Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (30 page)

With Mark as a sounding board, Ayers tried to decompress from the experience. “Going home was the best part,” she said. “Being able to tell Mark about what I had seen was a release for me. He would listen to my stories, he was kind of my therapist.” That evening she saw the video of the crash on television. “It was incredible,” she said. “Unbelievable those were the people I had just seen. I had no idea exactly what had happened until seeing the footage. I only knew there was a plane crash, people were hurt and coming into the hospital. It did not really sink in for weeks.” As she prepared to retire for the night, however, the hospital called.

She returned to St. Luke’s to find a young man
who lay unconscious. “He had a lot of head trauma,” Ayers said. The man, in his twenties, was engaged to be married. His fiancée was on her way. When Ayers entered the room, she was immediately stymied. She needed to perform an electroencephalogram on him. But to measure his brain waves, she would have to attach the electrical contacts to his head. Doing that involved measuring the distance between his ears to identify the points of contact. “And the man had no ears,” she said. “It looked like he had slid down the runway. Both ears were scraped off. His hair was burned off. Or scraped off, either one. Parts of his skull were showing.”

Ayers picked up the phone and dialed Dr. James L. Case, the neurologist on staff. She said, “I can’t measure this patient’s head, Doctor. Has no ears.”

“What do you mean he has no ears?”

“He has no ears. They’re gone.”

Ayers said, “I remember saying it several times, because he couldn’t understand. I told him, ‘I think you need to come up and see this gentleman.’ ”

When Case arrived and saw the man’s condition, he decided that it was imperative to determine if he had any brain activity. He told Ayers to try her best. In the end, she said, “I just guesstimated where I should put the wires.” Once the electrodes were glued to his head, she found “very minimal brain waves.” She watched the pen scratch feebly back and forth as the paper scrolled out of the machine. She could see that he was virtually flat-lined. A good brain wave is like a heartbeat. She would expect to see medium-strong voltage pulsing up and down eight to twelve times a second. A page took thirty seconds to scroll beneath the pen, and she saw scarcely two-dozen blips on each one. “With brain death,” Ayers said, “it may be one or two cycles per second.”

The patient was nevertheless admitted to the hospital and kept on a ventilator until July 23. On that day, Ayers was called to repeat the test to see if he had improved. By then his fiancée was by his side, trying to hold up against the waves of grief washing over her. Ayers arrived and attached the electrodes once more. She asked his fiancée to talk to him, thinking that she would have the greatest chance of eliciting a response.

The young woman told him that she loved him and was looking forward to the wedding and to seeing him return home. She implored him to get better.

“And I tried so hard not to cry,” Ayers said, “because I could see. I don’t think he ever truly was there. They left him on the runway. And I just had her keep talking to him.” He was taken off the ventilator.

But then Ayers was called to the pediatric intensive care unit and asked to perform the same test on a little boy in a coma. His name was Spencer Bailey—son of Frances, brother of Brandon—and he “had some scrapes but otherwise seemed so precious. I loved working with children,” Ayers said. She measured the distance between his ears and placed the electrodes. She tuned her instrument and talked to him and gently shook his shoulder. And there on the roll of paper, the pen began scratching out the pattern that she loved to see, big looping arcs filling the page with spikes of voltage a dozen times a second. When Lynn Hartter had run out onto the field with her fellow National Guard volunteers, she had seen the men lift the bank of seats, weighing hundreds of pounds, and had crawled under it to catch the little boy after he was cut free from his seat belt. She had run across the field with the two-year-old in her arms. As she tired of running, Colonel Dennis Nielsen took the boy from her and continued on to a waiting ambulance. Gary Anderson chose that moment to swing his telephoto lens around, creating the image seen around the world. And Ellen Ayers now determined that the little boy in that photograph would live.

Jan Brown wound up
in the company of Jan Murray. Brown had walked to triage amid the wreckage, while Murray had been bussed there. Now they began to understand that their job was over—their shining ship in ruins—and that they were through with this filthy field with its blood and its blowing money and its scorched pineapples scattered here and there like severed heads. They saw a hangar in the distance and hitched a ride. As they were jolting across the uneven ground, Brown realized something that had been in the back of her mind since before she shouted the order to brace. “I always waited too long to go to the restroom before landing,” she said. At Graham Aviation, the two flight attendants were shown to the restroom. Courteous to a fault, Brown let Murray go first. When it was her turn, she avoided looking in the mirror. She knew that half of her hair had been singed off. She didn’t need another fright. She found Murray outside smoking a cigarette. “I had quit smoking four days before this,” Brown told me.

“You know,” she said to Murray, “if you’ve got another one of those, I think I’d like one, because there are other things that are going to kill me.”

She and Murray were taken to the hospital, Brown said, “and the first thing I asked them was where the smoking section was. That nurse gave me the most stricken look.” The nurse told Brown and Murray that the hospital had instituted a ban on smoking the week before.

Brown looked at her and said, “There’s
always
a place to smoke.”

By that time, Donna McGrady had arrived, and the three flight attendants were put in separate examining areas. After a few minutes, a nurse pulled the curtain and said to Brown, “Your husband’s on the phone.”

“I don’t have a husband.”

The nurse gave her a puzzled look and “she walked away so fast that it went click.” Brown realized that the husband of “the other Jan Brown” was calling for Janice-Long Brown and their eleven-year-old daughter Kimberly. “They’re mixing us up,” Brown said, “right to the very, very end.”

She was treated for the burns on her ankles where the fireball had melted her stockings in the gap between her slacks and her shoes. Then a nurse was kind enough to take her outside in a wheelchair and give her another cigarette. After that she was wheeled to the cafeteria, which was teeming with passengers, and for the fourth time that day she saw Sylvia Tsao, who wasn’t even speaking anymore. She was in shock.
Joan Wernick, Dr. Banjo’s wife
, crossed the room and put her hand on Sylvia’s back, but the bereft mother of Evan could only stare into space.

Brown heard that United Airlines was going to fly survivors of Flight 232 to Chicago that night. She asked to be put on that flight. Someone drove her to the airport. Brown and Murray sat in the nearly empty boarding lounge, chain-smoking the pack of cigarettes that someone had given them. Brown watched the crusty old captain of the special flight come down the hall. She wondered why they hadn’t left yet. By then the NTSB Go Team was en route, and Robert MacIntosh, the investigator in charge, had sent word ahead that all crew members from United Flight 232 were not to leave town before being interviewed.

“If I had known then what I know now,” Brown said, “I would have just walked on the airplane and said, ‘You’ll have to get me off here kicking and screaming, because you know where I live. Just come and interview me.’ ”

Someone found a hotel room for Brown, but she didn’t feel much like being in it. She and Murray were asked if they wanted something to eat, but Brown said, “I’d really like a beer.” She tasted no beer that night. The two flight attendants smoked their last three cigarettes. Neither could sleep. Late that night, Brown managed to doze off for a couple of hours. In the morning, she wandered the halls looking for cigarettes, until she stumbled onto the United Airlines crisis team in a conference room. Charts on the wall listed the names of surviving passengers. She went in to see if she could find Janice Brown and Kimberly. Sure enough, she found a Jan Brown on the chart: her friend was at St. Luke’s Hospital. Brown breathed a sigh of relief. She felt sure that if the mother escaped, then the daughter survived as well.

Satisfied that her friend was safe, she left. She had to be questioned by the NTSB and make arrangements to go home. “And I don’t know where I was when it clicked that that was me that they had on that board from St. Luke’s.” She hurried back to the conference room. She scanned the board, but the name Jan Brown had been erased from the list. At last she knew that Janice and Kimberly were dead.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A
t one or two o’clock on the morning
of July 20, when the Grumman Gulfstream touched down at the Sioux City airport and taxied to the ramp, more than a dozen people descended the stairs, including the chairman of the NTSB, Jim Burnett, and a young engineering intern from Auburn University named Laura Levy, with her laser transit packed in its case. Immediately after their arrival, while everyone else retired to hotels and motels, MacIntosh and Benzon took a group on a tour of the crash site. The group included Ted Lopatkiewicz, Jim Burnett, Randy Curtis, Gary Brown, Frank Hilldrup, and Dennis Swanstrom, among others.

“Indeed, it was nasty,” MacIntosh remembered years later. As they walked through the night swinging flashlight beams, their feet shuffling through blowing paper and yellow insulation and sparkling computer tape, they passed the throttle quadrant that the crew had used to fly the plane. About the cockpit, Benzon said, “Well, it wasn’t there. It was twisted-up seats, pilot seats, and part of the throttle quadrant. We were aware that the crew had survived, and we were very, very surprised after looking at what was left of the cockpit.”

Frank Hilldrup, twenty-nine, chairman of the Structures Group, had joined the NTSB the previous fall. Wielding a flashlight, he made his way across the naked swath where the broken fuselage had skidded, cutting corn. He came to the severed end of the coach cabin from which the tail had departed. He stepped inside amid fire-fighting foam and melted metal, and shined his flashlight around to see the condition of the plane. He was shocked to see people hanging upside down or sprawled on the ceiling—many, many people, who some nine or ten hours earlier had been eating chicken fingers and watching the Kentucky Derby. His flashlight set the shadows of the people dancing, arms thrown up as if in some gruesome mockery of jubilation. He felt “a jolt,” he said, and backed out of there.

MacIntosh followed Runway 04-22 all the way to the threshold where the right wing hit. There he saw a long hole a foot and a half deep gouged through the concrete by the right landing gear, and he understood the tremendous force with which the plane had hit. Again he shook his head, marveling that there was anything left of the plane and its passengers. This was definitely a Crowd Killer, and yet most of the crowd had survived.

Under a bright moon that had been full the day before, augmented by floodlights, the group proceeded down Runway 22, across the uneven slabs of concrete, mismatched and shifted through the decades. They stopped at the intersection of 17-35 near what remained of the tail. MacIntosh cast his flashlight beam up into the seats where John Hatch and Martha Conant had been sitting. He saw the torn and twisted metal, the tangle of wires hanging down, the fiberglass batting inside ripped aluminum foil, the bent magazine rack on its side where Susan White had braced her foot, and the lavatory thrown open where the blue toilet water had vomited out at her. In the jaundiced illumination, they saw the stains on the upholstery where Susan and Dave Randa had been splashed with someone’s blood.

One of Gary Brown’s volunteers, Dave Kaplan, watched as an investigator from the NTSB recovered the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder and brought them to the command post. “I remember holding the CVR thinking to myself the answer to what just happened here is in my hands,” said Kaplan. The devices were put in Gary Brown’s truck and another WCDES volunteer, Don Dandurand, was assigned to keep them secure. “I should add,” Kaplan said, “that Don spent the night on the field in the truck, surrounded by the dead, the wreckage, the smell and keeping an eye on the CVR. Don later told me it was the worst night of his life.”

They all knew that there had been an explosion, but no one suspected that it was “nefarious,” to use MacIntosh’s word. It was the failure of a machine, which by design had a large amount of energy roaring around inside it. That energy, which normally bled out the back of the engine in a controlled fashion, had somehow come bursting into the open all at once. Beyond that, they knew little, and they were not inclined toward speculation. They couldn’t work until dawn, and the hour was late.

Benzon and MacIntosh drove across the river to the Flamingo Motel in Nebraska. “We had to pass near a cow rendering plant,” Benzon said. “It actually hurt your nose to take a whiff as we drove by. By the time we arrived in Sioux City, all the motels were so crowded with reporters and their entourages that Bob MacIntosh and I had to room together.” The Flamingo was, as Benzon called it, “a dump of a place. Flamingos in Iowa? We called it the Flamin’ O, as one letter of the neon sign was not working or was always blinking, and so it had, well . . . a scatological connotation.” Benzon described their evenings during the investigation as “two middle-aged guys sitting around in their underwear, discussing what to do and where to go next and watching the late evening press coverage on an old black-and-white television.”

Margo Crain was not sure what happened after she returned baby Sabrina Lee to the Michaelson family. By that time, fifty to seventy people, by her estimate, were milling around the area of the Grassy Knoll a short distance from the RTR antenna site. Sam Gochenour had called for transportation, and now Crain found herself riding through the wreckage in a National Guard bus, “with not a run in my hose,” as she put it. She said the ride “seemed to take an eternity. The gruesome, violent aftermath that . . . the bus had to pick its way through, was enough to turn anyone’s head. However, instead of turning away, I couldn’t help but stare.”