Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (44 page)

And indeed,
as the harvest proceeded
, the office of Chuck Eddy, the sheriff of Buena Vista County, had “taken on the look of an airplane salvage yard,” as Bill Zahren put it in the
Sioux City Journal
. Among the parts found since the crash were shredded aluminum scraps of the horizontal stabilizer, a four-foot section of the engine’s outer casing, parts of the cowling that had surrounded the missing fan disk, booster blades from the compressor stages of the engine, hydraulic lines—and enticingly, blades that had been installed on 00385, the missing fan disk. One young Iowa farm boy found an intact first-stage fan blade that was probably worth $1,000 in reward money. Instead of turning it in, he brought it to school for show-and-tell. On Tuesday, October 10, at around 3:30 in the afternoon,
Janice Sorenson, fifty-eight, was running her combine
through a field, harvesting corn near her farmhouse north of Alta, Iowa. Her family had been working that same 440-acre plot of ground since the late 1800s. The day was cool and pleasant, with clear skies and low humidity, and the workday had been slipping by uneventfully. Then she found that her combine wouldn’t move forward. “I felt resistance on the right-hand side, and it felt like something was stopping me. I backed up the combine and saw the fan blades sticking out of the ground. After I got out of the combine and got closer, I was really in shock.” She had no doubt about what it was. General Electric had stationed an investigator named Jerome Clark (no relation to John C.) in Buena Vista County, and he had aggressively promoted the cash rewards and circulated photographs of the missing pieces. In its fall from thirty-seven thousand feet the fan disk dished out and fell flat side to the earth, as John Clark had predicted it would. It was heavy, and it was going fast. When it hit the mud, it partially buried itself.

Janice Sorenson drove her combine the quarter mile to her home and called the sheriff’s office. Sheriff Eddy was in Des Moines. He left as soon as he received word that a piece of the disk had been found. He knew that no state trooper would try to stop him in his sheriff’s prowler, so he let it run wide open. When Eddy arrived at the Sorensons’ farm, “[The disk] was still there in the ground,” he said. “There was just about—I wouldn’t even say six inches of it sticking out of the ground. It was kind of spinning as it came down and just buried itself—threw up the dirt, and the dirt come right back down on top of it, and you couldn’t hardly see it.”

The disk was a dazzling silver as it lay in the cut-corn stubble. The blades were bent and torn and some were missing. Janice’s husband Dale helped to dig the disk out with a shovel. He drove his tractor over to the spot. He wrapped rags around the disk to avoid scratching it and put a chain through the bore. Then he lifted it with the bucket of his tractor and drove it to his turkey shed, where running hot water was available. With the disk hanging from the loader, Dale Sorenson sprayed off the mud with a hose. And even in its beat-up condition, it was, indeed, a beautiful object with its gleaming silver blades. In the bucolic farmland scene, it had the look of something that had traveled light years across the universe, a gift from an alien race in another galaxy.

As soon as Jerome Clark phoned General Electric
, John Moehring called for a Lear jet to fly him to Iowa. The 406-pound piece of the fan, including disk and blades, was loaded onto that plane and rushed to Cincinnati, where by Wednesday night it was put under black security in Cell 10. Some of the old-timers at GE were able to take a look at it, and they knew what they were seeing. James Wildey, the senior metallurgist at NTSB, was chosen to lead the metallurgy group, including several experts from GE, one from United, along with a representative from the FAA. When he arrived at GE in the morning, Wildey walked into Cell 10 and saw the fan disk sitting on a skid on the floor. He walked up to it and peered at the fractured surface where about a third of the disk was missing. Already he could read any number of tales that the disk had to tell. For example, the number ten fan blade with all its fittings had been found at the Sioux City airport with its dovetail intact. That meant that as the disk cracked, the split had propagated right through the dovetail slot holding that blade. He had already seen the containment ring with seven evenly spaced witness marks showing where the fan blades hit. He guessed that those marks were made by the blades attached to the smaller piece of the fan disk, which was still missing. But most importantly, he read the cracked surface as only a trained metallurgist could.

“You could see that there was a brittle fracture region,” said Wildey, “which is typical of a fatigue crack. And that’s mainly what was visible on the fracture surface . . . the presence of a large fatigue crack that reached a critical size and broke through the disk. So that part was relatively straightforward. There was a preexisting crack in the disk, and then questions started to pop up: Well, why wasn’t this crack found? When did they have to inspect it?”

To get answers to those questions, Wildey and his team would ultimately have to destroy the very evidence that would prove their case. “We could see that there was a chipped-out region, a cavity at the bore surface.” The chipped-out region, the pit, was on the inside surface of the hole, or bore, in the center of the disk. The
pit, or cavity, was measured
by General Electric and found to be “0.86 inch aft from the forward bore face. . . . The dimensions were 0.015 inch radial depth, 0.055 inch axial and at least 0.030 inch in the circumferential direction of the bore,” according to GE’s own account. Although Wildey could see that the disk had cracked from the pit outward toward the fan blades, “at the time when we were first looking at it we didn’t know what exactly that meant.”

If the smaller third of the fan disk were found in a cornfield and if it contained more information, Wildey would be grateful. But it might never be found. What they had in hand might be all the information they ever received. Consequently, in testing, “you are very conservative,” said Wildey. “You try to get as much information as possible before you start doing destructive testing.” Destructive testing would ultimately involve grinding through the metal of that pit to find out what material was in there and why the pit existed where there should have been smooth and unblemished titanium alloy.

The first job was to get the fan disk into the lab and clean it. Even though Dale Sorenson had hosed it off, even though it looked clean to the naked eye, it had been in service for almost two decades, and then it had been sitting out in the mud and the rain for more than two months as helicopters and high-tech spy planes flew overhead and searchers tramped past it. Wildey wanted to look right into the heart of the metal. He did not want to be inadvertently looking at grease and mud or any stray organic material when he should have been looking at titanium or at whatever substance had made that metal fail. The
first step was to use a brand new toothbrush
designed for cleaning false teeth. Those toothbrushes can be dissolved by acetone, so the technician used soap and water and methanol to clean the crack, blowing the alcohol off with compressed air so that it didn’t evaporate and leave stains.

On Thursday, October 12, 1989
, while Wildey’s team was working on the disk at the Evendale facility, Harold Halverson was disking a field of cut corn in Buena Vista County, running his tractor behind the combine that his son Allen was driving about half a mile east of where Janice Sorenson found the larger piece of 00385. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, a sunny day with temperatures in the mid-70s. “The disk bounced,” said Allen, and his father stopped his tractor and stepped down onto the corn stubble. He slowly walked back to look. Before nightfall, the missing third of the fan disk was in the back of Jerome Clark’s station wagon. That same day General Electric delivered a check to Janice Sorenson for $116,000 for the larger piece of 00385 and the many parts and blades attached to it. You could have knocked her over with a feather.

The GE Lear jet flew out again, picked up the second piece of the disk, and flew it back, where it joined its mate in Cell 10. On October 16, it was sealed into a protective plastic bag and set aside untouched.
Later that month, when asked under oath
if the rewards program reached “a successful conclusion,” William Thompson said, “Yes, it did.”

But GE was not yet through with the search.
By Friday, the company had organized
more than a hundred people from metal detector clubs in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Missouri. As Sheriff Eddy said, they “searched some fields for us.” Mick Erickson from Lincoln, Nebraska, found a bit of a fan blade. A few other bits of 1819 Uniform were found, but for the most part, said Eddy, “they found old harness buckles from back when they were plowing with horses, wrenches, nuts, bolts, and everything for machinery, screwdrivers, and all kinds of stuff out there.” On that farmland that had been worked for 150 years, they also found a jack knife, square nails, coins, a corn husking peg, and the bells from a genuine old-fashioned horse-drawn sleigh.

Employees from United Airlines took Susan White and Georgeann del Castillo
to a dormitory at Briar Cliff College and sequestered them in a room. “I wanted to be out,” White said. “I wanted to be amongst everyone. [But] United supervisors wouldn’t allow us to mingle with the passengers. The only interaction we had with them was in the bathroom area.” White had intimately bonded with her passengers. She had Cynthia Muncey’s tears on her blouse, her sweat on her skin. White wondered where Cindy was now. The pathology report would list no injuries. It would say only, “
Smoke inhalation
(blood CO saturation 30%).” She had no idea what had become of Cinnamon, whose papers had been in her pocket. White had come all this way, and now she needed to complete her emotional journey with her passengers, whatever their fate, but United would not allow it. A woman from the Red Cross came to sit with the two flight attendants. The three women talked all night. White said that her ears and nose were clogged with Iowa loam, “and it kept coming out for weeks.”

The next day White’s father flew in. The NTSB interviewed her with representatives of the FAA, United Airlines, and her union attending. White was released, but she was afraid to get on a plane, glad that her father was there. Thursday night she and her father drove out of Sioux City and found a hotel. White could not turn off the lights in her room. “When I’d turn the light out, when I closed my eyes, I’d see just the fire and the bodies, and the crash, and I just—it was too terrifying for me, so I just lay there in the bed with the lights on all night.”

White said that she had been “just the happiest person in the world” before the crash. She loved people, and her outlook on the world was tirelessly bright and enthusiastic. Everyone loved her. But after three weeks of not sleeping, she was a wreck. She took a leave from work in order to concentrate on the therapy she received, but United Airlines kept calling her. “I couldn’t handle the pressure of them trying to get me to come back.” Reluctantly, she returned to work. Each time someone asked her about the crash, she would tell the story, but she would also suffer flashbacks and nightmares in her hotel room at night. Then she’d show up at work the next day exhausted, and the next crew would ask her to tell the story again. “So every time I’m at work I couldn’t escape it.” After a year of that, she suffered a breakdown in front of all the passengers and flight attendants on a trip. She returned to therapy and gradually put her emotions back together. After that she was just fine until the attack that destroyed the World Trade Center.

One of White’s good friends, Jason Dahl, was the captain of United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, when it was hijacked and crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. White was happily married by then, and she and her husband were supposed to leave for Greece that day. Instead they wound up at the Dahls’ house planning a memorial service. “And that’s when Two Thirty-Two really hit me. It hit me almost harder, or just as hard, as it did [in 1989]. And I didn’t realize that I hadn’t dealt with it. I still had issues. I had no idea.” After the attack on the World Trade Center, she wound up back in therapy. But she continued to fly, though not without difficulties.

“Anything unsettling on the airplane, severe turbulence, an approach [to] landing that doesn’t quite feel right, my palms sweat and I have horrible anxiety. No one would know it, but I feel it so intensely inside. Usually those nights when experiencing those feelings is when I’ll have a nightmare about crashing.”

In 1979, at the age of twenty-two,
Nicholas Edward Cherolis graduated
from college as a materials engineer. He was snapped up by General Electric, which had recently formed its first team devoted to nothing but analyzing the way metal parts fail in aircraft and engines. The group that Cherolis joined was a coterie of elite alchemists, sorcerers and their apprentices, who would delve into the heart of the crystalline structures inside of metals. They had an odd way of speaking, a language of their own, and when it came to metallurgy and failure analysis, they formed a closed and clubby society. Cherolis told me he’d “gone off and done a little fracture mechanics and fractography class with my buddy Doug Pridemore [of GE],” when the case of United Flight 232 came along. Ten years into his career, “it was perfect timing. I was totally prepared,” he said. The fan disk that Janice Sorenson and Harold Halverson dug out of the Iowa mud was a perfect match for Cherolis, who at thirty-two was reaching the peak of his skills. By then he was passionate about an obscure discipline called failure analysis.

When the fan disk arrived in Evendale, the team in the lab was busy examining the parts of the engine that had already come in. The smear tests, done by Joe Epperson at the NTSB labs in Washington, had already given hard evidence that fragments from the number one fan had cut the number one and number three hydraulic lines. When the electron beam went down into the inner electron shells of those atoms and found titanium, the team knew that metal could have come only from fragments of the fan disk or its blades. Now the team had the disk in hand and had to dig down to the final level and show why the disk broke apart in the first place.