Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (37 page)

She continued, “The biggest impact the crash had on me is I am so claustrophobic that I won’t ride elevators, I won’t fly, and that stays with me.” To this day, if the right stimulus is present, Murray can go back there in an instant, into the middle of that wild slamming catastrophe. “It’s not like I dwell on it on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “From the get-go, I tried to just grab the good out of it. I mean, you gotta grab the good.” While acknowledging how devastating this was for others, she said, “I tried to see that maybe this was playing into me having a different path in life.” When she was flying, she had no time for anything else. During that time of frenetic travel, her best friend knew the man she thought would be a good match for Murray. Her friend kept saying, “When you’re ready for the right person, I know who he is.” Murray paid no attention. Once she realized that she could no longer fly, however, she took the time to meet him in 1993. They married in 1994. They have two boys, John and Hayden. She believes that if she had continued to fly, she never would have had that family. “I think I was left here to be a mom for these boys.”

The plane crashed on Wednesday. On Friday an attorney named Philip H. Corboy filed the first lawsuit on behalf of Joseph Trombello in Cook County Circuit Court, naming United Airlines, General Electric, and McDonnell Douglas. The lawsuit alleged that United was negligent in its maintenance, that GE built a flawed engine, and that McDonnell Douglas manufactured a poorly designed airplane. Many more lawsuits would be filed in the coming weeks and months, and many would make similar allegations. But because of the curious nature of aviation litigation, no proof of those allegations would ever be made available to the public.

David Rapoport, who represented the three members of the cockpit crew and a number of flight attendants, told me that “The issues of fault were fully worked up and by that I mean there were exchanges of documents by all parties that were sued. There were expert witnesses disclosed and deposed. And much of the material that was generated in that several-year-old, multi-headed series of cases is under protective order that remains in place.” In other words, General Electric, United Airlines, and McDonnell Douglas succeeded in convincing a court to keep all the evidence secret, even while they paid out millions of dollars to the victims to head off potential trials that would expose all the evidence in a public court of law.

Although the NTSB would amass thousands of pages of evidence and testimony in the months and years after the crash, none of it would be aimed at assigning blame. “
At NTSB hearings
,” Rapoport wrote in a scholarly paper, “questions directed to issues of fault and liability are not even permitted.” In fact, at the time of the lawsuits arising from the crash of United Flight 232, it was common practice for defendants to insist on an order of protection before they would produce any documents at all in discovery proceedings.

Today, said Rapoport, “the many depositions, the thousands of pages of documents that included many things in addition to what were in the public docket from the NTSB, are all still under protective order. My opinion is that there are important things that haven’t made it to the public domain.” Treading a fine line between telling the whole story and breaking the law, he added, “I think I could make the general comment that there was much information developed in the private litigation implicating relative degrees of culpability” of all major defendants. I suggested to Rapoport that McDonnell Douglas was at fault for designing an airplane with serious deficiencies, that General Electric was at fault for building a defective fan disk, and that United Airlines was at fault for missing the defect in its final inspection of the disk. “Does that ring true?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I think you have the right cast of characters.” Although the investigators did not know it when that first lawsuit was filed, a mechanic had not left a tool in the engine to cause the explosion. Nor had a piece of the plane broken off to be sucked into the number two engine. The fan disk itself was defective and exploded, initiating the sequence of events that caused the crash.

Rapoport, who as a plaintiff’s attorney had every reason to want to assign blame, said, “My way of thinking about it would place no or minimal culpability on” the man who last inspected 00385. “Because I believe the entire system of inspection was flawed. I am not convinced that he was asleep on the job. I do recall that plenty of energy went into blaming the airline.” And indeed, in its findings of probable cause, the NTSB in effect blamed United Airlines.

The National Transportation Safety Board determines
that the probable cause of this accident was the inadequate consideration given to human factors limitations in the inspection and quality control procedures used by United Airlines’ engine overhaul facility which resulted in the failure to detect a fatigue crack originating from a previously undetected metallurgical defect located in a critical area of the stage 1 fan disk that was manufactured by General Electric Aircraft Engines. The subsequent catastrophic disintegration of the disk resulted in the liberation of debris in a pattern of distribution and with energy levels that exceeded the level of protection provided by design features of the hydraulic systems that operate the DC-10’s flight controls.

It’s difficult to know what that statement means. It seems almost deliberately murky. And indeed, the NTSB not only investigates, but also negotiates with the parties involved, those companies for which a great deal of money is at stake.

Rapoport concluded, “I would say that the engine was sold with inadequate instructions for use in order to ferret out dangers that the manufacturer either knew of or should have known about.”

An aeronautical engineer who had worked in flight testing with Boeing in his early years, Richard F. Schaden went into law and for thirty years tried cases involving airplane crashes, both military and civilian. After 1819 Uniform crashed, he represented Brad Griffin, among others. “It was unique in that we knew the crash was going to happen close to a half hour before it did happen,” he said. “So from a lawyer’s standpoint, you have all that anticipation of disaster. . . . The intervening mental anguish was the big legal issue.”

But, he said, of primary concern to him was the faulty design of the DC-10. A faulty GE engine could have blown up on other jumbo jets and might not have caused a crash, as was the case with the L-1011 departing Newark. Schaden flies the Falcon 900 EX business jet, which is a three-engine system like the one on the DC-10. “The basic configuration, I think, is a good design,” he said. “The issue of having all the hydraulic systems go through one location where there’s a single point of failure—that was the biggest design issue. . . . It was a lack-of-redundancy problem. It was a lack of failure analysis at the time of the design. The DC-10 is the only [plane] that I know that would have [the hydraulic lines] in that location where they were so vulnerable.”

About the failure to find a defect that might have caused the fan to fracture—whatever that defect might have been—Schaden said, “The method used for inspecting [the metal] was pretty weak at that time, the nondestructive testing they used. Titanium as a metal doesn’t really exist. It was a manufactured metal, and the manufacturing process was not controlled very well. The titanium billets that were made back in those days are pretty much all in golf clubs now. Just so they could get rid of most of that defective titanium. There was just so much of it around, and it was expensive to make.”

Schaden’s strategy for litigating his cases for United Flight 232 was to avoid the federal court system and what he referred to as “kind of a bad food fight.” There was ample opportunity to make money, and “everybody started jumping in the business back in those days.” Lawyers retired on the money they made on 1819 Uniform. He completely sidestepped that process, filing his lawsuits in the city court in downtown St. Louis because that’s where the corporate offices of McDonnell Douglas were. “That allowed me to get a more effective jury for my clients as a plaintiff’s lawyer and also to stay out of the food fight of the multi-district litigation.” The defendants tried without success to kick him out of courts in St. Louis and force him into the federal courts. “We had pretty much an all-minority jury in an inner-city venue in downtown St. Louis,” he explained. “And that was the last thing that the industry wanted. Federal court juries tend to be much more conservative. They tend to be suburban, because they can draw from a large geographical area.”

Schaden said, “When I stood up to make an opening statement, they settled all the cases.”

Jason Henry, the young lifeguard
who worked in the morgue, was not the only person who was made uneasy by the methods used in identifying the bodies. “As we first got started,” Brad Randall said, “a funeral director representative came up to us just in a panic, because we had sat down with Steven Smith and his colleagues, and we’d decided we were going to take the jaws out of everybody. And she [the funeral director] was just aghast.” In her profession, she was ordinarily in the business of making people look better, not worse. Even one of the young forensic dentists questioned the need to remove all jaws and fingers. He went on in his career to help develop methods of identifying people by their teeth that did not disfigure the dead and would allow for an open coffin at the funeral. The fact that dentists removed the jaws of perfectly intact and viewable victims gave forensic dentistry a bad name for a number of years after that crash. And that scandal encouraged the development of new techniques. At the time of the crash, performing forensic dentistry on one person was not an easy task. Trying to identify more than a hundred dead people was daunting indeed. “Unclenching a dead person’s jaw is
extremely
difficult,” Randall said. “And it’s a good way to break teeth and that sort of thing.” However, techniques are available today that allow the mouth to be propped open and a digital X-ray taken without any disfigurement. Also, FBI technicians no longer routinely cut people’s fingers off to obtain fingerprints.

Marliss DeJong and numerous others defended the practice of removing jaws and fingers, saying that it was the fastest and most foolproof way to identify someone. “When you have all these families saying I want my family member, you want to process them as fast as you can,” she said. “And you cannot make a mistake.” If they mixed up one identity, they would automatically have two that were wrong, and the entire process would fall into question. Indeed, the Omaha daily newspaper ran a headline three days after the crash saying, “
Iowa Examiner Slow but Sure
in Identification of Jet Victims.”

Randall said, “Yes, we could have gotten by without doing that. It would have slowed things down and made it a lot more difficult for charting and X-ray. And we just decided that the cosmetics that were lost doing that were worth the increased accuracy we were going to get. And the families were more concerned about a rapid identification than having a body slightly disfigured.”

After a body had been put through the stages of the process for identification, either it was returned to a refrigerated truck to await autopsy, or if a pathologist was available, it was sent directly to the table. At one point on Friday, nearly three dozen people were simultaneously operating the X-ray, fingerprint, dental, autopsy, and embalming areas of the big partitioned-off postmortem room, amid garbage pails and buckets used for fluids. Pathologists worked with their scrubs soaked in sweat, while others took photographs or made videotapes of the proceedings. Some wore flowered aprons that were clearly meant for a cheerful kitchen, presumably because the morgue had run out of surgical aprons. Many others wore jeans and golf shirts.

When a plane crashed, the medical examiner was required by law to autopsy only the flight crew. The pilots of Flight 232, of course, were alive. Nevertheless, Herbek, Randall, and Bennett decided to autopsy all of the dead. Randall said, “They were real quick and dirty autopsies. We were just opening them up, looking for trauma, looking for horribly obvious natural disease, and that was it.” When an autopsy was completed, the body was moved across the hangar to the area where morticians and funeral directors waited with stainless-steel tables, “and they [the bodies] were immediately embalmed,” Herbek explained. “And again, the trackers were with these people the whole time.”

Patricia Collins, a forty-eight-year-old mother of four and a homemaker, worked part time as a switchboard operator in a local office building in Sioux City. She volunteered, as Jason Henry did, not knowing what might be asked of her. But her experience could not have been more of a contrast to Henry’s. She said that the faces of most of the bodies she processed during her two days as a tracker in the morgue were covered with a black substance that Herbek believed to be the oily soot produced by imperfectly burned jet fuel. A member of her team would dip a cloth into solvent and scrub the faces clean before Thomas Randolph, sitting on a folded white towel on the wooden ladder, photographed them. If the clothes weren’t already burned off, they were snipped off with scissors. Collins stood at the head of the body, as Jason had done with Jane Doe, while a DCI agent recorded any pertinent information, such as possessions, tattoos, and identifying marks or scars, as the team turned the body over for examination. The team catalogued anything the person was wearing, such as earrings, rings, watches, necklaces, even the change in their pockets. “No matter what was in the pockets—it could have been a toothpick, it could have been a screw—everything was taken and put into the sack for the family.” Then the brown-paper grocery sack was labeled with the body number. Kenneth Berger, for example. His wallet held a Sears credit card, a Maas Brothers card, and a card for The Athletic Club. Fragments of his skull were placed, like broken crockery, in a ziplock bag.

Collins still carries the memory of a nine-year-old girl who came under the cameras. The only nine-year-old girl who died in the crash was Cynthia Myers. Collins may have been wrong about the age, but the girl she attended could not have been Cynthia Myers, who died of smoke inhalation and would have therefore been badly burned, according to Randall. She had been in seat 24-C. It was a bad place to be. The portside ceiling collapsed starting at about row 22 and going back through row 28, and some of the people in those seats were trapped, though alive. Cynthia Myers had blood carbon monoxide saturation of 70 percent and would not have been able to escape the fire.