Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (51 page)

Within months of the crash
, the FAA had formed the Titanium Rotating Components Review Team to improve the manufacturing and inspection of all of the spinning parts on turbines. In 1990, the Jet Engine Titanium Quality Committee was founded to track defects in batches of titanium or components made from it. Participation became mandatory for all companies producing titanium or jet engines. Many hard alpha inclusions were found after 1989, but most were discovered before a disk or wheel had time to fracture.

There are many ways to think about the last flight of 1819 Uniform. James Wildey, the metallurgist for the NTSB, chose this point of view: “In a way it shows how safe aviation is. It took a whole series of really unlikely events to make this accident happen. That the defect got into the metal at all was unlikely. That it was located in the disk at the point that was going to be under the most stress was also unlikely. If the defect had been a little bit bigger, it might have been detected. If it had been a little bit smaller, the disk would have been retired from service before it broke apart. This disk was almost at its life limit. If the defect had been located pretty much anywhere else in the fan disk, the stresses would have been low enough [that] it wouldn’t have failed.” If it had been located a little farther inboard, it would have been machined off. If it had been located farther from the centerline, it would have been detected. He said that if the flaw had been closer to the surface, a chemical test would have revealed it, but the workers at GE machined the final shape
after
that test, not before it. They could not perform the chemical test on the final shape because that test used nitric hydrofluoric acid to etch the surface and reveal the grain of the metal. It was a destructive test that would ruin the final shape. Then (at least according to one theory) the tools that cut the final shape happened to reach and expose the defect. It was a chance occurrence that the tool reached the level where the defect lay. The defect was then on the surface of the metal. If it had not been chipped out already, it was ready to be chipped out during the finishing process.

“These small events happen all the time and don’t cause a crash.” But, said Wildey, “in this case, they all ganged up on the one spot there and caused the accident. . . . It illustrates how many different types of things have to go wrong in the aviation industry to have a catastrophic failure like this.”

Flying on commercial airliners in First World countries is the safest means of travel that exists today.

The dead from United Airlines Flight 232
are still among us. Photographs of them and their belongings are on file, in perpetuity, in the archives of the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation.

Joan Wernick said she took two lessons from the crash. “You’re going to die when you’re supposed to die. And then you get,” she said, using the concept she learned from her mother, “ ‘the grace of the present moment.’ ” She explained: “You are going to get the grace to deal with whatever tragedy comes up. My mother used to tell me, ‘You don’t get it beforehand. You won’t get it afterward. You just get it at that time.’ ” Joan said, “You can anticipate this grace. Why [else] would I have been calm when this plane was crashing? If I think about it, I should have been really upset. I wasn’t. I was very peaceful.” Jan Brown, Martha Conant, and many others said the same thing: facing death was the most peaceful moment of their lives.

One day when Sabrina Lee Michaelson
was in the seventh grade, she logged onto a message board on the Internet. It’s not clear which one, perhaps a forum on AOL about United Flight 232. On it, she wrote,

Hello, my name is Sabrina Lee Michaelson. I was the little baby girl on flight number 232. I went to your website hoping to find information about the plane crash I was in. Surprisingly I found out that my brother had written bout it and I never knew. I do not remember anything of it but feel very lucky to have survived it. And that my whole family survived it makes me feel very very lucky. To think that if it wasn’t for Jerry [Schemmel] I wouldn’t be alive today. My family and I still do stay in touch with Jerry and his family to this day but once again I would like to thank him for saving my life. Thank you. Now i am 12 years old in the 7th grade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sabrina Michaelson

By 2008, Sabrina was a beautiful young woman with a large Doberman pinscher she doted on and a wide circle of friends. She had had her left eyebrow pierced, and she liked to wear sparkly rings and dangling earrings. Sometimes she used turquoise eyeliner. In early July that year, as the sun had just begun its lowering arc toward the south and toward summer’s long waning, she abruptly put an end to the story by taking her own life, twenty days short of her twentieth birthday. Schemmel told me, “I have tried hard over the last couple [of years] to find out more about what led to her death, but her family has never responded to any of my inquiries.” And that was after nearly two decades of sending him cards every year and photos of the girl he saved. I wrote to Sabrina’s friends and family on many occasions, but received no response.

So we don’t know why, and perhaps we will never know why. She killed herself in Arizona, where vital records are not public. The cause of her suicide may have been clinical depression. Death may have been foreshadowed in the entire arc of Sabrina Lee’s life, beginning with the crash, which would have embedded itself permanently in the landscape of her unconscious emotional memories, even if she remembered none of it consciously. And then she lived with the never-ending repetition of the crash through the yearly reminders of the man who saved her. Even at the age of twelve, she identified herself to the world as the baby girl who was saved by the stranger. Sabrina is buried at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Mesa, Arizona. The inscription reads, “Those we have held in our arms for a little while we hold in our hearts forever.” The plaque displays photographs of Sabrina on ski slopes, in a bathing suit at perhaps the age of twelve, and with her Doberman near the end of her life.

Rene Le Beau was thrown from the plane
. She was found dead, out of her seat, lying on her side, stretched out, with her long red hair flowing all around her. She was twenty-three years old and had been flying for seven months.

Mark Fageol, chief photographer for the
Sioux City Journal
, left the newspaper business and became a railroad engineer. He drove a train on a regular run from North Platte, Nebraska, to Marysville, Kansas.

The
last scheduled airline flight of a DC-10
in the United States occurred on January 7, 2007, when Northwest Airlines Flight 98 arrived in Minneapolis from Hawaii. When this book went to press in late 2013, Biman Airlines of Bangladesh had the last two DC-10s that were still being used for scheduled flights carrying passengers. The airline sold one for scrap after its last flight and was attempting to donate the other to a museum somewhere in the United States.

On June 18, 1990, a healthy baby boy
, Emil, was born to Sylvia and Jeffrey Tsao.

*
Haynes was probably at the peak of his abilities as a pilot and could have flown safely for many more years. The rule was widely recognized as a bad one, and in 2007, the age for mandatory retirement was raised to 65. It could still be raised further. All pilots will tell you that they like those “crusty old birds” like the pilot who flew survivors to Chicago from Sioux City on the night of July 19, 1989.

ILLUSTRATIONS

The landing. This is a still frame taken from a video of the crash. The black spot at center above the smoke appears to be a bank of seats with people still strapped in. To view the video, see laurencegonzales.com.
From the collection of Gary Brown

Just moments after the crash, emergency vehicles and volunteers swarmed the scene. The truck with the sign that says, “Follow Me,” is ordinarily used to direct small aircraft to the parking ramp.

Fighting the fire in the minutes immediately after the crash. In the interior of the plane, the temperature rose to an estimated 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius), melting the structure and burning the people inside beyond recognition.

Firefighters use a forklift to raise the wreckage of the cockpit with four pilots trapped inside. For half an hour, people walked past this debris not realizing what it was.