Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (52 page)

Dr. Romaine “Ben” Bendixen (in the flight suit, center) looks down at one of the pilots freshly extracted from the cockpit.

Lieutenant Jim Allen of the Sioux City Fire Department (in the red helmet) calls for a backboard for the injured pilot. Dave Kaplan (in sunglasses), a volunteer with WCDES, was among the first to realize that the pile of wreckage had people in it.

Minutes after the crash, survivors, some without a scratch, others fatally wounded, were taken to triage. Colonel Dennis Swanstrom, the base commander, is on the far left. Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Harrington (wearing a hat) is in the center. The sign for Graham Aviation can be seen between the two, and the control tower is in the background, at the far right.

Air National Guard men and women prepare to search for bodies in the cornfield. The tail of the aircraft is in the background with two rows of seats still attached inside. The tail broke away and tumbled down the runway at more than 200 miles an hour, yet most people in those seats survived.

July 20, 1989, the day after the crash: The path of destruction from first impact on Runway 22. The view is approximately to the south. The burning fuselage came to rest inverted in the cornfield, in the upper left. Note the patches of unscarred ground in the middle where the jumbo jet bounced on its nose as it pirouetted.

The reverse view of the path, with the fuselage in the foreground and the point of impact in the background.
Photos by John Bates

The tail where it came to rest on Taxiway Lima, with passengers and flight attendants still alive inside. It broke away when the aircraft hit the ground traveling at almost 250 miles an hour.
Photo by John Bates

The burned-out fuselage on the day after the crash. Dozens of the dead were still inside. A perimeter had been cut in the cornfield to make it easier to guard the wreckage during the night. All of the dead remained on the field through the night.
Photo by John Bates

Passenger seat. Note the skid marks showing paths taken by seats. The two stains are from bodies that lay on the runway overnight. The pink numbers are case numbers. Each body was given a unique number before identification. Tags bearing these numbers were wired to each body.
Photo by Pat McCann

A typical arrangement of seats that had been ejected from the plane. Some passengers survived in these banks of seats, but the pink number and the stain on the concrete show the location of a fatality.
Photo by Pat McCann

The seats where Dave and Susan Randa sat, along with John Hatch, Martha Conant, Yisroel Brownstein, Richard Howard Sudlow, and the Milford family. Susan White’s jump seat (not visible) faces aft behind the seats at the top of the image.

The electronics building and the radio transmitter-receiver (RTR) towers where some survivors gathered after running through the cornfield (background).
Photo from the author’s collection