Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (42 page)

As Glynn’s team fed this new information to John Clark, he made new ballistic calculations and passed them to Monty Montgomery in Washington for another run through the computer. Clark drew a new map of where those two pieces of fan disk 00385 ought to be. And although everyone was still unable to find them, they were pretty much where he said they should be. By then it was September, and he had retuned to Washington to write his first report on the search. The
harvest began
September 11.

When Martha Conant first came out of the broken tail
of the aircraft, she believed that she was the only passenger left alive. She was in such a high state of alarm that she didn’t even notice when John Hatch and Susan and Dave Randa dropped from above. She saw nothing but her longed-for earth, and then she ran away. When a stranger stopped her, she turned and looked around at last. She saw people streaming toward her. She saw the couple who had been seated to her right, Marilyn and Karl Walter. “He had some burns on his hands,” she recalled. Susan White had shouted at him when he was somehow stuck: “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle!”

Conant’s thoughts and perceptions were in disarray. She saw Dave and Susan Randa sitting on a lighted sign and was amazed that they were alive. The boy no longer had his Cubs baseball cap. She saw John Hatch. Except for a few scratches on her leg, Conant was uninjured. People were wandering with uncertain looks on their faces. A number of them were thinking,
Am I in heaven?
Conant did not see Yisroel Brownstein or the businessman who sat next to him. People continued to stumble out of the corn, while rescuers came out to meet them. Someone helped her into a car. She was taken to a hospital, where a doctor cleaned up her minor cuts. “And then I was just kind of left to my own devices.” The images flowed past her, and the scenes in which she found herself changed as if in a dream, with no logical transitions. She found herself in a room where food had been laid out on tables. A television on the wall kept playing footage of the crash.

Conant happened to strike up a conversation with Sylvia Tsao, a scientist from Albuquerque whose two-year-old son Evan had been wrenched out of her grasp during the crash. Sylvia had seen him flying through the air. She still had not found him. Hearing this, Conant began to understand what had happened. “I just felt so helpless,” she said. “I mean, there I was with just a scratch, and there were people with just horrendous injuries and losses.”

A social worker approached her and said, “God still has work for you to do.”

“I didn’t want to hear that,” Conant said. She found it insulting, as many people did in the aftermath.

She waited, still in shock, still not completely sure whether or not she’d been through that surreal series of events. Late that night, United Airlines put her on a plane to Chicago. Rod Vetter was on board, his neck in a brace. John Hatch, who had tried to comfort Dave Randa, was sitting next to Vetter, “in a daze,” as he put it. “It was a terrible flight because it was stormy,” Hatch said. “I’d say we held hands,” he said with a laugh, “but we didn’t. We consoled each other. He was really a good guy.”

Conant stayed overnight in a hotel, hallucinating in dreamtime, and flew back to Denver from Chicago in the morning. Time, it seemed, had come unmoored from real events. Her husband picked her up and took her home, and she stood in her house, looking around at the strangeness of her own environment and feeling as if it hadn’t really happened, that monumental thing that had taken so many dozens of lives only the day before. Yet that same event, that great invisible force, had returned her unharmed to the earth as she had requested:
God, if you let me out of this alive, I’ll clean up my act
. In her mind, that very God had blown away the entire airplane from right in front of her in a storm of biblical proportions and had placed her feet carefully, gently, onto the wet green earth.

She tried to adjust over the weekend. She was back at work Monday, telling her story to those who asked, “again and again and again and again. And every time I tell it, there’s that sense that it wasn’t really me.”

She experienced no nightmares. When she went for counseling, the psychologist asked her what her worst fear had been before the crash. Conant said it was a fear of being in a car, heading into a brick wall, and knowing that she was going to die.

“Well,” said the counselor, “then you’ve faced your worst fear. You have nothing more to fear.”

“She was right,” Conant said. “That was very helpful. I looked death in the eye and walked away.” At that point Conant laughed and corrected herself: “Ran away.”

She had put her purse and briefcase under Kari Milford’s seat, which had been partly ripped out of its mounts. When Kari’s seat bent to the right, Conant’s purse and briefcase flew out onto the runway. Running across the field, she had lost one shoe. United Airlines eventually sent her suitcase and her purse back to her. “The suitcase was in fine condition, my purse was pretty beat up.” But, she said, “I just got rid of them. They smelled of jet fuel, and jet fuel is a trigger for me.” Even today, if she smells kerosene, she relives the crash, the people ahead of her being torn asunder, the entire scene. She also developed a fear of slippery roads when she experiences that wallowing feeling that she identified with the forty-four minutes before the crash.

A month after the crash, she made the trip to Philadelphia that she had been trying to make on July 19. Her youngest son Patrick rode along to keep her company. United seated them in first class and gave them “the royal treatment,” but she was “scared to death,” she said. “Scared to death.” After that trip, she asked to be moved into a job that required less travel. And she remembered the bargain she had made with God. She began to change her ways. She described the change as “like an ocean liner turning. It doesn’t turn on a dime. But I started making changes in my life. And I wanted deeper connections with people. My husband, my children, my friends. And I had not been that kind of person. I had been more private and more self-contained.” As she described the transformation she experienced, her voice grew melancholy and dropped to a hoarse whisper. A long groan came out of her as, “Ohhhh, gosh.” She heaved a weary sigh. The pauses between her words stretched out as she gathered the strength to speak. “I, um, started doing a little exploration of spirituality.”

I asked her if she felt that the crash had changed her life for the worse, and she said, “No, no. It wasn’t a
good
thing. It’s not anything I would wish on anybody. For me, however, I’ve made it a good thing. I struggled for the longest time with, Why did I survive? And another person from Fort Collins didn’t survive, and his widow, I’ve heard, committed suicide. A couple from Greely were very badly injured.” Her survivor guilt “hit as soon as I was running and realized I was the only person on the field at that time, and it persisted for a
long
time. Until I realized that I was asking myself the wrong question. I was asking myself, Why me?” She gradually realized that she could ask a different question: What do I do as a result of having had that experience? “That was the big shift: What now?” She became almost breathless as she tried to explain the changes she experienced once she had shifted from “Why me?” to “What now?”

Her eldest son Rich has a PhD in botany and does research into global warming. His wife Beth gave birth to a healthy girl and boy. They live nearby. Her middle son Rob earned a PhD in electrical engineering, married Sarah in 2006, and they also have a girl and boy. “And I introduced them,” Conant said with pride. “I’m very pleased about that.” Her youngest, Patrick, and his wife Brittany also have a girl and boy and live nearby. “I’m incredibly fortunate,” she said. Her marriage came back together and grew to be “very intimate and connected. I have wonderful relationships with my sons, my daughters-in-law, my grandchildren. I’m just incredibly fortunate.”

Conant retired from Hewlett-Packard in 1998 and now works at her church—another big change. The crash in effect engaged her in a struggle and sent her on a journey that led to family and to God.

Within two weeks after the crash
, most of the NTSB investigators had completed their work and returned home to write their reports. During that time, Colonel Swanstrom, along with Lawrence Harrington, engaged the Air National Guard members under their command to clean up the snowstorm of paper that had inundated the field. (Many other organizations joined the 185th in the operation, including the Iowa Public Service Company and the 134th Infantry of the Iowa Army National Guard.) The work was done by hand by these ordinary men and women wearing civilian clothes, walking back and forth over the ground, carrying white plastic garbage bags and bending down to pick up paper, over and over again, all day long, until their backs ached and their minds cleared. They worked around pieces of the airplane that still lay on the field. They worked around the pink spray-painted numbers that showed where bodies had been, the stains of blood, and the looping scars where banks of seats had skidded along like sleds from an amusement park ride gone amok. “It took us ten days to get the last piece of paper picked up off of the field,” Swanstrom said. One of the people who helped with the cleanup told of finding little bottles of liquor all over the field. He said several people drank them on the spot. In fact, Jan Brown showed me two that she had picked up and kept. One had no cap. The seal on the other one had been broken, the contents removed, and the cap replaced.

Swanstrom’s superiors wanted to return the Air Guard men and women to their regular jobs and let civilians clean up the airfield, but Swanstrom prevailed upon them to let everyone be part of the effort. He felt that by allowing his people to participate, they could get a feeling of completing the job they had begun under such trying circumstances. He was influenced by studies of post-traumatic stress that were being published at the time. In asking people such as Jim Walker to go out onto the field and deal with the dead, the mutilated, the severely injured, Swanstrom had asked them to make a sacrifice, to take a risk with their own emotional health. In allowing them to walk that ground again, purifying it, he felt that he could in some small measure help them to begin the process of healing. Each afternoon when the cleanup operation was over for the day, all the volunteers would gather on the field where a sound system had been set up, and someone would make a presentation. A psychological counselor might talk. Clapper or another chaplain might say a prayer. Swanstrom said that one of the lasting effects of the crash was to help people understand that it was natural to have strong emotional reactions to such events.

“One morning I’m sitting on the throne at home and I’m reading the morning paper,” he said. “For some reason, it just hit me. I mean, I was real tired. I hadn’t had much sleep. And I just broke down and cried like a baby.” Swanstrom, a tall, athletic officer, commander of one thousand, told that story to his people, and they were grateful to know that their own emotional reactions were normal. “They didn’t have to be macho about this thing.”

At the time of the cleanup, Harrington was trying to decide how to handle the refrigerated trucks they had used to store the dead. “Those were road reefers that hauled beef and everything else in ’em like the day before.” And now, he said, “there could be body juices there and stuff.” He called the Department of Agriculture to ask for advice, but in fact, Harrington had been a federal inspector before he went into the service, and the department told him that he was as qualified as anyone to make a decision. “So I made sure they got on the wash rack there and they cleaned them out with disinfectant and everything and then took ’em over to a truck place and made ’em clean ’em all again. And I told everybody exactly what we did. Because you couldn’t throw those trailers away. I let everybody see that they’re cleanin’ ’em out on the wash rack where we washed airplanes.”

While Swanstrom and his people were cleaning
up the field and the morgue operation, Gregory Phillips, the chairman of the Systems Group at the NTSB, worked in a hangar alongside Frank Hilldrup, head of the Structures Group, to reconstruct the tail of 1819 Uniform. Hilldrup and Laura Levy had meticulously recorded all the damage to the airplane and mapped the location of all the parts in painstaking detail. With that documentation in hand, all the fragments of the tail were brought to a hangar. The tail itself, where Susan White had sat in her jump seat, was too tall for the hangar. Mechanics cut off the top of the vertical stabilizer so the tail would fit. Then Robert MacIntosh’s team used cables to connect the major section of the tail to the floor and ceiling and built a wooden scaffolding to hold pieces of the horizontal stabilizer at the correct angle for cruise flight.
They built a wooden disk
two feet in diameter, as John Moehring put it, “to simulate not the disk, but the center of mass of any fragments coming off the disk in the bore-to-rim split.” Once the tail had been reconstructed, the team strung yellow ropes from the wooden disk to the horizontal stabilizer to show the trajectory of each piece of shrapnel. The starboard side suffered forty punctures, while the port side sustained thirty-eight. But that tail provided another set of data points, positive evidence in the conclusion that they would draw about how 1819 Uniform met its end.

In the meantime, the parts gathered by Gregory Phillips’s on-site team
had arrived at the NTSB labs in Washington. While Christopher Glynn’s team was analyzing the number two engine at GE, Jim Wildey’s crew of metallurgists began taking a closer look at pieces of the stainless-steel hydraulic tubing that had been found inside the tail, along the path of the wrecked airplane, and in the corn and bean fields between Rembrandt and Truesdale. The tubes had been bent, torn, punctured, and cut by something. And they bore obvious smear marks, evidence of what had happened. Long before then and long before the tail was reconstructed, everyone knew, at least at a gut level, what had happened up there at thirteen seconds after 3:16 p.m. on July 19, 1989, at thirty-seven thousand feet. You didn’t need to be an NTSB investigator to figure it out. In fact, by the morning after the crash, Bob Hager on
The Today Show
had the scenario reasonably correct.