Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (48 page)

After that his parents put a baby monitor in his room. That way, when he woke from a nightmare, he could talk to them or summon them to his room “to soothe me,” he said, and laughed. Baby monitors weren’t made for nine-year-olds, he said. It took years to gradually calm the fears and tone down the flashbacks. “I don’t think I consistently slept through the night until I was thirteen or fourteen.”

The crash left scars in other ways too. One day when he was in the sixth grade, a kid on the basketball court started an argument with Dave. As the argument heated up, the kid said, “I wish you had died.” The court fell silent. Everyone knew what the boy meant. Not died in an automobile accident. Not died of cancer. He wished that Dave had died in the crash of United Flight 232. It happened again at a relative’s house. Again the dispute was over basketball, only this time it was his own cousin who said, “I wish you’d died.” Dave flew into a rage and “we fought it out,” right down into the dirt.

Dave’s emotional system was permanently changed. His feelings and reactions to the crash grew fainter, more distant, but they were always there. He loves golf, and his favorite course is right next to an airport where business jets take off and land. When the emotion gets too intense, Dave speaks of himself in the second person. “When planes are flying around you at low altitudes, you kind of have to back away from the ball and regroup and focus.” As an adult, at moments such as that, he could push the flashbacks down, practice his breathing exercises, and continue with the game. But he was like a veteran of combat. He could not move through life as smoothly as someone who had not had that experience. “It made me grow up fast.”

Yet the flashbacks remain, as I learned when I said the word
brace.
“Even now I can see ’em. I can still hear them,” Dave said. He looked into the distance. “When you said
brace,
I hadn’t remembered
brace
for a long time. And I can hear the flight attendant’s voice right behind me saying, ‘Brace.’ ” Susan White’s voice was forever imprinted in Dave’s emotional system.

Dave lived in the affluent community of Boulder, and when he returned to school at the age of nine, many of his classmates said, “Aw, you’re so lucky, I’ll bet you’re rich now.” Nothing could have been further from the truth. “I wouldn’t wish this on anybody. It took away a lot of my youth. It’s bad. It’s awful.” As a result, he made an interesting decision, especially for a young man. Dave was given money, a settlement, a remedy as it’s called, for the wrong done by the companies that caused the crash. And like other passengers, he agreed not to disclose the amount. “It’s not much money,” Dave said. “But I’ve never touched any of it. It just sits there. It’s invested. I don’t want to spend it. I don’t want to do anything with it.” It is almost as if the money is a proxy for the place in Dave’s heart that came to be occupied by the crash. It lives in him now. But he wants to keep it separate. By putting the money in its separate place, he is putting the crash in its separate place as well. They both exist and always will. Apart.

Three months after the crash, United Airlines returned Dave’s favorite Cubs hat. “It smelled like the crash and I never wore it. But it was good to have back.”

On Thursday night, July 20, 1989, after the bodies had been recovered from the field, and the morgue had begun to function, Chaplain Gregory S. Clapper allowed himself to go home to rest. He was “pretty burned out.” He said he “got into bed and just hugged my wife and wept. And she wept too.” Clapper would find himself at the forefront of a great deal of the healing and coping that was to come. He would be arranging memorial services, giving talks, and generally making himself available for anyone who needed a shoulder to cry on. At one point, another Air National Guard chaplain named Bob Hicks, who had once dealt with the crash of an airliner, advised him, “Remember Paul in Romans said to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.” Clapper, being young and inexperienced, had been concerned with his professional image. Hearing that passage, however, helped him to understand that, in the end, “one of the best things you can do is put your arm around somebody and cry with them.”

I told Clapper about Martha Conant’s experience on the afternoon of the crash, standing in the mess hall when a social worker said, “God still has work for you to do.” Conant found the idea insulting, that God caused the crash, killing children while saving her.

“I’m a United Methodist,” Clapper said, “which means I’m a Wesleyan, which means I’m an Arminian. That’s a school of theology that believes in human freedom. So I’m not a Calvinist.” Many people in Siouxland come out of the reformed Calvinist tradition. “Their basic view is, God controls everything. God wanted this to happen. My view is, I don’t believe in the god who would want this to happen. I believe that we are truly free.”

And “free, sinful, limited humans often screw up. And in this case, they found a microscopic flaw in the flywheel of the engine. So I said, We’re not perfect. We build things that break. So this human invention broke. That’s what happened. Where we can use our freedom is in how we deal with this afterwards. Whether you come out injured, or whether you’ve lost a loved one, or whether you saw terrible things as a helper, the point is not to obsess on the fact that we live in a contingent world where bad things happen, but to say, Well, what do I do with the rest of my freedom? And one of the ways that I talk about that is, I really do believe in mystery. That even as a Christian, there’s mystery. So that the people who want to say, ‘Well, God is in charge,’ in order to remove all mystery, I say, No. I say, Look at some of the things in scripture. I say, Let’s take scripture seriously. Even in the Garden of Eden: Why was there a talking snake there to begin with?”

He laughed.

We were talking in a conference room in the new public library in Arlington Heights, Illinois, where his brother had done volunteer work. His brother had died recently, and Clapper had come from his home in Indiana to dispose of the estate and clean out the house. He was grieving again, and it brought up reflections on United Flight 232.

“So,” he said, “there’s a lot of mysteries that we just have to deal with, and my faith is that we have been given the resources—through the Holy Spirit, through Christ’s work—to deal with them. I think the only way you can deal with that mystery is—put it in dialogue with the other mysteries in your life. And I said, I think you’re not honest with yourself if you don’t acknowledge that there are other mysteries. So for instance, I use the story of Susan talking to her father.” He means Susan White, the happy, effervescent homecoming queen from Wadsworth, Ohio. When White entered the Air National Guard building and tried to call her mother and was so shaken that she could barely dial a phone, “Susan was encountering, was experiencing, the mystery of the giftedness of life,” said Clapper. “Did that somehow cancel out all the negative things that just happened? No. But I think you move into the future when you start integrating those two, bringing them together. So it’s not one or the other. It’s not, Life is crap and its meaningless. And it’s not, Everything is powerful and beautiful. It’s both.”

He had come full circle. “To come back to your initial question,” he said, “Why? Am I better than that five-year-old or anything like that? I just have to say—and I think all Christians should say—
I don’t know
. I don’t know why you were saved. And I don’t know why that young child was killed. This is a true mystery. And so I enter into it with you. I cry with you if you allow me into that space. I’ll walk with you. And this is something that a lot of chaplains I know that were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan—talking with their soldiers—they’ll say, Look, I’m gonna journey with you on this. I’m not here to explain it. I’m gonna journey with you. There’s a sense of humility there that I think connects with people, because I think in their heart of hearts we know, Oh, I don’t have an answer. So let’s walk into that mystery together.”

All the while that Clapper and I sat in that small conference room, flushed with sunlight from the great open spaces and the wide windows of the library, a security guard was making his rounds. He came past our windows again and again, and I was moved more than once to wonder what he was doing there. What could possibly happen in the public library in the safe and quiet suburb of Arlington Heights, Illinois? But, of course, I knew: What could possibly happen on a routine flight from Denver to Chicago on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon? What could happen in sleepy Sioux City, Iowa? The guard was the everyday reminder of the presence of incipient calamity in our midst. The forces of chaos are always there and can manifest themselves at any moment, from out of the clouds, unannounced. And indeed, are we not all on that last flight, launching ourselves triumphantly on our determined path, but inescapably finding that we are circling with little control over our own fate? In the midst of that journey, the gift is to celebrate it, as Susan White had when she exclaimed, “
I’m alive!
”

Clapper said that many people had told him, “I wish I could have done more.” His answer was, “I think it has to do with human pride. In our heart of hearts, we really think that we can make everything all better. And that goes back to me fantasizing as a child: I’m going to be John Wayne, I’ll run up the hill, I’ll kill all the enemies, I’ll rescue the girl, and do all the good stuff. But in reality, we can’t make everything all better. And if you face that truth and accept it, that’s really an assault on your pride. And so that gets to this huge spiritual issue, and that is control. It assaults our human pride to realize that we are not in control. And so when people say, ‘There must have been something else I could have done,’ in reality at some point, I hope they get to the point of saying, ‘No, there wasn’t. I really did all I could do.’ You shouldn’t stay up every night saying, ‘Well, if only I’d turned this corner and seen this other person, maybe I would have caught ’em before they died . . . No! Get off your high horse. Who the hell do you think you are?”

Dennis Swanstrom asked Clapper to organize the service for the first anniversary of the crash. At the opening reception, Clapper was thinking of Susan White and wondering if she would be there. He didn’t know if she would even recognize him. But in the reception line they saw each other, and she leapt into his arms and gave him a big hug and said, “Oh, Chaplain Clapper, you helped me make the most important phone call of my life!” In the year since the crash, White had found the man she wished to marry, a United pilot named Dan Callender. White took Clapper aside and said, “I’ve been talking to Dan, and we want you to be part of our wedding.”

Clapper conducted their premarital counseling and then traveled to Wadsworth, Ohio, and conducted the ceremony with White’s Lutheran minister—the same minister she had imagined would announce her death in the church where she grew up. Now at last, she was married in that same church. Happily married. Clapper said, “To me that wedding will always be a symbol of hope, that good things can come out of tragedy. Not to try to make the tragedy less tragic. But God can bring good things out of tragedy.” In fact, this motto is etched on a glass panel at the entrance to the NTSB training center: “From Tragedy We Draw Knowledge to Improve the Safety of Us All.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

T
he engineers at General Electric knew enough about failing titanium parts to predict that an accident of this sort had a fair chance of happening. The manager of the Propulsion Branch of the FAA, Robert Follensbee, put it this way: “
The requirement on the transport airplanes
is that the rotor system [rotating parts] must be assumed to fail, no matter what the engine is. We learned in the 1960s that you can’t really prevent that, no matter how hard we’ve tried. . . . It’s something that’s going to fail and can destroy the airplane.”

David Rapoport, the lawyer who represented Al Haynes and crew, along with Jan Brown, Susan White, Tim Owens, and others, said, “Those who knew most about the engines were doing their best at all phases [of the investigation] to keep outsiders from carefully studying what the management at GEAE knew about the danger and when they knew it. With hard and soft alphas (known insidious problems from the start) why would or should anyone assume [that] changing melt practices would do anything to protect the flying public from dangers that went into the field in the early 1970s? The NTSB was misled.”

As early as 1970, rotating titanium parts were giving evidence of their vulnerability to defects. Here are a
few examples of uncontained rotor bursts
since that time. “Uncontained” means that high-speed shrapnel was released, in some cases damaging the plane and even puncturing the tail and fuselage.

•   April 19, 1970: A fan disk burst on a Scandinavian Airlines DC-8. The pilot was able to stop the plane on the runway in Rome, Italy, before taking off. A hard alpha defect caused the failure.

•   May 2, 1972: A turbine wheel blew up on a DC-10 in Tucson, Arizona.

•   December 28, 1972: A fan disk burst in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

•   January 10, 1973: Another fan disk exploded, this one in Grand Junction, Colorado.

•   March 16, 1979: In Okinawa, a compressor disk failed due to a hard alpha defect.

•   June 25, 1983: In Manila, a compressor disk exploded from a hard alpha defect. Shrapnel penetrated the stabilizer.

•   July 5, 1983: A compressor disk on a DC-8 blew up during takeoff from Chicago. Hard Alpha was the cause. The titanium had been triple-melted, so GE knew that melting titanium three times was no guarantee that a part would be free from defects.

•  
April 10, 1995
: A General Electric CF6-50C2 engine on an Egypt Air Airbus A300 blew up due to a disk failure caused by a hard alpha defect. The pilot was able to stop the plane before takeoff. The disk that failed had undergone a fluorescent penetrant inspection that missed the crack.