Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (4 page)

The airport was already on Alert Two status, as it had been since word first arrived that the crippled plane was on its way. Now with Captain Haynes announcing that he might ditch, Bates immediately turned to Bill Hoppe, the new tower supervisor, a fifteen-year veteran as an air traffic controller. Bates trusted his judgment. “Alert Two or Alert Three?” he asked Hoppe. “There’s nothin’ in the books for this one. They say they’re going to put the plane down wherever they can.”

“I don’t know,” Hoppe said. “What do you think?”

Alert Two means that emergency equipment will be put on the field, but that might be for any sort of emergency. The plane itself might not be in trouble. Instead, someone on board the flight might be having a heart attack. Alert Two does not anticipate a mass casualty. Alert Three means that a plane has crashed or is about to crash. Because Woodbury County, home of Sioux City, had a disaster plan that involved an emergency response from all the surrounding communities of Siouxland, the two controllers reasoned that declaring Alert Three was the most expedient way of rapidly calling as much emergency equipment as possible to the field. Bates was in a real bind because he had to make the call. If he allowed Alert Two to remain in effect and people survived the crash, there might not be enough rescuers and equipment to take care of all the injured. Lives could be lost. If, on the other hand, he elevated the status to Alert Three and the flight landed uneventfully, the 270 organizations that responded would have wasted time and money for nothing. “I would have been in real hot water,” Bates said.

But at this, the moment of truth, Hoppe and Bates looked at each other and blurted it out in unison: “Alert Three!”

“We broke a rule was what we did,” Bates told me later. “The call was made simply because the plane was out of control. It was going down. We just didn’t know where.”

From the time Haynes told Bachman the condition of his plane to the moment Bates and Hoppe made the decision to call Alert Three, only fifteen or twenty seconds had passed. Then Bates used the special phone line to the fire department dispatch center in downtown Sioux City to explain the situation. Those dispatchers, in turn, notified other emergency agencies. In addition, Gary Brown (no relation to Jan), director of WCDES and an emergency medical technician by training, “escalated it above the normal Alert Three,” as he later said, requesting even more equipment than the emergency plan called for. Sirens took up a wailing chorus all across the corn-green countryside, as eighty pieces of emergency equipment from forty communities began converging on the Sioux City airport.

Since the field was an Air National Guard base, its equipment and the airport fire and rescue vehicles were the first to move. All of the emergency services involved in disaster planning had been assigned positions where they would wait in case of an emergency on the airfield, and the heavy equipment now went roaring across the field to those locations, blowing diesel smoke. Mleynek coordinated the movement of the vehicles on the ground. The Air National Guard fire-fighting equipment used no sirens or lights. As the base fire chief, James Hathaway, put it, “
There is no one out there
, just jack rabbits and us.”

At about 3:40 the emergency dispatcher
had called the Marian Air Care helicopter, known as MAC, that was on standby on the pad at Marian Health Center. He had alerted the crew to go to the pad immediately and then ordered the helicopter to take off and fly to the home of Dr. David Greco, land there, and pick him up. Chuck Owings, the local controller up in the tower, called MAC, too, and asked its pilot to stand off about three miles from the field when he returned and wait in loitering flight for the crippled plane to come in. By that time, emergency vehicles from the nearest communities had begun to arrive and line up at the main airport gate. Gary Brown drove his truck full of emergency medical equipment and technicians out onto the field. Bates could see Gary’s big white Ford trucks from above, as Mleynek cleared them into position. They parked on the ramp
*
with immediate access to the runways. They would be among the first to respond if the plane made it to the airport. As Bates looked out the window of the tower, he felt an acute sense of alarm. The landscape below, normally vacant and dead quiet at this time on a summer day, steadily filled with emergency equipment.

In the meantime, across the sunlit room, Jimmy Weifenbach was bringing in six Air National Guard A-7s that had been out on maneuvers over Kansas. When Zielezinski split the radar coverage in two, he gave Kevin Bachman his own scope for handling only United Flight 232. The approach controller would normally handle all traffic out to about forty miles, but that day, everything but United Flight 232, including the A-7s, went to Weifenbach, who would hand them off to Owings for the last minute or two of flight.

Also, the supervisor of flying for the Air National Guard, Dennis Nielsen, was talking to the pilots of the A-7s and listening to the transmissions from the tower. Although he couldn’t hear what Captain Haynes was saying, because his military radio operated on a different frequency, he realized that an emergency was under way and had directed the A-7s to return to base.

The first two A-7s landed to the northwest on Runway 31. They taxied into the de-arm area at the end.
Dale Mleynek called Al Smith
, the lead A-7 pilot, and said, “Bat
†
Three-One, Sioux City Ground. After de-arming, hold short runway three-five at Lima.” (Taxiway Lima is the one labeled with the letter
L
.)
Smith and his wingman Romaine “Ben” Bendixen
began to realize that they were in a bad place, indeed. Mleynek transmitted the same words again about forty-five seconds later, and Smith responded, “Three-One, Wilco.”

Within two minutes, Mleynek ordered the fire equipment to be shuttled off to the northwest side of the field, since the DC-10 had no brakes. As the trucks moved off, Smith called Mleynek and said, “Ground, Bat Three-One, we’re ready to taxi back now.”

Mleynek gave them permission to taxi and added, “Bat Three-One use caution for two emergency vehicles just off the right side of Taxiway Lima.”

The fire-fighting equipment pulled off the taxiway onto the grass to wait. As other emergency vehicles came onto the field, Mleynek directed them toward their staging positions. Smith called to make sure that he was cleared to cross Runway 17-35, and then proceeded to the ramp, where the two fighter-bombers passed Gary Brown’s white truck and the KTIV Channel 4 News cameraman, Dave Boxum, who was setting up his equipment outside the fence.

Al Smith and Ben Bendixen climbed down from their cockpits and began crossing the Air National Guard ramp. “I was walking northbound slowly with my head down somewhat,” Bendixen recalled, “not anticipating that United 232 was going to land as soon as it did.” He thought that it would approach from the south and land on Runway 31. He couldn’t see the northern part of the field because his view was blocked by the National Guard buildings and a group of old World War II hangars. He walked along in the heat, carrying his helmet, heading for the room they called maintenance control, where they would shed their flight gear. Then he heard—and almost felt—a sound that he would never mistake for anything else, and he turned to see the rising smoke and fire.

*
Looking forward from the back of the aircraft,
port
refers to the left side and
starboard
refers to the right.

*
Like ships, all airplanes have to be registered somewhere. Those from the United States have a registration number (a “tail number”) beginning with the letter
N
—hence,
November
in the International Phonetic Alphabet used in aviation. The tail number of the DC-10 flying as United Flight 232 that day was 1819U, so that plane was uniquely known as November 1819 Uniform.

*
VOR is a radio navigational aid. The initials stand for VHF omnidirectional range.

*
The word
heavy
reminds pilots of smaller aircraft that they can be upset by the wake of larger planes.

*
The words
ramp
and
apron
are used interchangeably to refer to the paved areas at an airport that are neither runways nor taxiways.

†
Runways are named for the cardinal direction they face. If a pilot is landing on Runway 31, his compass will say 310 (North being 360). If a pilot is landing in the opposite direction on the same runway, the compass will read 130, so it would then be called Runway 13, even though it’s the same stretch of concrete.

†
According to Colonel Lawrence Harrington (retired), a lieutenant colonel named Gordy Young gave the 185th Tactical Fighter Group the call sign “Bats.”

CHAPTER TWO

D
uring boarding in Denver, Jan Murray had been in A-Zone, first class, helping people to their seats and hanging up coats. She had noticed Rene Le Beau, the newest hire, who was helping out in first class. Murray would always remember Le Beau. “I remember how pretty she was, and I remember her hair in particular. It was strawberry blonde and very curly and beautiful.” Once the flight had taken off and the lunch service was under way, Murray, a former registered nurse who was thirty-four at the time and had eleven years of seniority as a flight attendant, chatted with the younger woman. Le Beau was excited because she was going to be with her boyfriend that weekend and they were talking about getting married. The two women laughed together, enjoying the flight.

Indeed, they sensed a festive atmosphere in first class that day. Murray, a thin, youthful woman with bleached silver hair, had stopped to talk with William Edward and Rose Marie Coletta Prato and Gerald Harlon “Gerry” Dobson and his wife Joann from Pittsgrove Township, New Jersey. All four were dressed in Hawaiian clothes, laughing and enjoying the first class luncheon, the perfect ending to their trip to Hawaii. “They stay on my mind,” Murray said more than two decades later. “They were so having a good time.” The ladies were dressed in muumuus and their husbands wore Hawaiian shirts. “It was obvious they’d had a wonderful vacation. They were just very pleasant people. I think about them all the time.”

After lunch, Murray was cleaning up, standing in the galley between first class and coach, bending down to put a tray into the cart, when the engine exploded. Murray went to the floor reflexively. “It just was so loud that there’s no way to describe how loud it was. The plane was shaking pretty fiercely,” she recalled. “The plane was making sounds that I had never heard before.” When I asked Murray to describe those sounds, she made a noise like a siren wailing. She was hearing the hydraulic motors pumping all the fluid out of the system and overboard, as Dvorak, up in the cockpit, watched his gauges fall to zero. “It was very obvious that something was very, very seriously wrong.”

With her heart sinking, Murray continued cleaning up after lunch. When Jan Brown emerged from the cockpit and told her and Barbara Gillaspie and Rene Le Beau that they had lost all hydraulics, it merely strengthened her conviction that she was going to die. Murray had been serving lunch to two deadheading United pilots in the last row of first class on the starboard side. Peter Allen was in uniform. Dennis Fitch, by the window, wore civilian clothes. Murray had learned that Fitch was a DC-10 instructor at the United training facility in Denver. He was on his way home for the weekend.
Fitch had first noticed
Murray when she served his lunch. He had heard her lilting southern accent as the three chatted pleasantly.

Fitch was the oldest of eight siblings, and as such he had developed what he called “people radar.” He could spot a distressed person at a hundred yards, as he liked to say. Now he saw that Murray looked grave and worried as she rushed past. Fitch reached out, touched her arm, and stopped her. Murray leaned down. “Don’t worry about this,” he told her. “This thing flies fine on two engines. We just simply need to get to a lower altitude, and we’re gonna be fine.”

She leaned in closer and fixed him with a penetrating gaze. According to Fitch’s account, she said, “Oh, no, Denny.” She spoke softly so as not to be overheard. “Both the pilots are trying to fly the airplane, and the captain has told us that we have lost all our hydraulics.”

Fitch stared at her for a moment. He knew that wasn’t possible, but as he later put it, “
A flight attendant is not a pilot
.” She could not be expected to know anything about airplanes. “DC-10s
must
have hydraulics to fly them. Period.”

“Oh, that’s impossible,” Fitch told Murray. “It can’t happen.”

“Well, that’s what we’re being told,” Murray said.

“Well, there’s a backup system.”

“We’re being told that that’s gone too.”

Fitch thought about that for a moment and said, “Well . . . I don’t think that’s possible, but . . . would you go back to the cockpit. Tell the captain there’s a DC-10 Training Check Airman back here. If there’s anything that I can do to assist, I’d be happy to do so.”

Fitch watched Murray go forward as quickly as she could without alarming passengers. Fitch had been on full alert for a while now, and this new development was baffling and more than a little alarming. When the explosion occurred, he had finished his lunch and was having that second coffee that Susan White, tongue in cheek, had asked a nonplussed Jan Brown about far in the back of the plane. “The whole fuselage went very sharply to the right,” Fitch recalled. “That coffee cup is now empty. Its contents are in the saucer, and it’s all over the table linen. And my rear end, which is sitting in the middle of a leather seat, is now up against the arm rest to the left. It was abrupt and violent.”

As a Training Check Airman, or TCA, Fitch had conducted five days of training with a group of DC-10 pilots in Denver during the past week. When the engine exploded, he turned to Peter Allen and said, while mopping up coffee, “It looks like we lost one.” Fitch then felt the plane begin making a series of strange excursions across the sky, first up, then down and to the right in long, loopy spirals, and up and down again and again, like a boat on uneasy seas. With one engine out, they were supposed to be going down, not up. The right turns made it seem to him as if the number three engine on the right wing had failed, causing drag on that side. But the announcement said that number two quit. As a TCA, Fitch was exposed to every conceivable emergency, week in and week out, yet nothing he saw or heard made sense.