Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (41 page)

Before the Badis family left Hawaii, Adrienne’s mother had bought the boys matching T-shirts in shades of blue and turquoise. The shirts bore the smiley face symbol and the words “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Both boys wore those shirts on board the plane. At the hospital, “when the ambulance doors opened, Aaron was handed off first,” Ellen said.

Before Aaron’s feet even touched the ground, an X-ray technician saw his shirt and made the connection. She approached the ambulance and asked, “Is this Aaron?” Ellen could barely speak through her tears as she recalled what the technician said to her: “They’re here, and they’re okay.”

“The knot that I had in my stomach was so—was just so relieved,” Ellen said. “I could just not believe it.” Now the technician led Ellen and Aaron into the X-ray department. “And we were reunited, and it was the best feeling we’ve ever had.”

By the time the Badis family reached the dormitory at Briar Cliff College, all the beds were taken. They had to sleep on the floor. Nearly everyone in the area where Adrienne and Eric were seated was killed, the Feeney family from Denver (no relation to Tony) and Cindy Muncey, Ruth Gomez and her ten-year-old son John—it was a bad place to be—yet father and son walked away from the crash virtually unhurt. (When I interviewed her, Ellen still had not learned how Adrienne escaped, because he had never been able to talk about it.)

While Bruce Benham’s superficial wounds were being treated at the hospital, a producer from ABC News arrived and asked him if he would appear on a television program called
Nightline.
Benham, Schemmel, and Priest appeared on the show and then spent the night at the house of a local weatherman. No one could sleep. Schemmel stayed up all night making phone calls to try to find Jay Ramsdell. At one point, about 3:00 in the morning, the United crisis line reported that Ramsdell was in the burn unit at St. Luke’s. “I called the hospital for a half hour,” said Schemmel, “and couldn’t get through.” When he reached someone at last, he learned that Ramsdell was not at St. Luke’s. In fact, Jay Ramsdell lay dead on the field. Television producers recruited the three survivors to appear on another show,
Good Morning, America
. When the show was over, a producer drove them back to the airport so that they could fly home to Denver.

Once the Badis family had returned to their home in the Raleigh-Durham area, “It felt like we had been born again,” said Ellen. “We saw things in such a wonderful light now. Everything just felt new, being back in our home again.” From then on, the Badis family never let a day go by without expressing their love for one another. “Because,” as Ellen put it, “you never knew how quick your life could be cut short.”

But the initial euphoria wore off. Ellen began to feel the symptoms. She had difficulty concentrating and developed digestive trouble. She lost her ability to function at work. By 1991 Ellen Badis had quit her job as a nurse, never to return. Ellen developed a whole range of emotional triggers that could set off a panic reaction again, such as low-flying planes or any type of concussion or explosion. “I’ve got a terrible, terrible startle reflex,” she said, “and I have to apologize in the store, if somebody drops something.” And of course, she said, “we don’t fly.”

*
After the harvest, some farmers claimed that the helicopters damaged their crops while others said that the wind helped to pollinate the corn. The area enjoyed a bumper crop that year.

CHAPTER TWENTY

B
y the first week in August
of 1989, executives at General Electric came under increasing pressure to find the missing fan disk. John Clark was eager to have it too. He knew where it was and felt confident that he would find it. He also had the means at his disposal, he thought, to search as effectively as anyone could. The executives at GE, however, were impatient. They sent out one of their investigators to comb through plat books for the names and addresses of the people who owned the land underneath the path that 1819 Uniform took to Sioux City. GE worked with a local law firm, Mack, Hansen, Gadd, Armstrong, and Schiller, in Storm Lake, to send out about fifteen hundred letters to landowners in Buena Vista County and elsewhere, offering cash rewards to anyone who found parts of the airplane. The farmers in that area thought the whole idea was ridiculous. By mid-August GE had upped the offer of rewards to more than $250,000. The larger segment of fan disk 00385 would fetch $50,000. Individual blades might be worth $1,000 each. But Chuck Eddy, the sheriff of Buena Vista County, admitted that except for people from GE and the NTSB, no one was looking for the missing parts.
Steve Lullman, who worked at Mellowdent Hybrids
where a big piece of the tail had fallen, expressed the opinion of the local farmers when he said, “I think it’s a waste of time.”

In the meantime, John Clark had checked and rechecked his ballistics calculations and had sent all the revised data to Monty Montgomery in Washington in an effort to refine the trajectories. He realized, though, that in order to understand how a fan disk would fall, he would have to take one out and drop it. When I asked how he did that, Clark laughed and said, “It was pretty crude.” United Airlines offered up two fan disks that had been retired from service. Clark took one, and as he put it, “We basically just put a strap around it and slung it up under a Huey, climbed up to altitude, and then just pickled the load—cut it loose.” They timed the fall of the disk from twenty-five hundred feet and photographed it and observed how it flew. They didn’t need to lift it any higher than that, because, as is true of any falling body, the forces of gravity and of the air acting on the disk stabilized fairly quickly.

They carefully marked the spot where it fell to avoid the embarrassment of having to search for two titanium fan disks that were lost in the corn. Then they landed and trudged over to it through the crops and looked at how it had hit the ground. It had buried itself about fifteen inches into the soft earth, but it was partly above ground and plainly visible. In fact, the disk had oriented itself flat side to the flow of air, dishing out like a paper plate dropped from a height. Disk 00385 would have tended to drift with the wind. Clark had to think about how the disk fractured and make some estimates of what would happen depending on the various ways it might have come apart. The disk he used in the test had no blades, but in all likelihood, fan disk 00385 tore away from the engine with quite a few blades still attached. That could produce drag that might turn the disk edge-on toward the earth and cause it to drop more directly down instead of drifting. His team also studied how the disk had buried itself in the soft loam, to develop an idea of what they ought to be looking for. Clark’s team concluded that the broken fan disk ought to be visible from a low-flying helicopter—if the observers were lucky and happened to see the ground instead of corn.

John Moehring from GE coordinated
with the NTSB, Lawrence Harrington, and others to get the number two engine documented and then lifted onto a lowboy tractor trailer for transport. The
driver of the semi left on Wednesday
, August 2, for an all-night run to Evendale, arriving there at about 3:00 a.m. on Thursday. The engine went into a high-security room at General Electric known as Cell 10. “
There are guards at the door
,” Moehring said later. It was a cell where engines were tested for “a black program,” such as the B-2 bomber. The engineers hoped that even without fan disk 00385, a close examination of what remained of the number two engine would yield a more precise picture of how the disk had burst. Moehring had appointed Christopher Glynn to head the team that would try to prove that the fan disk itself had initiated the sequence of events that led to the crash. Glynn in turn assigned each of the experts he had recruited to examine a portion of the engine. “
We asked those people,” Glynn said
, “to go off, look at the hardware, map the damage, try to put the pieces back together, and basically arrive at a time line where we could say, ‘This happened first, this happened second, this happened third,’ and try to deduce the correct sequence.”

Meanwhile, back at the Sioux City airport, John Clark had been offered the use of the
latest high-tech spy planes
from the military to see if those planes could find the missing disk. Each of the two Spanish CASA C-212 Aviocar aircraft had a top-secret suite of sensors that included such devices as forward-looking infrared radar and infrared line scanner, which were meant to be used in guerrilla warfare in the jungle. Each plane had three gimbal-mounted cameras with lenses of different focal lengths. Known as the Grisly Hunter program, the crew and its equipment arrived in Iowa with a telemetry van that raced up to the high bluffs for line-of-sight mission control and for the monitoring and acquiring of data in real time. Clark took one of the fan disks that United had given him and had it placed in a cornfield so that the Grisly Hunters could fly over it and see what it looked like and calibrate their equipment. In fact, when they knew where to look, they could easily see the fan disk. Now they would try to find one whose location they did not know beforehand.

The Grisly Hunter pilots flew at night. Strobe lights were set up in the corn, flashing eerily across the tassels and illuminating the blowing stalks. The silhouetted forms of the teams on the ground made throbbing shadows as the strobes fired off. While the Grisly Hunters flew one path, the ground crew moved the strobes 250 feet over, and the planes flew the next line. The two aircraft flew back and forth going north and south, then flew more passes going east and west. For five nights, the aircraft searched in a grid pattern over sections seven and eight of Scott Township and over all the sections surrounding those two. The Grisly Hunters also made video records and created grid maps of the area. Since Clark’s team was going to search on foot on the ground for anything the spy planes detected, the experts in the spy van could work up those locations at night and have them ready in the morning. Then Clark’s group would spend the day walking up and down through the fields. At the end of the day, they would bring their data to the conference room at the convention center to discuss what they had accomplished. As Clark studied that mass of data at one of their meetings, he remarked to the group, “The signature we’re looking for off of that fan disk is remarkably like a pig feeder.” Years later he commented, “And boy, there were a lot of pig feeders in Iowa.”

Although they flew right over the fan disk, the high-tech equipment missed it. Clark was understandably frustrated. He knew where the disk was with a fair degree of accuracy. Lighter debris drifted with the wind more than heavy debris did, so he could see the pattern in the pieces that had already been retrieved from the fields. And the line made by the lighter debris would invariably point to the spot where the heavy debris was to be found. This was the same method that had been used to find the
Titanic
on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 1985.

Clark’s team would go back to their motel, exhausted at the end of a long hot day, and see the Grisly Hunter pilots sitting out by the pool drinking iced tea, getting ready for their night flights. Walking the fields, Clark’s team found about fifteen objects sighted by the planes, none being parts of 1819 Uniform. They searched and searched and failed to find many of the other targets that the Grisly Hunters turned up; the grid maps weren’t precise enough. In time, Clark gave up and surrendered the videotapes to a private company for review. But all the effort and the untold sums of money yielded nothing.

By that time, Glynn had worked with his group at General Electric to tear down the number two engine. They had puzzled over the witness marks—the scratches and smears and tears—and saw what appeared to be conflicting evidence. “
We had a significant penetration
of that containment ring,” he said. “But then approximately 180 degrees away from that, we had a different sort of a separation, not due to penetration. It was just an overload kind of a separation. We had great difficulty in the early going in understanding what that could have been produced by.” Moreover, Glynn and his team had studied the driveshaft that had been torn asunder. “That joint is a very strong joint. It has about a half million pounds of clamp, and yet we had failed these bolts.” A tremendous amount of energy would have been needed to create the kind of damage they saw.

They were ultimately able to make a successful analysis through techniques ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated. On the simple end of the scale, a moving part would leave an impression on a stationary part. They put the parts together where they saw damage, and if the parts fit like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, they could be pretty certain that one part had hit the other and left that imprint.
To back that up, electron microscopy revealed traces
of the metal that the moving part had left on the stationary part. (All this time, another team of experts at the NTSB labs in Washington was conducting a similar analysis of other parts that were not from the engine itself, such as the stainless-steel tubing from the hydraulic systems.)

Glynn’s team, working on the number two engine, conducted its work at GE but with members of the NTSB present and participating. His group would meet each morning to discuss and debate the various theories, comparing them with the physical evidence from the previous days’ work. During the afternoons—and often long into the night—Glynn’s engineers “would go back and try to perform fundamental calculations to see if the velocities, masses, loads that separate pieces were in reasonable agreement with the kind of damage that we saw.” They performed their calculations based on the idea that momentum is conserved. Glynn’s team was able to estimate the approximate size and speed of the two main fragments of the missing disk. They were able to read witness marks that showed that one segment still had fan blades attached. In addition, by knowing the momentum of the spinning fan and calculating the forces needed to inflict the kind of damage they saw, they realized, as Glynn put it, “that the mass times the velocity of the small piece should equate in the early going to the mass times velocity of the large piece, and that the angular momentum of the system should be conserved as well.” Their numbers compared favorably with the original momentum of the intact disk spinning in cruise flight. Glynn’s team, working with GE engineers, was able to tell, step by step, where each piece of bearing, blade, or structure had gone and at what speed. The
entire event took five to six milliseconds
, far less than the blink of an eye.