Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (14 page)

And yet that crew had done something considered impossible by all the engineers that McDonnell Douglas and United Airlines could assemble: they had brought a plane home without using any of the conventional flight controls. If you’re a seasoned pilot, you are one with the aircraft. Your nerves grow out into the wings and tail and your brain connects up with all the control surfaces. You can tell when you’re slowing or falling or climbing. You can tell with your eyes closed. Haynes and his crew had that deep sense of the airplane. They were in the zone. According to his wife Rosa, Fitch later commented that “he had never felt more alive as when he stepped into the cockpit that day.” But long before Fitch entered the cockpit, if Haynes had not reached over and closed the left throttle and advanced the right one as the plane rolled to the right, everyone would have been killed.

No one yet had any idea what had happened to that plane to cause this accident. There was a loud noise, an engine quit, and the hydraulics failed, leaving the plane uncontrollable. As Robert MacIntosh, the lead investigator for the NTSB, drove toward his home in Virginia, he wondered how that could happen. Seven miles beneath the aircraft at a company called Mellowdent Hybrids in Storm Lake, Iowa, workers heard the explosion when the engine blew. Like distant thunder, the sound took about half a minute to reach them. Then they turned toward the source above their rich summer fields. They looked up at the white jet and saw something amazing: great pieces of the craft spinning and falling in a hail of metal, and one big piece so large that Chuck Eddy, the sheriff of Buena Vista County, would later stand inside of it. Another piece that looked like half of a giant steel ring, said Eddy, was “whirling as it came down, sounding like a helicopter.” One of the farmers felt the ground shudder as a heavy piece of metal hit. But in the green sea of corn and soybeans, it was impossible to say where it might have fallen.

Even as Kevin Bachman shouted, “He’s gonna make it!” the air traffic controllers saw the left wing come up. The buildings between the tower and the runway hid the right wing, but Bates said, “You could see the jolt in the aircraft when apparently it hit the ground.” As the DC-10 shuddered and began grinding off its own right wing, fracturing the main spar, it emerged from behind the buildings already on fire. Then the fireball and smoke rose, obscuring the middle portion of the plane from view, as banks of seats began vaulting and somersaulting high above the flames.

Bates heard Zielezinski say, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.”

“It was so dead silent in the tower cab,” Bates recalled, “and he said it softly, but it was almost like it was an extremely loud break of the silence.” In fact, at the moment of the crash, a scream or yell can be heard on the tape recording of Dale Mleynek’s position as he transmitted, “All emergency equipment, proceed.”

When the plane burst into flames, Zielezinski said, “three of us at the same time said, ‘My God, nobody could live through that.’ ”

“At the point that the fireball came on up,” Bates continued, “the tail snapped off, hit the ground, tumbled once, and then went straight on the taxiway and
stopped
. Just
bam!
I was terrified at that point, because I remembered the A-7s were on that taxiway.”
As the A-7 pilots watched, the tail came to a stop
about two hundred yards from the first aircraft in line, by Bates’s estimate. And inside that tail sat Richard Howard Sudlow, his body now draped over nine-year-old Yisroel Brownstein in an effort to protect him. After the tail snapped off, the rest of the plane began to rise up onto its nose as the left wing started its rotation. “I saw it
bounce
,” Bates said. “It was amazing. I never could believe that an aircraft could bounce, but it bounced on its nose . . . and then it landed on its back.”

Fitch said, “
We hit so hard
that my hands flew off the throttles.” As he described it, “a giant hand was behind my head, and it slammed my face down into the radio below me.” Then he “bounced back up like a Jack-in-the-box. And for some reason—why I don’t know—I looked left through a veil of blood, because blood was running over my eyes.” He saw “the captain’s profile—corn stalks going by.”

Fitch described the impact. “There was this terrible sound, tearing of metal, G-loads, there was yaw to the right. And simultaneous with that change of direction was this sensation that something was like drop-kicking your backside. You feel yourself coming up and over, head over heels. The windshield went completely green and brown. Split second. Cold air blowing on my left shoulder.”

When the right wing ruptured, more than ten thousand pounds of kerosene sprayed out and turned to an aerosol. The right landing gear tore an eighteen-inch deep gash in that World War II concrete. The right engine, number three, was ripped off the wing and demolished when it hit the runway as the landing gear collapsed. As Tim Owens watched the eerie mix of sunlight and firelight flood the cabin, the seats between rows 29 and 36 began ripping free and arching high in the air or else tumbling down the runway, including those carrying the Mixons, Cinnamon Martinez, Lena Ann Blaha, who had pointed out the damage on the tail to Jan Brown, and the boy beside her, James Matthew Bohn. Gene Chimura, sixty-three, in the starboard aisle seat in row 28,
suffered minor injuries
. In the rows behind him, except for a few children, who, owing to their short stature, were protected by the backs of their seats, nearly everyone else was killed. Brenda Ann Feyh’s scalp was ripped off, her head crushed, as she breathed in a spray of her own blood. Her son, Jason, eight, beside her, survived. He suffered brain damage and was in a coma for nineteen days. Likewise, in 32-A, six-year-old Lauren Marsh survived, while her mother, beside her in 32-B, died when her neck and spinal cord were snapped. The pattern continued with a few exceptions back through the rows, until all but one person died in each of rows 34 through 36. Rows 37 and 38—the last two rows—remained attached within the tail, and all but two of the people seated there survived.

As Richard Howard Sudlow and Elenore E. Gabbe, sixty-three, were dying in the last row, the single remaining engine, mounted on the left wing, was still running full throttle, because Fitch’s hands had been knocked from the controls and he was unable to shut it down. “
Like a pinwheel
, it’s just causing the airplane to rotate, because the engine’s pushing it around,” Fitch said. “When the tail broke off, the airplane is much heavier forward, so the airplane is now coming up in the air like a seesaw that somebody got off. And the cockpit is getting pointed straight to the earth, and we skip like a pogo stick. The first skip, when I saw the windshield go dark brown and green and I still felt the air-conditioning, we were still integral to the aircraft.” But on the second skip, “the stress caused the cockpit to break off like a pencil tip.” As that was happening, the lift on the left wing, as well as some thrust, perhaps, from the left engine, powered the plane around in a complete 360-degree rotation, spinning on its nose like a top before angling over and landing on its back.

Fitch continued his description from his point of view in the now separated cockpit: “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. I could feel the blood flowing up my face to my ears and up to my hair. 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.” Indeed, his punctured lung would almost kill him that first night, and the repair of his severed radial nerve would eventually require a nine-hour operation.

As the crew waited for someone to notice the cockpit, the controllers in the tower stared in silence at a scene they could scarcely comprehend.
Bachman turned away
from his position and fell to his knees on the floor of the tower, hanging his head, as Zielezinski and the other controllers gaped in horror. “And it was just, it was just surreal,” Zielezinski said. “I mean, there was smoke floating past the tower, and you could see paper and pamphlets and whatever just floating in the smoke, you know, it was just, it was—
really eerie
.”

Zielezinski put his hand on Bachman’s shoulder, recalled Bachman, and he “told me that I had done everything I could.”

Bachman stood up, quaking and ill, and
went unsteadily down the tower stairs
and burst into tears.

As Bates and Zielezinski and the others watched, the sunny scene of summer in Iowa turned to a gray and wintry landscape. “The thing that struck me the most,” Bates said, “was the shower of paper. It was like snow.” Then the sirens began their keening wail, as dozens of pieces of equipment began to move.

Bates said, “Here’s this fire, this plane that had broken into all these pieces, and the snow coming down. Millions of pieces of paper and Lord knows what else—clothing—and it fell on the field like snow. It was just amazing.” As the fire on Runway 17-35 burned out where fuel had spilled, Bates raised his binoculars and saw a set of two seats out on the concrete. “There was a man and a wife sitting in two seats. Their legs were pointed at ridiculous angles. His left shoulder was dislocated and [his arm] wrapped back around behind his head, and all I saw was red.”

Charles Owings, the local controller, broke the silence and broadcast an announcement to all aircraft on the frequency that Sioux Gateway Airport was closed. Luckily, the traffic was light. Then the emergency dispatcher radioed the helicopter, saying, “
MAC, I, we have the airplane down one half mile from the airport
. Start that way please, the plane is on fire.” Owings called the pilot, too, saying, “You’d better get in here, it’s real ugly.”

The pilot said solemnly, “We see.”

As the controllers watched the chaotic scene below them from their glass-walled crypt ninety feet in the air, in a vortex of blowing ash and paper, the tower returned to silence.

“We were totally helpless,” Bates said.

*
The airport property was planted in both soybeans and corn, and the cockpit had come to rest in the beans.

CHAPTER SEVEN

B
rad Griffin had his hands on the first class seat
in front of him, which was the first row in the airplane. Gerald Harlon Dobson, a retired state trooper from New Jersey, sat with his wife Joann, dressed in their festive Hawaiian clothes directly across from Rene Le Beau’s jump seat. Griffin had been meditating. He felt no fear, even though he could feel how unusually fast the plane was going. “And when we hit the runway,” Griffin recalled, “my seat belt pops.” He was stunned for a second, free in his seat, and he turned to look at Michael Kielbassa on his right.

“If this is as bad as it gets,” Griffin said, “we’ll be okay.”

It took but a second. When he turned to look forward toward Le Beau, as he later recalled, “the plane’s disintegrating. Everything’s starting to turn gray, because of the particles and whatever parts of the plane are falling apart. And it’s getting hard to breathe.” The cockpit was separating from the rest of the plane, and angels of fire were roaring around the open tube of the fuselage, even as the first class cabin began tearing away from the remainder of the craft. As fire bloomed in the air, it consumed all the oxygen. Griffin could feel himself suffocating and could feel the air heating up around him, as the fire from the fuel spraying out behind him moved forward and expanded into a deflagrating cloud. Looking ahead, he could distinguish less and less of the structure of the airplane, as the identifiable parts—the bulkhead, the galley, the jump seats for the flight attendants—were being transformed into dust. Griffin watched it all with detachment.

Then he was launched into flight. “I’m free in the air. When that plane breaks into pieces, I’m thrown out of the plane and I see the fire. And as I’m leaving the plane, I think, ‘If I go in that fire, I’ll be a dead man.’ ” He believes that he traveled 150 or 200 yards. “I land in a cornfield, and I’m unconscious for a minute or so—maybe two minutes, I don’t know. I’d worn sandals, and I’m feeling this coolness on my feet, and I go, ‘Oh, that feels good.’ ” He didn’t yet know that he had broken the bones in his feet. His feet had also sustained second- and third-degree burns from passing through the cloud of fire. “And I go, ‘No, that’s fuel, stand up.’ And I stand right up, and I look around. The plane’s far from me. And I go, ‘Well, what should I do now?’ And my brain just said, ‘Go in slow motion. Just lie down.’ I lie down, and I hear people yelling for help around me. And I yell for help.”

Greg Clapper had left his wife, Jody, and his daughters, Laura and Jenna, in the car on the side of the highway after urging them to go back to the mall to see
Peter Pan
. They watched Clapper run down the shoulder toward the airport half a mile distant, and then Jody pulled out into traffic and drove away. Clapper ran on for a time, reflecting on how little he knew about the mission he had set for himself. He had his PhD from Emory University and was teaching at Westmar College a few miles up the road in Le Mars. He was the chaplain for the Air National Guard. But he had no real-life experience to prepare him for an event of this magnitude. All at once, he was filled with misgivings about his role. He had been to Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University, but he hadn’t even been to the military chaplain school yet. He was merely an ordained minister. What resources could he fall back on? What help might he bring?

He stopped running. He looked toward the east at the angry vortex of smoke and debris. He threw his hands up to heaven and said, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace and help me to be your servant here.” And then on he ran toward whatever tasks awaited him. He knew that the situation would be bad. At the least, he’d be dealing with people who were severely shaken from the task of retrieving the dead.