Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (2 page)

“Being in the last row of this massive tin can that didn’t seem to be under control,” she later said, “I was pretty convinced that I was not going to make it out of there.”

About twenty minutes had passed since the explosion, and now the passengers could see a mesmerizing mist spraying out from the wings as the crew dumped fuel in what Conant now understood was a last desperate bid for salvation.

Far ahead of Martha Conant and nine-year-old Dave Randa
, nearly two hundred feet away on the flight deck, William Roy Records, the first officer, was flying the Denver-to-Chicago leg of the trip in this McDonnell Douglas DC-10, with Captain Alfred Clair Haynes in the left seat acting as his copilot. Behind Records, Dudley Joseph Dvorak was manning the gauges and monitoring all systems. Jerry Lee Kennedy, thirty-six, a deadheading pilot, recently hired by United Airlines, had been visiting the cockpit to observe the operations. One of the flight attendants came up to ask if he wanted to eat his lunch in the cockpit or in his first class seat.

“You’re welcome to stay up here,” Captain Haynes told him.

“Thanks,” Kennedy said. “But I’m tired of eating off my lap.” He said his good-byes to the crew, thanked the captain, and returned to seat 1-A. In the row behind Kennedy,
Walter Sperks, eighty-one
, and his wife Marie, eighty, were returning from a trip to the Colorado Rockies, where they had spent their honeymoon fifty-two years earlier. Mass would be said for them a week later at 10:30 Wednesday morning in St. James Catholic Church on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago.

On the flight deck, the crew ate lunch in their seats, as usual. They were a bit more than an hour into the flight. The plane was on autopilot. The trays had been cleared away, and Haynes was nursing a cup of coffee. The crew had few tasks to perform until the time came to descend into Chicago. “Everything was fine,” Haynes said many years later. “And there was this loud bang like an explosion. It was so loud, I thought it was a bomb.” He had no recollection of the plane shaking or jerking, but he said he spilled his coffee “all over.”

Records lurched forward and took the control wheel (called the yoke), saying, “I have the airplane.” The plane slewed hard to the right. It shuddered and shook violently and almost immediately climbed three hundred feet, as the tail dropped sharply.

Dudley Dvorak radioed the Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center in Farmington, Minnesota, saying, “We just lost number two engine, like to lower our altitude, please.”

While Records struggled with the controls, Haynes called for the checklist for shutting down the failed engine. He asked Dvorak to read it to him. The first item on the list said to close the throttle, but “this throttle would not go back,” Haynes said later. “That was the first indication that we had something more than a simple engine failure.” The second item on the list said to turn off the fuel supply to that engine. “The fuel lever would not move. It was binding.” Haynes realized that the number two engine, the one that was mounted through the tail, must have suffered some sort of physical damage. The crew as yet had no idea what had happened, but Haynes felt a deep wave of concern surge through him. He knew that he was facing something far more serious than the loss of power to an engine. Events unfolded at lightning speed. Only a minute or so had elapsed since the explosion when Records said, “Al, I can’t control the airplane.”

Aircraft N1819U on final approach. Note the daylight coming through the hole in the leading edge of the horizontal portion of the tail (near the tip). What appears to be a small white spot is actually a foot-long hole. Because no slats or flaps were deployed on the leading and trailing edges of the wings, the crew was forced to attempt a landing at twice the normal speed.
From the collection of Carolyn (Zellmer) Ellwanger

The DC-10 had stopped its climb and had begun descending and rolling to the right. Records was using the control wheel to try to steer, but the aircraft wasn’t responding. He was commanding the aircraft to turn left and to bring its nose up. The aircraft was doing the exact opposite. Haynes saw this dissonant image. It didn’t take a pilot to know that something was dreadfully wrong. Moreover, the pilot can’t wrench the controls to the stops in high-speed cruising flight. Doing so would cause the airplane to break apart. Records later recalled the startled look on Haynes’s face: “I think the picture was worth a thousand words when he looked over at me and saw what was going on.”

As the plane continued its roll, Haynes said, “I’ve got it,” taking hold of his own control wheel. Both Records and Haynes now struggled with the failing steering, while Dvorak watched his instrument panel. Something bizarre was happening. The gauges were showing the pressure and quantity of hydraulic fluid falling lower and lower.

“As the aircraft reached about 38 degrees of bank on its way toward rolling over on its back,” Haynes later explained, “we slammed the number one [left] throttle closed and firewalled the number three [right] throttle.”

Dudley Dvorak recalled the moment: “I looked forward, and we’re rolling to the right. I just said, ‘We’re rolling!’ And Al, in one quick movement, took his right hand off the yoke and swatted the number one engine back, and on the way back up, pushed the other engine up and was back on the yoke in just a matter of seconds.”

If Haynes had not decided—somehow, reflexively—to steer the plane with the throttles, the crippled DC-10 would have rolled all the way over and spiraled into the ground, killing all on board. After a few agonizing seconds, “the right wing slowly came back up,” Haynes said. He had no idea what made him use the throttles. Nothing in his training would have suggested it. The
DC-10 manual does briefly mention
“the use of asymmetric thrust,” but Haynes had no memory of having read that entry. He responded automatically, as a reflex that has remained a mystery to him ever since that day. Now as Dvorak watched his instruments, he was horrified to see the pressure and quantity of fluid in all three hydraulic systems fall to zero.

Before takeoff from Denver, Jan Brown stepped out of the galley amidships, between the forward and aft coach cabins, to check on the unaccompanied minors. She always worried about the children. Reviewing her manifest, she noted that a number of younger children would have no seats. Each would have to ride in someone’s lap. As the chief flight attendant, Brown constantly worried about safety. She wore the white shirt and tie of her uniform, as always, but she chose the navy slacks over a skirt because she knew that the natural materials, cotton and wool, offered protection from fire. Anyway, skirts in an emergency would be disastrous. She was amazed that United even allowed the flight attendants to wear them and had told her superiors as much. Her sandy-colored hair was done in a bob, framing her face at the jawline. When a fireball came through the exit door beside her jump seat about two hours later, it would turn that hair into “a complete frizz job,” as she would put it. But that hair would also save the smooth tan skin beneath, while her wool and cotton clothing would protect her body.

The flight had arrived in Denver from Philadelphia on the last leg of a four-day trip. The pilots had departed and a fresh crew came on board: Haynes, Records, and Dvorak. Brown planned to go up to the cockpit to introduce herself, but Haynes came back to the galley and beat her to it. The fact that he bothered to brief her had reassured Brown. Haynes said that he expected a smooth ride, maybe a few bumps on the descent into O’Hare International Airport. Brown decided to speed up the lunch service at the beginning of the trip in case the flight attendants had to strap in toward the end.

Brown liked everything to be perfect on her flights and lost no opportunity to make it so. If she was serving passengers in first class, she would write a personal note to each one and tuck it inside the white linen napkin on the service tray. She always called her work “the service,” a nearly religious experience, as it must be: after all, she was about to be lofted among the clouds, miles over the earth, even as her congregation sipped coffee and broke bread, virtually in heaven itself.

In fact, Brown had become something of a legend among DC-10 cabin crews. In what she called “the old days,” an elevator would take flight attendants down to a lower galley and into a splendid kitchen with convection ovens. Brown said that flights from Chicago to Boston were often so empty in those days that she’d bring her muffin tin and all the ingredients and bake for the crew down there, in what they called “the Pit.”

“They’re still talking about it to this day,” she said, “about my blueberry muffins and my apple pancake.” In addition, she said, flight attendants liked to go down to the Pit to smoke.

On July 19, 1989, Brown made the preflight safety announcement. She first carefully checked what she called her “demo card,” the safety instructions found in the pocket on the back of every seat. She checked it because one time a fellow flight attendant had taped a piece of paper to her card. In big block letters, it said, “I NEED A DATE!” Satisfied that no one had tampered with her card, she told her passengers that she was well aware that many of them were seasoned travelers and had heard this briefing dozens of times. She asked those adults to set a good example for all the first-time fliers—and especially all the children—and to please pay attention. It was the bane of a flight attendant’s existence: no one paid attention. Brown, however, took the possibility of a crash seriously. “I was really so concerned, because when we’d have to stand at our demo position, looking at our area of responsibility, I’d just look at people and think: I can tell who are the survivors, because they’re the ones who are watching this. We know how to get out of the aircraft in sixty to ninety seconds, but you won’t if you’re in the dark.”

Once the plane was airborne, Brown served the port side in the forward coach cabin, known as B-Zone, rows 9 through 20, while Rene Louise Le Beau worked the starboard aisle across the five-seat center section from her. Then Brown and Le Beau quickly began picking up the service trays so that everything would be put away early. As busy as she was, Brown couldn’t help noticing Le Beau, thin, petite, and striking. Her hair was such a brilliant red, it always attracted attention. That day she wore a large navy-blue bow in it for a startling contrast. Both Brown and Le Beau lived in Schaumberg, Illinois. Le Beau, twenty-three, had not been scheduled for this flight. She was put on at the last minute because the plane was so crowded.

Brown had rehearsed how to react in any kind of emergency. She was
acutely aware that a United Airlines 747
had lost a cargo door five months earlier. As the door had ripped away, it had taken a large piece of the cabin wall with it, and nine people were sucked out over the Pacific Ocean and never seen again. When Brown heard the explosion on this flight to Chicago, she went to the floor and held onto the nearest armrest, fearing that the cabin might lose pressure and suck someone out.

“I held on until we stabilized.” Brown was about two-thirds of the way down her aisle. “And since I was facing aft, I could see Sylvia Tsao holding Evan.” At thirty, Sylvia had her twenty-three-month-old son in her lap. “She was working up into panic, and I was like: ‘No, I don’t have panic on my airplanes. We’re all calm. No matter what, we’re all calm.’ ” For just as Haynes was captain of the ship, Brown was the captain of her cabins.

When she felt that the plane was stable, she stood up and went to Sylvia Tsao. In a low and gentle voice she said, “We’re going to be okay.” She explained about the plane still having two good engines. As she spoke, Dvorak announced the same thing: they would descend to a lower altitude and fly more slowly to Chicago.
Jerry Schemmel
, twenty-nine, sat in the next row back, across the aisle from Sylvia. He was the deputy commissioner for the Continental Basketball Association, which oversaw the teams that fed new players into the National Basketball Association. Schemmel watched Brown and Sylvia and baby Evan Jeffrey. He thought about how he would respond once the plane was on the ground: he would help them get out.

Brown crossed the aisle from Sylvia and Evan and reassured another woman “who looked petrified,” in Jan Brown’s words. Then the chime rang at her station, indicating that someone was calling on the interphone. From where she stood at the 3-Left door between B-Zone and C-Zone (rows 21 through 38), she could see most of her crew and knew that the call was not coming from any of them. From long experience, she knew that if the captain was calling her at this point in the flight, it could be nothing but bad news. She picked up the handset, and Dvorak’s voice confirmed her fear. He told her to report to the cockpit. She hung up and walked deliberately up the port aisle, trying to look calm, “knowing that passengers were still watching, that they were very concerned. So I gave my best casual walk.”
As she passed into B-Zone
, she walked by the Osenberg family, Bruce and Dina and Ruth Anne, holding hands with Tom Postle, a lay minister who had his thick old Bible out. The couple and the man with the Bible appeared to be in their forties or fifties. The girl Dina was college age. They were all praying together, heads bowed. The Wernick family, Pete and Joan with their six-year-old son Will, watched Brown go forward. Brown passed Joseph Trombello and Gitte Skaanes; Margo Crain, Rod Vetter, and Ron Sheldon in row 19; and Aki Muto in the next row back, a tall Japanese girl in a white blouse and light-blue skirt, college age, with jet-black hair, alabaster skin, and big dark eyes, like a doll’s.

“I knocked on the door like we’re trained to do,” Brown said. “And they opened the door. And the whole world changed just in that instant when that door opened.” She saw no panic, she said. “I just took it all in, but it was what was in the air. It was so palpable. I remember thinking: ‘This isn’t an emergency, this is a goddamned crisis.’ And I don’t usually talk that way.”

As Brown spoke to me about this in her brightly lit modern kitchen over coffee and chocolate chip cookies, which she had taken out of the oven moments before, her face contorted in the agony of her remembered horror, and I could see the goose flesh rise on her forearms. Her face mobilized into anguished expressions, and at times as she recounted what she had gone through, her sad winter-brown eyes rolled heavenward as if she had reached the exasperating edge of all experience.