Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (5 page)

More than twenty years after Fitch had sent Jan Murray to the cockpit to offer his services, she described her experience there. “I went to the cockpit, knocked on the door. It flew open.” As she tried to describe the horrifying scene in there, she stuttered and stammered with the pain of remembering. “Th-th-the pilots were struggling so, it was just, it was incredible, the struggle that they were—just the visual of it was just—
so frightening
. It was like they were struggling to hang onto the controls. So I just hollered in there, I said, ‘You have a Training Check Airman back here if you need him.’ ”

Haynes didn’t turn around. He called out, “Okay, let him come up.”

“Immediately I closed the door, and trying to be as calm as possible, I walked back through the first class cabin and I leaned down to Denny and I told him, ‘They want you up there.’ ”

Fitch reached the cockpit, still thinking that the flight attendant didn’t understand the situation. But as the door opened, he recalled, “the scene to me as a pilot was unbelievable. Both the pilots were in short-sleeved shirts, the tendons being raised in their forearms, their knuckles were white.” As he closed the door behind him, Fitch’s eyes flicked over all the instruments and switches on Dvorak’s panel.
He clearly saw that the motor pumps
and rudder standby power were both armed. No rudder standby light. No bus ties (similar to circuit breakers) were open, the navigational instruments were working normally, and the plane had electrical power. Someone had already deployed a generator driven by air that was meant to pump hydraulic fluid in the event that the regular engine-driven pumps weren’t working. But the hydraulic gauges read zero and the low-pressure lights were on.

The plane was porpoising in a slow cycle, up and down, hundreds of feet every minute, even while both Haynes and Records fought the yoke to no effect. On the radio, Dvorak was pleading for help from the United Airlines maintenance base in San Francisco, while Records, breathing hard from his effort, used his knee to help force the yoke forward during one of the aircraft’s uncontrollable climbs.

Fitch later said, “The first thing that strikes your mind is, Dear God, I’m going to die this afternoon. The only question that remains is how long is it going to take Iowa to hit me? That’s a very compelling moment in your life. Life was good. And here I am forty-six years old and I’m going to die. My wife was my high school sweetheart, loved her dearly, and I had three beautiful children.” The last thing his wife had said to him was, “I love you, hurry home. I love you.” Fitch turned away from Dvorak’s gauges and saw that Records didn’t even have his shoulder harness fastened. Fitch leaned over him and fastened it.

Haynes had hoped that Fitch would know some secret trick to bring the plane back under control, perhaps a hidden button that only flight instructors get to know about that would make everything all right. Dvorak was telling United Airlines Systems Aircraft Maintenance in San Francisco, known as SAM, that they needed assistance and needed it quickly. When Fitch entered the cockpit and saw the hydraulic gauges reading zero, his reaction was similar to that of the United engineers at SAM, who were telling Dvorak that what he had reported was impossible. Having hydraulic fluid in the lines is a necessary condition of flight in a DC-10. After a complete loss of hydraulic power, the plane would have no steering. It would roll over and accelerate toward the earth, reaching speeds high enough to tear off the wings and tail before the fuselage plowed into the ground.
Or it might enter into an uncontrollable flutter
, falling like a leaf all the way to the earth, to pancake in and burst into flames. Under no circumstances would it continue to fly in any controllable fashion. To an expert pilot’s eye, what Fitch saw was like watching someone walk on water. Haynes later said that Fitch “took one look at the instrument panel and that was it, that was the end of his knowledge.”

Haynes told Fitch, “See what you can see back there, will ya?”

Records said, “Go back and look out [at] the wing and see what we’ve got.”

“Okay,” Fitch said, and he left the cockpit. As he hurried down the aisle, he brushed past Gerry and Joann Dobson in their Hawaiian clothes. He passed Brad Griffin in 2-E, who had been thrilled to make this trip to play in a golf tournament with his brother.
Fitch passed Paul Burnham
, whose body, at first unidentified, would be labeled with nothing more than the number 43. Fitch left first class and entered the coach cabin, standing by the exit door behind his own seat and Peter Allen’s.
Allen would eventually escape
from the wrecked aircraft by the seemingly impossible maneuver of going through a broken passenger window. In fact, he wasn’t the only one who attempted that. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, a young police officer named Pat McCann, who happened to be training at the airport that day, saw a man who had managed to get the upper half of his body through his window before the lower half was incinerated inside the plane.

Fitch passed down the aisle into B-Zone. What he saw through the window only deepened his dread. He crossed to the port side and looked out at the left wing to confirm what he suspected. He rushed back through A-Zone, passing row 9, where Upton Rehnberg, who wrote technical manuals for the aerospace giant Sundstrand, sat in the window seat. Helen Young Hayes, an investment analyst from Denver, sat next to Rehnberg, on the aisle. A young woman with Chinese features, Hayes was fashionably dressed in a miniskirt and blouse. Across the aisle from her sat John Transue, forty. Rehnberg and Hayes would soon share adjacent rooms in the burn unit at St. Luke’s Hospital. Transue would save Jan Brown’s life. Fitch reached the cockpit door and knocked. No one answered.

On the other side of the door, Haynes was saying, “We’re not gonna make the runway, fellas. We’re gonna have to ditch this son of a bitch and hope for the best.” Fitch knocked again, louder, and Haynes shouted, “
Unlock that fuckin’ door!
”

“Unlock it!” echoed Records.

Dvorak opened the door, and Fitch stepped into the cockpit. He’d been gone less than two minutes. He said, “Okay, both inboard ailerons are sticking up. That’s as far as I can tell. I don’t know.”

The extreme stress was still affecting Haynes’s thinking. He responded, “That’s because we’re steering—we’re turning maximum turn right now.” Ailerons always move in opposite directions, up on one wing and down on the other. Both of them can’t be up at the same time unless they’re floating from lack of hydraulic power.

“Tell me what you want,” Fitch said, “and I’ll help you.”

Haynes said, “Right throttle. Close one, put two up.” He was under so much stress that he had simply misspoken. In reality, he was trying to tell Fitch to reduce power on the left engine (one) and increase it on the right (three, not two, which had obviously quit). “What we need,” Haynes said, “is elevator control, and I don’t know how to get it.”

Fitch was confused but willing. “Okay, ah . . . ,” he said. He stood between the two pilots, took the handles in his hands, and began to move them in accordance with instructions from Haynes and Records, surfing this 185-ton whale five miles in the sky at 83 percent of the speed of sound.

Dudley Dvorak was known as an unflappable guy. He had started his career in the Air Force as a navigator and flew back seat in F-4 Phantoms in Vietnam. He had been a flight instructor and examiner in numerous aircraft during his military career. Dvorak retired from the Air Force in 1985 and joined United with two decades of experience. Haynes could not have asked for a more competent pilot. Despite that, as Dvorak talked to SAM in San Francisco, he was under so much stress that he was having trouble saying what he meant to say. “Roger, we need any help we can get from SAM as far as what to do with this, we don’t have anything, we don’t—what to do, we’re having a hard time controllin’ it, we’re descending, we’re down to seventeen thousand feet we have . . . ah, hardly any control whatsoever.”

In the meantime, Haynes suggested to Fitch that they try the autopilot, and Fitch said, “It won’t work.” Then Haynes began coaching Fitch concerning how to steer against the constant and uncommanded climbing and descending. “Start it down,” he said. Then, “No, no, no, no, no, not yet . . . wait a minute till it levels off . . . Now go!”

Immediately after the explosion, the plane made one big slow right turn about twenty to thirty miles in diameter. Then the plane proceeded to make several more spirals of five to ten miles each, downward and to the right. Robert Benzon, an investigator for the NTSB, would say later, “The flyers in the cockpit became instant test pilots when the center engine let loose. They were line pilots,” meaning workaday guys, “with no training on a total hydraulic failure situation. Period. They are heroes in every sense of the word.” In fact, the
pilots who later attempted landings
in a simulator that was configured to fly as the damaged DC-10 flew, found that the aircraft eventually crashed, despite their best efforts.

Haynes and Records continued to try to fly the plane using the yoke, even though the controls were dead. Haynes later said that after forty years of flying, it was difficult to get it into his head that he was flying a plane unless he was holding onto something. Fitch said the same thing: they reacted reflexively. And he later dared any aviator under those circumstances, “
You
let go of it if you’re the pilot.” Haynes also said that he and the crew really had no idea what had gone wrong with their beautiful ship.

This radar track shows the path of Flight 232. The plane was traveling northeast at thirty-seven thousand feet. Just east of the Cherokee airport, the fan on the number two engine blew apart, cutting hydraulic lines and disabling flight controls.
From NTSB Docket 437

As Fitch acquired a feel for steering with the throttles, Haynes asked, “How are they doing on the evacuation?”

“They’re putting things away,” Fitch said, “but they’re not in any big hurry.”

“Well, they better hurry,” said Haynes. “We’re going to have to ditch, I think.” Then, after a moment, “I don’t think we’re going to make the airport.”

Fitch’s response was, “Get this thing down, we’re in trouble!”

Many years later, Haynes laughed at that, saying that it seemed like a pretty profound case of stating the obvious. But as a TCA, Fitch knew that in the twenty-five years prior to this event, no one had ever survived the complete loss of flight controls in an airliner. They were merely buying time.

As Fitch nursed the throttles, Dvorak continued talking to SAM. Someone in San Francisco said, “We’ll get you expedited handling into Chicago. . . . Put you on the ground as soon as we can.”

Exasperated at the preposterous remark, Dvorak said, “Well, we can’t make Chicago. We’re gonna have to land somewhere out here, probably in a field.” Whoever was on the line at SAM was so shocked that the frequency went dead for more than a minute before anyone spoke again. And then all he had to say was, in effect, Tell us where you’re going to crash.

Even at this late stage, the gathered engineers on the ground at SAM were still scratching their heads in disbelief, and the cockpit was awash in confusion from the extreme stress that was making it difficult for the crew to think straight. Haynes denies that they were afraid, but from the mistakes they were making and the sound of their voices on the tapes, it is clear that this highly skilled crew with its long experience was not functioning normally. Fitch was later frank about how afraid he was. Records asked Haynes if he wanted to put out the flaps, but the flaps are hydraulically operated, so that was not possible. (Slats and flaps are extensions on the front and back of the wings, respectively. When deployed, they allow the plane to fly at slower speeds for takeoff and landing.) Haynes responded, “What the hell. Let’s do it. We can’t get any worse than we are and spin in.”

Records went so far as to pull the slat handle and report, “Slats are out.”

The wings aren’t visible from the cockpit, so the pilots were unable to see whether pulling that handle had any effect. But Fitch said, “No, you don’t have any slats.”

Haynes realized his mistake at last, saying, “We don’t have any hydraulics, so we’re not going to get anything.”

Moreover, at that point, they didn’t even know where they were. “Get on [frequency] number one,” Fitch said, “and ask them what the—where the hell we are.”

Haynes radioed the Sioux City tower, “Where’s the airport now, ah, for Two Thirty-Two as we’re turning around in circles?”

Bachman said, “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, ah, say again.”

Haynes said, “Where’s the airport to us now as we come spinning down here?”

“United Two Thirty-Two, ah, Heavy, Sioux City airport’s about twelve o’clock and three-six miles.”

“Okay,” Haynes said, “we’re tryin’ to go straight, we’re not havin’ much luck.”

Indeed, in their uncontrollable series of right turns, they would drift farther away from the airport instead of closer to it. And yet that would put them at an altitude from which they might actually reach the runway.

Bruce Osenberg and his wife Ruth Anne were sitting in the center section of row 21 with their twenty-year-old daughter Dina between them. Tom Postle, forty-six, sat on Ruth Anne’s right. “We had just eaten our lunch,” Ruth Anne said more than twenty-three years later, “and I had just put a package of Oreo cookies from the lunch into my purse. And then we heard this loud explosion at the back of the plane.”

Dina, who had recently finished her sophomore year in college, turned to her father and said, “Daddy, I don’t want to die.”

“Dina,” he said, “we’re okay. Just be patient. Things’ll work out here.” He looked to his left to check the door over the wing. Beyond the bulkhead, Sylvia Tsao held her squirming toddler, Evan. Bruce decided that he was taking his family out that door as soon as they were on the ground. All three of the Osenbergs noticed that the plane had begun to perform a number of strange maneuvers. The first was its tendency to roll over on its back, which they noticed because they could see the earth out the starboard windows. That would not ordinarily be possible from their center seats. The plane had also begun a long series of excursions up and down. First the plane would descend, rapidly gaining speed. The increased speed would produce more lift on the wings, causing the plane to reverse direction and climb. As the plane climbed, it lost speed the way a ball does when it’s thrown in the air. As the speed bled off, the plane lost lift and resumed its descent. And so it went, with each oscillation taking a minute or so. The plane always wound up at a lower altitude. They were going to return to earth no matter what.