Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (12 page)

A DC-10 is nearly two hundred feet long, and she was in the last row. The initial point of impact was about a hundred feet ahead of her. In fact, as she tried to control her panic, the impact had already begun.

When the plane rolled out lined up with Runway 22,
Fitch understood that they had 369,000 pounds
of flesh and metal going
nearly 250 miles an hour
with no way to stop it. “
But,” he later said
, “the beautiful thing was at the end of the runway was a wide open field that was laced in corn.” The
Sioux City airport leased about a thousand acres
of its land to the Sioux Land Farm Agency, which planted corn and soybeans in the fields and in return provided the airport with about 15 percent of its operating revenue. This meant that 1819 Uniform would be landing, in effect, on a rich, green, wet, midsummer farm. “And I thought, Perfect,” Fitch said later. He had envisioned all that plant matter gently slowing the plane, cushioning the blow. It would be like dropping a ceramic vessel into a pile of newly mown hay. It would not even crack. Then the eight doors would open, the yellow slides would blossom, and all the passengers would emerge from the cathedral in a jubilant procession. “And we’re going to the nearest saloon,” said Fitch, “and I’m buying.”

In the final seconds of the flight, at an altitude of about four hundred feet, Haynes saw their excessive speed and was concerned that the tires would explode on contact. The plane would normally land at about half its present speed. Haynes told Fitch to take the power off. Records, too, told Fitch to cut the power. But Fitch was on his own, Records said. Fitch later said that he had planned to close the throttles as the plane touched down, “but then I looked over to see the incredibly high sink rate, eighteen hundred feet per minute toward the ground, three times in excess of the structural capability of the landing gear. So I firewalled both the engines.” He stretched his arms forward as far as he could reach, straining against his harness as he sat in Dvorak’s seat.

The
left engine spooled up
to almost 96 percent power, while the right reached only 66 percent at first. It’s possible that Fitch pushed both throttles the same amount and the engines happened to respond that way. The
relationship between the position of the throttle
and the thrust that an engine produces is not linear. The second possibility is that Fitch made a mistake. While he thought that he was pushing the throttles evenly, he may not have done so. A third possibility is that the plane, which had been trying to turn right for more than forty minutes, turned right once more on its own. Whatever the case, the right wing went from about 2 degrees of bank to more than 20. This happened less than a hundred feet above the ground, and it happened fast. Once the right wing began to drop, it took but a fraction of a second for it to tear into the runway at roughly the same time that the right landing gear gouged a trench through the concrete.

Records believes that whatever caused the difference in thrust, “had we made a real nice touchdown, we probably would have gone off the end of the runway at 150 knots with no brakes, no nose-wheel steering, no spoilers, speed brakes. Who knows what could have happened? As it turns out, maybe we were fortunate.” He believes that the difference in power was not a blunder on Fitch’s part but was nothing more than the difference in the time the engines took to spool up.

Tim Owens was strapped into his jump seat at 3-Left looking at all the seats on his side of C-Zone, all the heads down, all the way back to Dave and Susan Randa, with Owens’s dear friend Susan White in her jump seat right behind them. Along with the other flight attendants, he was shouting, “Brace! Brace! Brace!” over and over again. At the same time, he kept glancing out the small window in his exit door.

“I could see how excessively fast we were going,” he said later. And he could no longer shout “brace” with quite the same conviction, because he knew that the plane was going to crash and considered it likely that everyone would die. “Right before we hit the ground, I took one last look out the window and everything was just a blur.” He braced himself as hard as he could, gritted his teeth, put his head back, and then felt himself slam into the ground. He felt the plane bounce and tip and then pole-vault up onto its nose. He vividly recalled looking down his aisle toward Susan White. He couldn’t see her, but he knew where she was, sixteen rows away. He could see her elbow as she crossed her arms and tried to brace in her jump seat facing the toilets. And then to Owens’s amazement, the entire tail of the airplane broke off and departed. As the plane rolled up onto its nose, the great aperture that had opened where the tail had been now angled across an arc of intense blue sky, and then—shockingly—it pointed directly at the high summer sun. “And I was blinded by the sunlight,” Owens said. That shaft of pure sun streamed down the aisles, supersaturating all the colors and giving the scene a surreal cast. The celestial light flooded the cabin, illuminating a sight that Owens would never forget, as people who were still strapped into their seats were torn free and sent tumbling out onto the runway.
Some of the banks of seats were thrown high
into the air, far above the fuselage in great parabolas, shot there as if from a cannon by the centrifugal force as the aft end of the fuselage swung in its majestic, flaming arc. What must it have been like to take that ride, alive, aloft, alone, aware, unhurt as yet and looking down on the green earth? Then as the plane continued its balletic progress, the breached fuselage swept past the sun, and the cabin went dim once more.

“It all happened so fast,” Owens said. “The plane was breaking apart, things were coming apart around me, people were screaming.” Soon his view of those people who were being cast out was obscured as Owens was buried by debris. And once again he became certain that this was how his life would end.

Far away in the departed tail, Martha Conant could not yet tell what was happening. All she knew was that the plane was shaking and shuddering and vibrating and wrenching so violently that she couldn’t keep her hands on the seat in front of her. Conant’s left hand flew free, as if of its own accord, and she involuntarily took hold of John Hatch’s necktie.

“And then this voice in my head said, ‘If you panic, you’re not going to be able to get out.’ ” She withdrew her hand and put it back on the seat in front of her and tried to steady herself. Only seconds had passed, but it seemed much longer.

“Then there was this huge rush of air and dirt and grit.” She involuntarily closed her eyes. She felt as if she had blacked out. When her memory trace picked up again, she was still in motion with a hot torrent of air and sharp grit, like shattered glass, lashing her face. She had barely enough time to think, as she reported, “Oh, I’m still alive.” Then her memory was again wiped clean. It seemed to her that she blacked out again. When her consciousness resumed, all motion had stopped.

Conant opened her eyes and saw the earth, a scabby field of grass and weeds, hot and moist from recent rains. “There was nothing in front of me,” she said, still incredulous after more than two decades. She could not see the seat in front of her, now tilted to the right, torn almost free of its mounts. John Hatch to her left, the couple to her right—if they were there, she could not see them either, nor Susan White in her jump seat nor Dave Randa and his mother. To Conant’s right, nine-year-old Yisroel Brownstein and Richard Howard Sudlow were buried in debris. The entire plane was gone, that much was true. And in Conant’s perception, only the hurtful beauty of the green earth remained, the place she had so dearly longed to be beneath the vast, impossibly blue sky. Some colossal force had set her gently on this soil and had opened a passage the size of the entire circumference of the ship through which to escape. Nothing else existed. If she’d been looking for a miracle, it appeared that she had found one.

She took a breath and paused for a moment to let this astonishing sight sink in. From somewhere far off, the cicada sound of a red-winged blackbird reached that section of seats. Killdeer raced past the opening into the corn. “I unbuckled my seat belt. The seat was tilted forward, and I dropped probably two or three feet to the ground.” The drop was closer to eight or ten feet. She landed in torn and twisted metal, but noticed nothing, felt nothing, not even as she walked out, cutting her ankles on the twisted shards. It seemed as easy as stepping out of a car. She stood on the warm earth in the smell of the corn, the moist heat of the day. In her view now, as she looked around, she saw no fire, no airplane, no debris. “I was the only person out there, and I kind of looked to see—where should I go?” She turned and turned and turned, peering, searching. Then she saw something in the distance that she thought might be people or vehicles, and at last her emotional system let her go. She ran flat out with her heart jammed up in her throat. Airports are big. The way seemed endless. A man appeared as if out of nowhere, and said, “Where did you come from? How did you get here?”

“Off that plane,” she said, pointing to the foul cloud of black kerosene smoke that she could now see crawling across the green world, the blue sky. “And I am scared to death.”

CHAPTER SIX

T
he
seven-foot fan on the front of the CF6-6
engine is made of an alloy of titanium. So are some of the compressor wheels behind it. As you move back through the engine, where the combustion of fuel must take place, the temperature will grow so hot that titanium cannot withstand it. The combustion chamber, therefore, is made of one of the so-called nickel superalloys designed to hold together in the extreme heat. The turbine wheels at the back, which drive the engine, are also made of nickel superalloys.

Miners in medieval Saxony were after copper and silver, but they sometimes had their wares contaminated by niccolite, a bedeviling alloy of arsenic and nickel. They called it
kupfernickel
, a reference to Old Nick, Satan himself. When Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, a Swedish chemist, isolated that metal in 1751, the name stuck. This hard white metal certainly could have been the culprit in the explosion. It’s more than three times as dense as titanium (and hence weighs considerably more). When it spins, the stresses on it are great indeed. And superalloy wheels had been known to break before.

But nickel was elsewhere in the plane too. The hydraulic lines were made of stainless steel, which is part nickel. When Dvorak had watched the hydraulic pressure fall from three thousand pounds per square inch to zero, when he assessed the damage to the tail, he most likely knew that something had gone wrong with those stainless-steel lines. Nickel may have been the culprit, but nickel was the victim too. No one yet knew. The trouble may have been elsewhere.

For titanium is a strange and temperamental material. Perhaps it should have been named for Old Nick, because it certainly could pass for the work of a diabolical intelligence. It seems almost as if it were put on earth specifically to tempt us into this clever trick of spinning wheels and launching ourselves into flight. For one thing, titanium is found everywhere—in sand, rock, clay, soil, coal, water, oil, plants of all sorts, and in the flesh of animals. We find titanium in lava from volcanoes, in the bottom of the ocean, and in the meteorites that fall from the sky. We can find it in our own bones. Moreover, there are plenty of places where titanium is highly concentrated in a form that is easily mined. Titanium dioxide is a common ingredient in paint. It makes it white. If the paint is colored, titanium gives it opacity. Titanium dioxide makes great sunscreen. And it’s not poisonous.

An Englishman named William Gregor originally described titanium in 1791. In 1795 a German pharmacist named Martin Heinrich Klaproth named it for the mythical Titans because of its strength. But titanium was unusable because of its strong affinity for oxygen and nitrogen. Whenever one chemist or another tried to isolate titanium, he wound up with metal that was contaminated with those other elements. It wasn’t until 1910 that an American chemist named Matthew Arnold Hunter managed to combine titanium with chlorine, making titanium tetrachloride and revealing yet another confounding mystery about that metal.

Titanium tetrachloride is a clear liquid, what’s known as a “rare transition metal halide.”
Transition
means that titanium is always on the way to becoming something else. It does not want to be itself, because one of its shells of electrons, the sub-shell designated by the letter d, is not completely filled, so titanium constantly longs to mate with a material that can fill that shell. Nitrogen and oxygen will suffice, but chlorine can strip those electrons away to form titanium tetrachloride.

In the business of making this elusive metal, titanium tetrachloride became known as “Tickle,” based on its chemical formula: TiCl
₄
. Tickle must be kept in a vacuum or in a vessel that contains an inert gas, such as helium or argon. If Tickle is exposed to air, it combines with moisture and bursts into view as a cloud of corrosive white smoke that is made up of tiny droplets of hydrochloric acid. Titanium is full of tricks. It will burn in chlorine gas and will explode in red fuming nitric acid. Melt it with nitrogen, and it turns into a ceramic material that looks like gold and is suitable for coating everything from knife blades to prosthetic hips. By
varying the thickness
and the voltage used in anodizing titanium, it can be made pink, green, purple, blue, brown, and any number of colors in between. The trouble with those materials is that they are so brittle they crack except when used as a thin coating.

Darrell F. Socie, professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois and an expert in metal fatigue, said of such materials, “They’re intermetallic compounds, but they’re really a ceramic. They are very hard, very brittle, very strong and have no ductility.” That means they won’t bend or stretch. They break.

Titanium is a paradox, a thing that both can and can’t exist. James Wildey, a metallurgist, was thirty-seven years old when he helped investigate the crash of United Flight 232 for the NTSB. He said, “Under some conditions, titanium can be soft and weak. When soft, it can stretch without breaking. Under other conditions, it can be hard and brittle like crystal. When mixed with small amounts of other elements, it can retain much of its hardness, but unlike crystal it is very tough.”
It is so tough that about half a million square feet
of it, just a third of a millimeter thick, was used to build the retractable roof of the Fukuoka Dome arena in Japan.