Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (26 page)

Jerry Schemmel felt at last that he had put enough distance between himself and the plane to feel safe from an explosion. He paused to examine the baby in his arms. It was not Evan Jeffrey Tsao. It was “a little girl in a light blue dress.” He checked her all over but found no sign of injury other than a small scrape on her cheek. And then she gave Schemmel “a big, beautiful smile.” He would later learn that her name was Sabrina Lee Michaelson. Schemmel hurried through the corn and eventually found himself at the Grassy Knoll. He saw a young woman who seemed uninjured, standing on the rise in the land in a light-blue skirt and a white blouse.

As Crain stood contemplating all that had happened, she saw a man in a suit and tie walking quickly toward her with a look of determination on his face and a baby in his arms. “Here,” he said, holding the baby out to her. “Can you hold her? I rescued her from the plane, but I don’t know where her family is.”

“Sure,” Crain said, taking Sabrina Lee from Schemmel. “Being a mother,” she told me, “I just held her. Her diaper was gone, but she just had a little bruise on one cheek.” As Crain watched the man recede into the corn, she held Sabrina on her hip and consoled her. The child seemed so content. “She wasn’t even crying.” Then Crain heard a voice call out, “Oh, my God, my God! You’ve found my little girl! My baby! My baby! There she is!” Mark Michaelson came running out of the corn toward Crain with his hands outstretched, saying, “Thank you, thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” Crain said, as the other members of the Michaelson family emerged from the corn, Mark’s wife Lori and their other children, Andrew, four, and Douglas, six, and all of them uninjured. By Friday, baby Sabrina and family would be on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
with Margo Crain.

But even as the Michaelson family was being reunited, Crain heard Sylvia Tsao screaming, “My baby! Where is my baby?” Crain turned toward the voice and saw Sylvia crawling on her hands and knees as if to find the lost child beneath the very earth.

For Schemmel everything happened too fast that day. After giving baby Sabrina to Crain, he took off in the direction of the burning plane “for what possible reason I do not know,” as he later recalled. Schemmel ran to the plane and found that the fire had completely enveloped the fuselage. Yet he was still faced with the nagging sense that he had left some important business unfinished. It was too late. No one was going in now. No one was coming out. The rest of the day was one surreal experience after another for him. People were dazed and wandering, covered with blood amid the intense and beautiful green of the corn. One man knelt beside Sister Mary Viannea, praying.

When the engine blew up, Sister Mary later said
, “I grabbed my rosary and said, ‘Dear Lord, this rosary is for everyone on this plane. Please keep us in your hands.’ ” Miles below, a woman named Terry Moran was driving her car up the long sweeping hill of Floyd Boulevard, headed for the high bluffs above Sioux City, where an old boys’ school, Trinity College, stood abandoned. In the early 1980s, a group of Catholics had joined together to devote themselves to the Virgin Mary. They wanted to tear down the old college and build a center in her honor on the highest bluff in town. A priest named Father Harold Cooper led the effort. Their first bid for the property had been rejected some time earlier. Then Father Cooper buried a statue of Saint Joseph on the property and brought the group together to say the rosary every day in the hope that the Virgin Mary would hear their prayers and intercede on their behalf. When the group later made a lower offer—about half of the original bid—it was accepted. Into this atmosphere of hope, Terry Moran, one of the co-founders of the Marian Center at Trinity Heights, drove her car as fast as she could. She screeched to a halt and leapt out, shouting, “Start the rosary right away! A plane is coming in to make a crash landing right now!” Father Cooper began to lead the prayers for the fifteen or so people gathered there. They harmonized with Sister Mary Viannea, praying so high above them, as the DC-10 staggered in and exploded in flames on the runway.

Now Sister Mary sat on the ground in a cornfield surrounded by survivors. Several people reported seeing her methodically working her rosary beads through her fingers and saying Hail Marys one after another in both Polish and English. On the other hand, her red rosary was gone. “Mine was lost in the crash,” she said. Someone gave her another one to use in the aftermath. But she credited her special red rosary with saving all the people who survived. A childhood friend had bought it in Assisi and had it blessed in Fatima before giving it to Sister Mary. “I give credit to the rosary,” she said. “It was the rosary that saved us. I know it.” Terry Moran and the others who had prayed the rosary on the high bluff before the crash also credited the rosary with saving many lives. “It really was a miracle,” said Sister Mary.

As Schemmel wandered through the chaos, Air National Guard men and women in green fatigues materialized out of the corn like apparitions in a dream. A helicopter hovered, sharp and thunderous, reanimating the clothing on the corpses as if to raise the dead. Volunteers approached Gary Brown’s white truck with offerings of hundred-dollar bills. Schemmel meandered here and there, then came upon several seats in a pile and a woman sitting in one of them with a girl of eight or nine beside her. He ran to help them out of their seat belts, thinking that they had been overlooked in the confusion.
When he reached them
, he saw the tags on their wrists and realized that they were dead.

*
The airport was renamed Ronald Reagan National Airport in 1998.

*
Many people believed that the plane would explode. Many even reported that it did explode. In fact, it did not, although oxygen bottles and fire extinguishers burst in the fire.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

W
hen the billet of titanium
known as heat K8283 arrived at ALCOA in Cleveland, Ohio, technicians cut it into eight blanks weighing about seven hundred pounds each. Those blanks were destined to become fan disks for General Electric CF6-6 engines. The blanks, squat cylindrical columns sixteen inches in diameter and twenty-two inches deep, were put through a series of processes to prepare them for shipping to General Electric. The first was a forging operation that would make the blank the right shape to fit into a die. It would also knead the metal like bread dough to improve its microscopic crystalline structure. Then the blank was put through blocker forging to yield a crude approximation of the finished shape. Finisher forging gave the metal nearly its true shape but with enough excess material to allow for the fine machining it would undergo at GE. Heat treatment refined the crystalline structure of the metal further and gave it the right balance of strength and ductility for its life of spinning. Heating and working metal also helps dissolve impurities and further homogenizes the crystals. Gregory Williams, the manager of quality assurance in metallurgy for ALCOA, said, “
All of the preforming work
was done on a 3,000 ton hydraulic press between closed dies, typically heated to 500 degrees F. The forging stock was typically heated to 1,700 to 1,750 degrees F for these operations.” As the blanks went through these processes, technicians wrote serial numbers on them in crayon.

A
ring of metal was cut from around the bore
of each blank—the hole in the center—and another from around the outer edge. The inner ring was tested for purity and strength. The outer ring was not. Thus did the eight blanks made from heat K8283 obtain another set of papers certifying their suitability for the flight. The blanks were shipped to General Electric in May of 1971 to be machined and finished into CF6-6 fan disks and put on airliners. Those blanks now had a pedigree from TIMET and another from ALCOA. They had papers saying that they had been tested and were of a material suitable for service on a jet engine that would propel a plane carrying hundreds of people.

Those papers were wrong.

At GE, the blanks were forged to what’s known as “sonic shape” or rectilinear form.
As James W. Tucker
, the general manager of product operations at GE, put it, “The sides are parallel. . . . There are no dovetails machined in it.” The disks were then given another ultrasonic inspection. During this first stage of the process at GE, the technicians who were performing the ultrasonic tests could see something below the surface of the metal on one of the eight disks that had been cut from heat K8283. No one knew if it was a real defect or an artifact of the ultrasonic test itself. In the past, false-positive findings had caused GE to waste money and cut up perfectly good disks to look for defects. But the disk was pulled out of production just to be on the safe side. These slugs of metal, now weighing about 370 pounds each, were nearly ready to commit to the audacious act of spinning into flight and soaring high above the earth.

Of the eight blanks that ALCOA had made, GE machined seven into working fan disks. The disks were given serial numbers MPO-00382 through MPO-00388. Fan disk MPO-00385 was entered into the GE manufacturing cycle on September 13, 1971. It was inspected by immersion ultrasonic testing on September 29 and passed the test. (Immersion ultrasonic testing, using water to conduct sound waves, is a more reliable way of detecting flaws.) Still in the sonic shape, it was subjected to a process called macroetch in which it is submerged in nitric hydrofluoric acid. This burns away some of the metal to reveal the grain structure. A technician inspected the grain of the metal and gave the disk a clean bill of health. During the week beginning December 1, 1971, the workers machined 00385 to its final shape—a large disk with a hole in the middle and dovetail slots cut into the outer edge. The day after the disk was finished, technicians subjected it to fluorescent penetrant inspection (FPI). In this process, the disk is submerged in an oily liquid that will seep into any cracks that might be present. A powder is applied to draw the penetrant out of the cracks. The dye fluoresces under ultraviolet light, making cracks easier to see. Disk 00385 passed that test.

Two weeks before Christmas, the GE technicians put the disk through a finishing process called shot peening, in which tiny beads of metal are flung at the surface at high speed. They then used grit blasting and metal spray on the dovetail slots that would hold the fan blades. The finished disk was given a final inspection on December 11. Mechanics fitted the new disk with thirty-eight finely crafted fan blades, surgically precise in their ability to move air without undue turbulence. You can hear their almost ceramic ring and howl, an echoing bell-like sound that tolls when the captain pulls back the power as a big jet flies overhead on its way to landing. Mechanics then installed fan disk 00385 on a new CF6-6 engine. That engine, in turn, was sent out to Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, California, on January 22, 1972.
Douglas installed the engine on a brand new DC-10
to carry people to and fro across the heavens.

At that point, anyone inspecting the disk could be confident that it had no defects because of all the previous testing it had undergone and all the certificates guaranteeing its integrity. In fact the fan was a beautiful and otherworldly object made of a gleaming and silver-gray and perfectly smooth metal that existed nowhere without the hand of man. With all that it had been through, with all of its papers in place, who would be tempted to look at it with too jaundiced an eye?

Yet inside the bore of disk 00385, less than an inch from the front edge, a tiny pit, a cavity, existed on the finished surface. Shortly after TIMET melted heat K8283, General Electric changed its specification to call for a different type of furnace to be used in making titanium. It also required that the metal be melted three times instead of two. In addition, the use of scrap was no longer permitted. By then, however, heat K8283 had already been made, and a piece of it—fan disk 00385—had embarked on the long and winding road that would take it to 1819 Uniform and onward toward its long fall in two big pieces into the green corn of Buena Vista County, Iowa. By another bitter twist, 00385 and its seven sister disks were the last CF6 fan disks ever made with the old-fashioned double-melt titanium process. In 1989 passengers had no way to tell if they were boarding a plane bearing new technology or old. The same is true for passengers today.

Tony Feeney, the skinny fourteen-year-old boy
with the big glasses, was traveling alone on United Flight 232. He was on his way to visit his grandmother and to attend Michael Jordan’s basketball camp in Chicago. When the engine exploded, Feeney recalled, he was eating his lunch, listening to music on headphones, and reading a heavy-metal magazine. When Dudley Dvorak rushed back to look out the window at the tail,
Feeney made the sign of the cross
and prayed, “Holy angels, protect us.” Priscilla Theroux, twenty-seven, seated across the aisle, gave him a religious medal. The businessman on Feeney’s left tried to comfort him. Reynaldo Orito, forty-nine, told Feeney that he took this flight twice a week. “He gave me his Oreo cookies from his lunch and said that everything was going to be okay,” Feeney said.

With Orito’s reassurance and Priscilla’s sacred medal, Feeney felt more confident that the plane would land safely. As he held his ankles, though, and waited, “there was a loud impact,” he told me, “and it kind of threw everybody back in their seats, and I remember seeing the back of people’s heads as we were all kind of thrown out of the brace position and into the backs of our seats.” He was jerked upward. His arms and legs went into the air, and his body was wrenched into odd contortions that he could not control. “And the next thing I remember is just rolling along on the runway. I was thrown from the plane at impact, out of my seat.” He had no recollection of how he came out of his seat belt.

A week after the crash, Marcia Poole of the
Sioux City Journal
visited Feeney in his hospital room at St. Luke’s. “
The teenager clearly remembers
,” wrote Poole, “noticing two men several rows in front of his 32-G seat seconds before the crash.” As Feeney watched them, they gave each other the thumbs-up sign.