Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (40 page)

“
Within the very first few days after this event
,” said John Moehring of GE, “we researched the records . . . of all of the disks that had been manufactured from this . . . batch of titanium . . . we sent out an order to . . . withdraw those disks from service and bring them back to the factory.”

In the evenings, after MacIntosh had led the daily meeting
at the Sioux City Convention Center to review the findings of all the groups, Thompson of GE would call Moehring in Evendale and have what Moehring called “a long conference” about their progress toward an understanding of the appalling blunder that had been made in the General Electric aircraft engine factory.

Bruce Benham, thirty-seven, and his young colleague Garry Priest
, had very different reactions to their impending arrival at Sioux City. Priest told me that he was not afraid. He later said that he was thinking, “Hell, this might even be kind of cool. Because, hey, we might get to go down the slide. I’ve never done that before. That might be kind of neat.”

Benham, Priest’s boss, on the other hand, was gripped with fear when he looked out the window and saw “how fast we were still going.” He bent over and braced himself, and “to be honest, [I was] wondering when I would be killed. I was consciously thinking about when the end is going to come, because I thought it was done. The end.”

When the wreckage came to a stop, Benham and Priest popped their seat belts. “I look around me and it just seems to be pitch black,” Priest said. “Any direction I look is just darkness.”

Benham echoed his assessment, describing “confusion, disorientation, darkness.”

Gradually Priest saw silhouettes of faces. “No bodies, just faces. Really kind of eerie. And at some point, off to my right, I see the orange ember of what turns out to be a fire.” He heard someone yell, “Fire!” and people began pushing past him in the opposite direction. He looked the other way and saw “a ray of sunlight. And it just made sense to go to it.” He raised his voice and said, “Calm down and go to the light.”

Benham had begun to follow Priest’s lead, when he noticed a boy still strapped in across the aisle from his seat, alone in the thickening smoke. Benham had seen the boy’s mother moments before, but now she was gone. Pete and Joan Wernick, with their son Will, were gone too. Ron Sheldon was boosting Aki Muto up into a hole in the floor a few rows back.

“I pulled him out of the seat and grabbed him,” Benham said of the boy. “I didn’t know the little guy’s name. I just said, ‘Son, please, please put your arms around my neck and hold me real tight. We’re gonna get out of here.’ His eyes were the size of a half-dollar. Beautiful little guy. He wasn’t crying. I could tell he was scared. But he did exactly what I asked him to do. He put his arms around my neck, and I took him outside.” With the boy in his arms, Benham struggled toward the hole, stumbling over luggage.

As the fuselage filled with smoke, Ellen Badis, the thirty-five-year-old mother of two, stood in the sunshine in her light-blue summer dress and came to the realization that her two-year-old, Aaron, was still inside. She turned to go back in, but the group of survivors who were ushering people out of the plane blocked her way. Now Ellen stared helplessly into the growing smoke.

Upton Rehnberg was holding back the bundle of wires that had been assembled by the hands of women at the Douglas factory in Long Beach. Rod Vetter and Jerry Schemmel were now joined by Garry Priest in helping people out. John Transue stood with Jan Brown, while survivors, many of them injured, hurried away from the burning plane in different directions. Benham stepped out into the sunlit cornfield bearing the two-year-old in his arms. He moved away from the fire and smoke and almost immediately stumbled into a woman in a torn blue sleeveless sundress, standing in the sun and staring as if in a trance.

When Ellen Badis told this story, her voice dropped until it was nearly inaudible, the terrible confession, the unspeakable omission: “I just can’t believe I didn’t have my child.” Then her voice rose almost to a scream as she said, “And then there he was!
There was Aaron
. And he was being held by this gentleman. The men were up on the broken fuselage, and they were helping folks off.” She was seeing Clif Marshall on top of the inverted plane, pulling people out of the hole, Aki Muto and Gitte Skaanes and the Hjermstads, Alisa and Eric.

Benham handed Aaron to Ellen Badis, reuniting mother and son in the corn.

The
crash happened on Wednesday, July 19
. By Friday, July 28, everyone concerned—GE, the airlines, the NTSB, and many other manufacturers of parts that go into making an airliner—knew that jumbo jets were flying around that might have potentially deadly flaws in their engines. John Young from the NTSB, along with James Tucker, John Moehring, and others had already been poring over dispatch orders, inspection records, check sheets, ultrasonic inspection logs, discrepancy reports, and correspondence. They had come to realize what a mess the records were in. From this mass of material, they nevertheless managed to trace fan disk 00385, along with its seven so-called sister disks, to heat K8283.

As the sister disks came in to the Materials and Process Technology Lab at GE, they were subjected to ultrasonic inspection, and it soon became apparent that the disk labeled 00388 was indeed defective. Ultrasound showed the equivalent of a tumor in the flesh of the metal. It was a sick area within the crystalline structure. They called it an “indication,” a spot in the metal where sound waves reflected in an unexpected way, indicating that the metal was somehow different at that location. Titanium kept jealous hold of its impurities, and here in 00388, the sister of 00385, was clear evidence of its true nature.

Pure titanium is silver-gray to the naked eye, white as snow under the microscope. The metallurgists call it alpha, the beginning of all the alchemy that will produce flight at unprecedented speed and height. With this special metal—the only metal strong enough and light enough for those spinning wheels—everyone from the towns of Rembrandt and Truesdale could be flown aloft at once, nearly to the edge of space, in a single ark.

James Wildey said, “Ti six-four (titanium with 6 percent aluminum and 4 percent vanadium) is an alloy composed of two phases. Phases are regions in the material with different crystallographic structure.” He was talking about the way the atoms are arranged to create the microscopic crystals that make up the metal. At room temperature, for example, titanium crystals have the shape of a hexagon. Pure titanium is made of grains, and the grains are made of those hexagonal crystals. When more than half a percent of another substance is added to the pure metal, the structure of the titanium changes to accommodate the new material. When titanium is melted with aluminum and vanadium and then cooled to room temperature, the alpha (pure titanium) and beta (aluminum with some vanadium) freeze back into their own crystal structures and form interleaved sheets or lamina. Under a microscope, it looks almost like living tissue, a strange weave of fibrous grains, elongated and intertwined. In titanium, “the whole thing just transforms pretty much instantly as the temperature drops,” said Wildey, “and this is what the resulting structure is. It freezes in place. And actually that’s what gives you some of the strength, because it doesn’t want to change. It’s locked into place there. Whereas the alpha is a nice, gentle, softer material, and it gives you the toughness, because it can deform a little bit and take the impact, the (transformed) beta gives you the strength, resisting it.”

Yet
titanium can change its nature entirely
. Magnified five hundred times, titanium can look like a bacterial infection in a petri dish. Add a little nitrogen when the titanium is being melted, and it suddenly looks like ice on a winter window. The area is much harder and more brittle than the material should be.

Wildey traveled to Evendale to examine the disk
known as 00388. He would much rather have been working on 00385—the disk from Flight 232—but John Clark had yet to find it. (And indeed, Clark, along with the other people who were searching for the disk, never would find it.) So Wildey worked with metallurgists and technicians at GE to cut the sister disk 00388 into pieces to expose the tumor. The team then subjected that metal to nitric and hydrofluoric acid, industrial CAT scan, X-ray and neutron radiation, as well as ammonium bifluoride etching. They put pieces of it in a scanning electron microscope and bombarded it with a beam of electrons in a process known as energy dispersive spectrography, or EDS. In EDS, the electron beam bypasses the outer shells of electrons in the material and hits the inner shells. In that interaction, the atoms give off X-rays, which are high-energy photons. Wildey said, “Each atom will produce X-rays at a very specific energy based on the differences between the energy levels of the various electron shells in the atoms. So it’s a pure atomic interaction. It looks at the differences in the electron shells in each atom.” By reading the energy level, he could identify the element.

An electron microscope is a formidable instrument, unlike any other manmade object. It is a stainless-steel tower, perhaps a foot in diameter, with many knobs and devices bristling off of it. A thick cable enters the tower at the top. The tower is set in a platform the size of a businessman’s desk but made of stainless steel and weighing a great deal to prevent any vibration that could blur an image that’s been magnified many thousands of times. (Electron microscopes are often installed in basements, because the concrete floors tend to dampen vibrations.) At the bottom of the tower is a vacuum chamber with thick glass windows, and surrounding the tower are various other instruments aimed at that chamber. The big cable at the top carries twenty thousand volts of electricity into a tungsten filament to produce electrons, which are then accelerated downward in a vacuum through a series of electromagnets. The magnets act as lenses to focus the beam as it travels to the chamber where the specimen waits. The instruments around the chamber collect the X-rays that come off of the specimen under electron bombardment. The room is kept dark except for the displays, which give off a cold blue glow, while tangles of electrical cables snake in every direction from the various devices.

When Wildey’s technician activated this suite of instruments and beamed electrons into the heart of the tumor in that metal, right down to the inner electron shells of its atoms, he found something curious indeed. When he read the X-ray signature of the atoms, he found titanium, aluminum, and vanadium, as expected. However, in addition to the strong energy levels from those elements, he saw the energy of the X-rays peter out, dwindle away, to weak uncertain signals. Something else had contaminated the metal, but its signal was not strong enough to read. Wildey had his thoughts about what the material might be, but he was going to have to change his technique if he wanted to be certain of what had caused that tumor.

Ellen Badis, with Aaron freshly delivered into her arms
by Bruce Benham, was convinced that the burning plane behind her would explode. She began running down the muddy rows of corn, in her sandals. “The corn was so tall and beautiful,” she said. She recalled the soft feel of the damp ground. She broke down weeping again as we talked. “I ran on and ran on, I didn’t think I’d ever—oh, my gosh, we ran and ran and—and finally we came to the opening.” Then Ellen said with great wonder in her voice, “And there was a tower down there. And a lot of other passengers were congregated. And one man was starting to climb the tower. We didn’t know where we were. And I said, ‘Here, you want part of my dress to use as a flag?’ I had a light-blue dress on and it had been ripped a little. We wanted to let folks know we were out here.” The man took a strip of blue cloth from Ellen’s dress and began waving it in the hope that someone would take notice. Sam Gochenour, the technician from the FAA, ran over and yelled at him to get down, help was on the way.

As the adrenaline began to wear off, Ellen said, “I had to go pee so bad. It was just the worst.” Someone offered to watch Aaron while she went down to a grassy bottom where trees grew, “and I just went down there behind a tree and relieved myself.” She returned to the tower and joined the group, and a blue bus eventually came from the Air National Guard. “I just assumed my husband and Eric, my oldest son, were burning, were dead,” she said. By the time she and the others were dropped off at the triage area, “I was desperate, looking for my son and Adrienne.” She found herself rushing around, clutching her remaining son, “looking at every wounded person, every body. I was just desperate to find them. I didn’t care in what condition, I just wanted to find them.” While she was peering into the faces of the dead, John Transue rode past in a bus, staring out in horror at the tableau of corpses and body parts and the dissonant image of the mother and child hurrying among them.

As Transue passed by, Ellen peered into the face of a man who was taking his last breath. A United Methodist minister named Duane Churchman, who was volunteering on the scene, saw her. He took her arm and gently pulled her away, saying, “You don’t want to do this. Come with me. I will take you somewhere.”

Beside herself, she screamed, “But I’ve got to find them!”

People gathered around to reassure her that her husband and son had probably been taken to the hospital. It meant nothing to her. Her husband and son were dead, and she just wanted to see them one last time. The clergyman took her to the mess hall. “And I was just slowly going into psychological shock,” she said. She burst into tears once more as she relived those moments. She recalled people sitting on the floor with blankets, despite the heat of July. “And there was a TV over in the corner,” she said. She asked if someone would turn on the television, thinking that she might see Adrienne and Eric. Someone turned it on and Ellen stood watching the jumbo jet explode. “And then I lost all hope after that,” she wept. “I just couldn’t believe anyone else could have survived.” As she went into shock, paramedics loaded her and Aaron into an ambulance.