Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (18 page)

Across the field at his WCDES command post, Gary Brown was hearing the same thing from his bosses and from the county administrator. They were telling him that someone named Stephen Wolf from United Airlines was insisting that the bodies be removed immediately. After a number of frustrating calls, Gary stormed over to the terminal building and went to the basement where he found a conference room jammed with employees of United Airlines. “And I walk in,” Gary later said, “and I didn’t look good, I didn’t smell good, and I was
not
in a good mood.”

Gary shouted, “Who the fuck is Stephen Wolf?” The room fell silent, as everyone turned to look at the bull-like visage of Gary Brown.

A deceptively mild-looking man in round tortoise-shell spectacles, with reddish brown hair falling toward his bushy eyebrows and sporting a graying walrus mustache, Wolf said, “I’m Stephen Wolf. How can I help you?” He was the CEO of United Airlines.

“You’re making my life miserable,” Gary said, “and you need to stop.” Wolf then assigned Gary Brown a United employee as liaison to the command post, “and it was very smooth after that,” said Brown.

At about eleven o’clock that night, Randall felt that a workable plan was in place and that he could be of no further use until morning. Because of the scarcity of hotel rooms, a college called Morningside had opened its doors to house many of the technical experts and investigators who had come to town. Randall retired to a room in the dormitory for a few hours of sleep.

CHAPTER NINE

T
he
great fan at the front of the CF6-6 engine
pulls air into the compressors. Once the air is compressed, it has to enter the combustion chamber. That super-heated air, however, is moving at about four hundred miles an hour at that point, far too fast to sustain a flame. Moreover, that flame will burn at more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt the nickel alloy that the combustion chamber is made of.

In 1989, Nicholas Edward Cherolis was an engineer at General Electric, specializing in what’s known as failure analysis. He worked on the team that investigated the crash of United Flight 232. He was one of the detectives who figured out what went wrong with 1819 Uniform and GE engine number 451-243. I asked Cherolis to explain jet engines to me, and he did a good job right up until we reached the subject of the combustor. Then he began talking about “the black art of making the fuel nozzles themselves mix the fuel and the air that’s coming in around it into the perfectly combustible mixture that they need.” When I asked him about the aerodynamicists who design the swirl and vortex patterns of air and fuel that the combustor had to produce to make flight possible, he said, “That’s all voodoo to me. I have no idea what they’re doing.” It was as if I had asked him to describe the work of the devil. He was expressing not an ignorance of his profession but the sharp cultural divide that has existed since the early days of NASA between those who design the interiors of jet engines and those who perform autopsies on them after they break. “They’re combustion designers,” Cherolis said. “I don’t talk to ’em.” He said the air flowing through the engine doesn’t really stop, but the flame stands still, or else the necessary fire would travel out the end of the engine and be gone: a flameout.

Here’s what happens: The fans and compressor wheels blow air backward. When some of that air reaches the combustor, it hits a diffuser. The diffuser performs several functions. The pattern of tiny holes slows the speed of the air so that the flame isn’t blown out, but it also allows the air into the combustion chamber in a complex aerodynamic dance that makes efficient combustion possible. Some people spend their whole careers studying those vortex patterns and the holes that make them. The well-respected primer on turbine engines by Bill Gunston says, “
It is usual to design each fuel burner
so that [the flame front] is situated in the center of a strong swirling vortex. The reduced pressure in the center then tends to suck air back into it, causing a region where the flow is in the upstream direction, providing conditions for stable burning with the flame effectively anchored in space.”

In addition, those patterns of holes spray a layer of cooler air across the inner surface of the combustion chamber. This cooler air protects the metal from the 3,000-degree flame. Only by the most intricate and clever ducting of cool air through those holes can the engine be saved from self-annihilation. If flame should touch metal, the walls would turn to slag, and in a fraction of a second the whole chamber would flow guttering into space, reducing the engine to a heap of scrap. That presented another possibility for what might have gone wrong with Flight 232.

That stable flame front forms a hoop of fire held in place by competing aerodynamic forces and extruding its white hot fluid out the back of the combustor and on through the turbine blades, driving them to power all the wheels up front that create the wind. The big fan in front—the number one fan—provides 85 percent of the thrust. The turbine wheels extract almost all of the energy from the burning of fuel and transmit it forward. Any energy that still remains in the exhaust gas helps to push the plane forward.

It is a marvel that such a contraption can hold together for one flight, let alone tens of thousands in its lifetime, but it generally does so because the engineers are smart and the testing is rigorous. And yet several of the investigators of the crash of 1819 Uniform had already begun to suspect that the failure was caused not by the combustor but rather by the spinning wheels.

One of the designers of the CF6-6 engine, Martin Hemsworth, said, “
We elected to design
the rotor [fan disk] for 54,000 cycles . . . with the expectation that we would follow the FAA guidelines and assign an initial operating interval of 18,000 cycles;
*
in other words, one-third.”

“A major engineering concept regarding strength of parts,” explained Robert Benzon of the NTSB, “is that you design something, test it until it fails, then make it 50 percent stronger to ensure that it doesn’t fail.”

And the designers do not guess. They don’t stop with calculating what the engine can withstand. They test it aggressively and even destructively. Hemsworth explained, “For example, when bird resistance is evaluated, that has to be done in a complete engine, and pneumatic guns are set up in front of the engine and the four-pound and pound-and-a-half and small birds are shot at the engine at a rate and location that is specified in the FAA regulations to evaluate damage tolerance.”

The engineers also are simultaneously pushing toward the absolute limits of the materials involved—the hottest temperature, the thinnest blades, the fastest speeds, the highest altitudes, the longest service life—and yet are ever vigilant concerning the need to kill as few people as possible.

Ben Bendixen had been a pilot in the Navy, as well as a medical officer and an aircraft accident investigator. When he left the Navy, he went into private practice as a physician in Denison, Iowa, about sixty miles from Sioux City. He joined the Air National Guard and worked as the medical officer for the 185th. His normal schedule with the Guard was to fly a training run early on Wednesday mornings so that he could be seeing patients at his satellite clinic in Ute, Iowa, by 1:30 in the afternoon. For reasons he was never able to learn, he was scheduled to fly at 1:30 in the afternoon on July 19, 1989. Although he was irritated by the change, he decided to go ahead and fly the hop and then stay late at his clinic that night.

When he and his lead pilot, Al Smith, returned from their practice run over Kansas, Bendixen recalled, “I had just taxied into my parking place and crawled out of the airplane and started walking up the ramp.” In the meantime, the other four A-7s had landed but could not move from their position on Taxiway Lima between the two main runways because the DC-10 was too close to the airport. “If you’ve ever heard an airplane crash,” said Bendixen, “it has a very distinctive sound, a very distinctive thoomp! Muffled thump.” He was describing the bursting of the thin balloon of the aluminum skin as everything—pressurized air, fuel, paper, people, glittery computer tape, hundred-dollar bills, and pineapples—came bursting into the open. It was a wet and tremendously powerful sound. It had the same reflexively nauseating quality as hearing someone vomit. “I looked up and here’s this great big black cloud up at the north end of the field with flame inside it, and I remember saying to myself, Oh shit, they won’t need me now.”

He continued up the ramp. At fifty-one years of age, he was the lone medical officer for the base, but he assumed that everyone on board had been killed. They’d be needing pathologists, mortuary services, and Greg Clapper, that new chaplain they’d hired. Bendixen said he was walking “sort of slowly. And then I thought to myself, you never know.” Bendixen hurried across the ramp. Inside the maintenance control building, he struggled out of his torso harness and his G-suit. He ran outside. “And just by chance, my ambulance and my medics happened to come driving across the ramp. So I waved them down, threw the guy in the right front seat into the back, and away we went.” As his crew sped away toward the smoke, he silently said a prayer in much the same way that Clapper had done. He later recalled saying to himself, “God, I’ve never been in this situation before. Give me some guidance.”

As the ambulance rolled onto Runway 22, Bendixen spotted several banks of seats from the coach cabin. He ordered the driver to stop. The shredded red-and-black-checked upholstery of the coach seats was stained with blood and disgorging its foam rubber padding. By Bendixen’s reckoning, the dozen or more people before him were either dead or not long for this world. He passed his expert eye over the people one by one, and assessed them in his mind. Using endotracheal tubes, he and his medics established airways for those who were still alive. Most had severe head injuries, but “there was one woman at the end of the row who was alive and obviously conscious, with a little boy sitting beside her on the ground.”

“Is this your little boy?” Bendixen asked her.

“No,” she said, “but would you check my husband next to me?”

Her husband was dead beside her. The woman may have been Lydia Atwell of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bendixen said, “She really didn’t appear to need treatment.”

At about the same time that Bendixen began his impromptu triage, Bob Johnson, the triage officer with Siouxland Health Services, arrived on the scene and began acting in his official capacity in accordance with the WCDES disaster plan.
Ward Palmer, Johnson’s paramedic supervisor
, was on the field as well. “We have basically four different groups,” Palmer said later. “We have red, which is the critical. Yellow, which is moderate injury. Green, which is basically your walking wounded. And then there’s black, which is the mortally injured or dead.” Palmer had reached the field so fast that not all of the mortally wounded had died. “That’s one of the problems we had,” he said. “We were sitting there waiting for it, so they didn’t have that time to die.” For example, Palmer came upon a man who was lying on the runway. “He basically had both legs and both arms amputated. He asked me, ‘Am I gonna live?’ ”

Palmer told him, “We’re gonna do what we can for you,” but he knew that he could not save the man. “He stayed there until he passed. He was one of those, you know: he didn’t have the time to die.”

Palmer stayed in one place, while Air National Guard men and women with backboards and stretchers brought the wounded to him. He would then assign each victim to one of the categories—red, yellow, green, or black. A transport officer would assign them to an ambulance or helicopter or some other means of transport for the trip to the hospital. Through this system, Palmer was able to move all of the seriously wounded people to the hospital within about forty-five minutes after the crash.

While Palmer and Bendixen worked with their teams, many other members of the Air National Guard responded as well, doing whatever they could to help.
Among those volunteers, Jim Walker
, twenty-five, was a full-time lieutenant flying the A-7 Corsair. Walker happened to be standing on the ramp with a few other pilots when they saw the DC-10 line up with the old Runway 04-22.

“Wow,” Walker remembered saying to his fellow pilots, “this guy’s really going to be embarrassed. He’s landing on a closed runway.” Then he did a double take and thought, “My God, he’s awful fast and extremely shallow.” The plane disappeared behind some buildings and then “just a moment thereafter [I] saw an enormous fireball and then saw the aircraft cartwheel and another fireball and just a huge amount of debris. Oddly enough, it looked like it was paper.”

Walker assumed that no one could have survived, but a few minutes later another pilot, Norm Frank, pulled up in a pickup truck and said, “Get in, we’re going to pick up survivors.” And with that, Walker’s life was changed forever, as he was swept up in the rescue. He boarded the truck, and Frank raced onto the field.

“There were bodies everywhere,” Walker said.

Frank stopped the truck, “and we just sat there looking at all these dead people,” Walker recalled. Most of them were lying in the grassy easement between the concrete and the crops. “And the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen in my life happened next. It actually looked like something from
Night of the Living Dead
, because many of these dead bodies all of a sudden started sitting up and standing up and I remember saying, ‘Is everyone else seeing this?’ ”

Many others confirmed what Walker saw. “That’s absolutely true,” Gary Brown said. “Because I was there, and I saw it firsthand.” Brown elaborated: “As the aircraft passed in front of me, I pulled out there, and I literally saw people getting up, injured, and looking around, walking toward me.”

James Hathaway saw it too. He later said that as he arrived in the seconds after the crash, “
there were a lot of people
that stumbled up the runway and slid up the runway in seats; and those people—some of those people that were uninjured were simply unbuckling their seat belts and getting out of their seats and walking toward the sirens.”