the cast and “took a liter-and-a-half of fluid out of me.” In addition, he had suffered brain damage, two torn rotator cuffs, and a cracked wrist. He had one giant bruise from the back of his head to his buttocks. When he arrived at the hospital in Colorado, the doctors observed a big cut on one hand that looked almost like an old scar. It was completely sealed as if it had been cauterized, but it was obviously pink and new. The doctors concluded that as he flew out of the plane, his hand encountered white hot metal, which passed through the flesh and simultaneously injured him and sealed the injury.
Griffin was in a full body cast for nearly two months. Once he arrived home, a walk to the end of his driveway would leave him exhausted and sweating. “But I’d just try to do that every day.” His company was building a house down the block, and he’d try to walk outside and check on its progress. It took him two years of rehab to recover from his wounds. He did not have nightmares or flashbacks. His attitude was, It’s beautiful to be alive. Brad Griffin thought he was the luckiest guy in the world.
After his long rehabilitation, he continued his career for more than two decades. He died of pancreatic cancer on October 4, 2013.
In 2012, I asked Aki Muto how she was doing, and she surprised me by saying that she was a flight attendant for Finnair, working a route between Helsinki and Tokyo. “My life after the accident is OK, I would say. It is difficult to say because there is no other life to compare!”
Muto began flying with Lufthansa in 1991, less than two years after the crash. She now says, “It has been many years, and flying is getting very natural to me. I do not feel scared any more.” At the end of her note, she wrote, “Oh, my son is crying. I have to go.”
Nine years after the accident, Muto married at the age of twenty-eight. She gave birth to a baby boy in 2010. Now, she said, “I enjoy every single day with my son.” Without a hand from Clif Marshall and Ron Sheldon, there would have been no son and no future generations from Aki Muto.
Captain Al Haynes, who saved the aircraft in the initial minute or so after the explosion, quietly returned to his regular piloting duties on Wednesday, November 1, 1989, the forty-fourth day after the complete destruction of his ship.
Haynes was forced by law to retire at age sixty.* He flew his last flight on August 27, 1991. The night before, a crowd of people turned up for the retirement party in Denver, including the cabin crew from United Flight 232, except for Rene Le Beau. Many people from Sioux City attended too, among them Gary Brown and Dave Kaplan. James Hathaway, the Air National Guard fire chief, attended, along with George Lindblade. Dr. Banjo, Pete Wernick, hid in a hallway outside the ballroom at the hotel. When the party was under way, he began playing his banjo, slowly moving toward the ballroom so that the bluegrass tune rose in a gradual crescendo. Lindblade said it was “a real tear jerker.”
The next morning United Flight 455 took off under the command of Captain Alfred Clair Haynes, bound for Seattle. William Roy Records flew as first officer. Peter Allen, who had sat in first class next to Dennis Edward Fitch, flew Dvorak’s position—Dudley Joseph Dvorak had not yet returned to work. Al Haynes put the air traffic control communications on the entertainment system—as it had been on United Flight 232—so that people could listen in on headphones as controllers all across the country congratulated him. The flight attendants cut a cake and served pieces to all the passengers as if they were at a wedding. The fire department at Seattle-Tacoma Airport was prepared to spray an arc of water over the plane in a traditional salute to a retiring captain. Late in the flight, however, Jan Murray alerted Lindblade that an emergency had developed in the aircraft. Lindblade tapped Gary Brown and Hathaway, who were seated ahead of him.
Gary Brown had been lifting a cocktail to his lips. He put it down.
The Sioux City rescue professionals made their way aft, wondering if history were about to hideously repeat itself—this time with them on board instead of waiting on the ground. In fact, a passenger was having a diabetic seizure. Gary Brown and his crew cleared passengers out of the way and had them reseated. They then propped up the ill man in a center seat. The plane was on short final. Gary Brown and Kaplan sat on either side of the man to hold him up. After touchdown and rollout, Jan Brown called the cockpit and Peter Allen answered. She announced the medical emergency and said they needed to be met by an ambulance. Then she asked the passengers to remain seated until the man was off the plane.
A moment later, Allen called back, saying, “You were kidding, right?”
Jan Brown confirmed that the emergency was real, and then watched as Gary Brown and Dave Kaplan carried the victim out of the plane.
“The terminal building was completely full of newsmen,” Gary Brown later recounted, “so there was lots of security. Dave Kaplan and I were both in uniforms, which look a lot like law enforcement uniforms,” because emergency services used to be under the sheriff’s office. “And here we are carrying this guy, and nobody bothered to tell the cops.” The man was still thrashing about because of his seizure. “They thought we had a prisoner who was fighting with us. So it was like an almost instantaneous wrestling match. Big dog pile in the Jetway.”
Gary hollered at the police, “Put down your clubs and get an IV started before we lose this guy! Give us a little room here, we need an ambulance.” The situation gradually resolved itself, and the patient later recovered.
Someone commented that Gary Brown didn’t feel comfortable when a plane arrived unless it was met by emergency vehicles. And Jerry Schemmel said the same thing to Captain Haynes.
Jan Brown was heard to say, “The boys from Sioux City saved us again.”
The investigators from the NTSB and other agencies, as well as from General Electric and United Airlines, went on to contribute to the improvements in aviation safety in the twenty-first century. As Robert Benzon put it, “Each of us was affected by the accident, but went on with our work over the years since Sioux City on many similar events. It was a tough, tiring, family-affecting job that few appreciate.” Benzon was the investigator in charge for the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus A300 that went down in Belle Harbor, New York, in 2001. The second-worst aircraft accident in U.S. history, it killed all 260 people on the plane and five on the ground. Benzon was also the investigator in charge on US Airways Flight 1549, the Airbus A320 that ditched in the Hudson River in 2009. All on board survived, thanks to the remarkable skill of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.
Within months of the crash, the FAA had formed the Titanium Rotating Components Review Team to improve the manufacturing and inspection of all of the spinning parts on turbines. In 1990, the Jet Engine Titanium Quality Committee was founded to track defects in batches of titanium or components made from it. Participation became mandatory for all companies producing titanium or jet engines. Many hard alpha inclusions were found after 1989, but most were discovered before a disk or wheel had time to fracture.
There are many ways to think about the last flight of 1819 Uniform. James Wildey, the metallurgist for the NTSB, chose this point of view: “In a way it shows how safe aviation is. It took a whole series of really unlikely events to make this accident happen. That the defect got into the metal at all was unlikely. That it was located in the disk at the point that was going to be under the most stress was also unlikely. If the defect had been a little bit bigger, it might have been detected. If it had been a little bit smaller, the disk would have been retired from service before it broke apart. This disk was almost at its life limit. If the defect had been located pretty much anywhere else in the fan disk, the stresses would have been low enough [that] it wouldn’t have failed.” If it had been located a little farther inboard, it would have been machined off. If it had been located farther from the centerline, it would have been detected. He said that if the flaw had been closer to the surface, a chemical test would have revealed it, but the workers at GE machined the final shape after that test, not before it. They could not perform the chemical test on the final shape because that test used nitric hydrofluoric acid to etch the surface and reveal the grain of the metal. It was a destructive test that would ruin the final shape. Then (at least according to one theory) the tools that cut the final shape happened to reach and expose the defect. It was a chance occurrence that the tool reached the level where the defect lay. The defect was then on the surface of the metal. If it had not been chipped out already, it was ready to be chipped out during the finishing process.
“These small events happen all the time and don’t cause a crash.” But, said Wildey, “in this case, they all ganged up on the one spot there and caused the accident. . . . It illustrates how many different types of things have to go wrong in the aviation industry to have a catastrophic failure like this.”
Flying on commercial airliners in First World countries is the safest means of travel that exists today.
The dead from United Airlines Flight 232 are still among us. Photographs of them and their belongings are on file, in perpetuity, in the archives of the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation.
Joan Wernick said she took two lessons from the crash. “You’re going to die when you’re supposed to die. And then you get,” she said, using the concept she learned from her mother, “ ‘the grace of the present moment.’ ” She explained: “You are going to get the grace to deal with whatever tragedy comes up. My mother used to tell me, ‘You don’t get it beforehand. You won’t get it afterward. You just get it at that time.’ ” Joan said, “You can anticipate this grace. Why [else] would I have been calm when this plane was crashing? If I think about it, I should have been really upset. I wasn’t. I was very peaceful.” Jan Brown, Martha Conant, and many others said the same thing: facing death was the most peaceful moment of their lives.
One day when Sabrina Lee Michaelson was in the seventh grade, she logged onto a message board on the Internet. It’s not clear which one, perhaps a forum on AOL about United Flight 232. On it, she wrote,
Hello, my name is Sabrina Lee Michaelson. I was the little baby girl on flight number 232. I went to your website hoping to find information about the plane crash I was in. Surprisingly I found out that my brother had written bout it and I never knew. I do not remember anything of it but feel very lucky to have survived it. And that my whole family survived it makes me feel very very lucky. To think that if it wasn’t for Jerry [Schemmel] I wouldn’t be alive today. My family and I still do stay in touch with Jerry and his family to this day but once again I would like to thank him for saving my life. Thank you. Now i am 12 years old in the 7th grade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sabrina Michaelson
By 2008, Sabrina was a beautiful young woman with a large Doberman pinscher she doted on and a wide circle of friends. She had had her left eyebrow pierced, and she liked to wear sparkly rings and dangling earrings. Sometimes she used turquoise eyeliner. In early July that year, as the sun had just begun its lowering arc toward the south and toward summer’s long waning, she abruptly put an end to the story by taking her own life, twenty days short of her twentieth birthday. Schemmel told me, “I have tried hard over the last couple [of years] to find out more about what led to her death, but her family has never responded to any of my inquiries.” And that was after nearly two decades of sending him cards every year and photos of the girl he saved. I wrote to Sabrina’s friends and family on many occasions, but received no response.
So we don’t know why, and perhaps we will never know why. She killed herself in Arizona, where vital records are not public. The cause of her suicide may have been clinical depression. Death may have been foreshadowed in the entire arc of Sabrina Lee’s life, beginning with the crash, which would have embedded itself permanently in the landscape of her unconscious emotional memories, even if she remembered none of it consciously. And then she lived with the never-ending repetition of the crash through the yearly reminders of the man who saved her. Even at the age of twelve, she identified herself to the world as the baby girl who was saved by the stranger. Sabrina is buried at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Mesa, Arizona. The inscription reads, “Those we have held in our arms for a little while we hold in our hearts forever.” The plaque displays photographs of Sabrina on ski slopes, in a bathing suit at perhaps the age of twelve, and with her Doberman near the end of her life.
Rene Le Beau was thrown from the plane. She was found dead, out of her seat, lying on her side, stretched out, with her long red hair flowing all around her. She was twenty-three years old and had been flying for seven months.
Mark Fageol, chief photographer for the Sioux City Journal, left the newspaper business and became a railroad engineer. He drove a train on a regular run from North Platte, Nebraska, to Marysville, Kansas.
The last scheduled airline flight of a DC-10 in the United States occurred on January 7, 2007, when Northwest Airlines Flight 98 arrived in Minneapolis from Hawaii. When this book went to press in late 2013, Biman Airlines of Bangladesh had the last two DC-10s that were still being used for scheduled flights carrying passengers. The airline sold one for scrap after its last flight and was attempting to donate the other to a museum somewhere in the United States.
On June 18, 1990, a healthy baby boy, Emil, was born to Sylvia and Jeffrey Tsao.
* Haynes was probably at the peak of his abilities as a pilot and could have flown safely for many more years. The rule was widely recognized as a bad one, and in 2007, the age for mandatory retirement was raised to 65. It could still be raised further. All pilots will tell you that they like those “crusty old birds” such as the pilot who flew survivors to Chicago from Sioux City on the night of July 19, 1989.