It was a little over an hour into United Flight 232 when the plane suffered its first explosion. “It was just so loud that there’s no way to describe how loud it was,” said Jan Murray, one of the seven flight attendants on board that day. “The plane was making sounds I never heard before.”
Those sounds were caused by the sudden loss of the DC-10’s No. 2 engine — and while that plane was able to fly on just two of its three engines, Flight 232 was about to endure a disastrous chain reaction that seemed to have one outcome: This plane was going to crash somewhere over Iowa, and it would be unsurvivable.
Yet as Laurence Gonzales details in his heart-stopping new book “Flight 232,” of the 296 people on board that day, 185 would survive — something no passenger, no crew member, no air traffic controller thought possible.
“The first thing that strikes your mind is, ‘Dear God, I’m going to die this afternoon,’” one survivor told Gonzales. “The only question that remains is: How long is it going to take Iowa to hit me?”
‘That can’t happen’
At 2:09 p.m. on July 19, 1989, United Flight 232 took off from Denver en route to Chicago. It was a normal flight, with passengers having their normal concerns — wanting to sit somewhere else, worries over making a connecting flight, meeting a family member on time — when, a half-hour into the flight, BOOM! went the engine, and the cabin went silent.
Jan Brown, 49, was the most experienced flight attendant on board. She went right to the cockpit. “I knocked on the door like we’re trained to do,” she said. “And the whole world just changed in an instant when that door opened . . . I’m guessing we’re at 37,000 feet, and I think this situation means we could go straight down.”
In what seemed like seconds, she reconvened with fellow attendants Jan Murray and Susan White. They held hands and prayed, then tried to go about business as usual.
When Murray emerged, clearly shaken, a passenger named Dennis Fitch — himself a DC-10 pilot instructor for United — grabbed her by the arm.
“Don’t worry about this,” he said softly. “This thing flies fine on two engines.”
“Oh no,” Murray said. “Both the pilots are trying to fly the plane, and the captain has told us that we have lost all our hydraulics.”
“Oh, that’s impossible,” Fitch replied. “It can’t happen.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s what we’re being told.”
“Well, there’s a back-up system.”
“We’re being told that’s gone too.”
Fitch still didn’t believe her. He told Murray to tell the pilots that he’d help in any way they wanted, and within minutes she was back at his seat. “They want you up there,” she said.
He moved as quickly and calmly as possible, and when the door to the cockpit opened, he was floored. “The scene to me, as a pilot, was unbelievable,” Fitch told Gonzales. The pilots were literally white-knuckling the controls. The hydraulics were gone. Fitch knew that what Murray had told him was true: This plane was going down.
‘Brace, brace, brace!’
Pilot Al Haynes was in desperate communication with Systems Aircraft Maintenance (SAM) in San Francisco, and it took specialists there two solid minutes to accept what Haynes was saying was true: Hydraulics gone, no controls.
“Whatever you do,” Haynes told SAM, “keep us away from the city.” He put Fitch on the throttles.
Jan Brown, meanwhile, was back in the cabin, and she was struck with a grim realization: There were children on this flight, more than 50, and several mothers clutching infants on their laps, yelling “What should I do with my baby?”’
Brown knew what her training mandated, and she hated what she had to tell them: Put your babies on the floor and try to cushion them with pillows. The airline industry provided no other option.
“As I’m saying this, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this has got to be the most ludicrous, ludicrous thing I’ve ever said in my life,’” Brown recalled. “I’m telling people to put their prize treasured possession on the floor? In other words, ‘Let’s just hope for the best.’ Everybody else has a seat belt. I was so appalled at what I was saying.”
By now the plane was lurching up and down, several hundred feet at a time. Nearly half an hour had elapsed. The plane was dumping fuel, which spewed along the windows. No one had yet announced to the passengers what was going on, but they knew, and were quiet.
Some began writing notes to loved ones; women began stashing their driver’s licenses in their bras; some began picking up Airphones, attempting one last goodbye.
Weighing 369,000 pounds and moving at 250 miles an hour — twice the speed of a normal landing — the plane was turning ever rightward. In the cockpit, the pilots were struggling to make it to Runway 22 at the airport in Sioux City.
It was 3:52 p.m. In the cabin, the crew began issuing orders: Remove your eyeglasses and jewelry. Take the pens out of your pockets. Bend down and grab your ankles and brace, brace, brace!
Pilot Al Haynes came over the intercom and briefed his passengers and crew. “This,” he said, “is gonna be the roughest landing you’ve ever had.”
‘Nobody can live through that’
The plane came in at 240 knots (560 mph groundspeed). The right wing sheared the runway and 10,000 pounds of fuel spilled out, erupting immediately. The tail and the cockpit broke off. The nose hit the ground and the plane flipped over, passengers dangling upside down.
“We just smashed into the earth,” Jan Brown recalled. She was strapped into her jump seat, and at the moment of impact, her exit door blew off and she was engulfed in flames. All the lavatory doors went flying, as did all water and liquids in the bathrooms.
“I would describe it as being in a tornado with the amount of soot and dirt that we were scraping up,” said flight attendant Susan White, then 25. “And then pieces of metal were just flying around the plane.”
So were passengers, still strapped in their seats, torn from their joists and sucked out on impact.
In first class, passenger Brad Griffin’s seat belt broke apart. When he looked up, “the plane’s disintegrating. Everything’s starting to turn gray, because of the particles and whatever parts of the plane are falling apart.”
Then he was ejected up in the air, propelled about 200 yards over the fireball that was the fuselage, thinking, “If I go in that fire, I’ll be a dead man.” He landed in a cornfield, and was in such shock that he stood up, even though he’d suffered second- and third-degree burns and had broken both feet. “The plane’s far from me,” Griffin recalled. “And I go, ‘Well, what should I do now?’ And my brain just said, ‘Go in slow motion. Just lie down.’”
Fitch recounted the scene in the cockpit for Gonzales: “The windshield lightened for a split second, darkened a second time. Heat and humidity and violence beyond any words I could ever hope to put forth. My next recognition was being still. I was upside down, I had mud in my eyes and my ears, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t move . . . Tremendous pain. My ribs were broken and they punctured my right lung cavity and stuck in there. Just couldn’t get a breath of air.”
The men in the control tower went silent. Controller Kevin Bachman collapsed to his knees, then fled the room in tears. “It was just surreal,” supervisor Mark Zielezinski told Gonzales. “Three of us at the same time said, ‘My God, nobody could live through that.’”
As smoke billowed and paper streamed though the air, first responders rushed in — yet they were held back by the smoke and flames and wandering passengers, who looked like the walking dead. One survivor, a man in a suit, stood up, looked around for his suitcase, grabbed it and walked off. Others picked up stray liquor mini-bottles and started drinking.
Other survivors were mangled in ways these responders had never seen: The woman whose skin looked as though it had been shorn by a cheese grater. The clothes melted into skin. The woman scalped from eyeballs back. The broken leg so mangled, the foot was up to the hip.
Mark Reinders, a cub reporter on the scene for the Sioux City Journal, recalled the dead hanging “like tinsel at Christmas.” One survivor, a woman hanging upside down, screamed and screamed until rescuers cut her seat belt, and then she went quiet and her body broke apart: The belt had kept her together.
There were multiple explosions as the fuselage burned at an estimated 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Firefighter Larry Niehus pulled out as many passengers as he could — some alive, some dead, one a little girl who didn’t make it — sometimes having to reach out and cut their seat belts off. Before he knew it, the fuselage was melting, sealing itself inward, and he had to get out. He never forgot the dead girl he carried out, “about the age of my daughter at that time. I had a really hard time with that.”
Members of the Iowa National Guard streamed in to help, among them Lt. Col. Dennis Nielson. As he approached the wreckage, he saw a small, 40-something woman struggling to carry 3-year-old Spencer Bailey, and yelling for help. Nielson said the boy “fell into my arms” and he rushed to an ambulance, and that image — a photograph shot by the Journal’s Gary Anderson — went worldwide.
It was later memorialized as a bronze statue called “The Spirit of Siouxland.”
Nielson later went to see the boy in the hospital, and when asked how he rescued Spencer, he said, “God saved the child — I just carried him.” Those words are engraved on the memorial.
Unthinkable survival
One hundred twelve people died on Flight 232, and it is considered one of the worst crashes in commercial aviation. Yet the actions of the pilots, the crew and the passengers that day resulted in the otherwise unthinkable survival of 185.
Al Haynes and Dennis Fitch, along with first officer William Roy Records and second officer Dudley Dvorak, crash-landed a plane with no hydraulics and no controls.
The crew prioritized the safety of their passengers over their own, with Jan Brown — who saw a ball of fire coming her way on impact — among the most heroic. Just half of her hair was singed away, and once the plane stopped, she stood at the nearest opening, holding debris out of the way while she calmly ushered people out.
And there was passenger Jerry Schemmel, 29, who told a frantic mother to jump out of the wreckage, that he’d find her son. When another passenger tried to stop him, Schemmel pushed past: “I know I couldn’t see anything, and I do remember honing in on the cries,” he told Gonzales. “‘Keep crying,’ I remember saying to myself. ‘Please, keep crying.’” He found the baby and pulled him out.
For these reasons, the crash of Flight 232 is also regarded as one of the most successful disasters in commercial aviation. The collaboration in the cockpit resulted in the best possible outcome, and in the wake of the crash, airlines quit viewing the National Transportation Safety Board as the enemy and began cooperating.
Some things, though, haven’t changed: While the NTSB has implored the Federal Aviation Administration to mandate safety protocols for babies, the agency has refused.
In 1998, then-FAA administrator J. Randolph Babbitt wrote that requiring families to buy seats for children 2 years old or younger “would significantly raise the net price of travel . . . [and] divert some family travel from the air transportation system to the highway system . . . I consider our actions complete.”