Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (6 page)

Bruce later said, “It felt like we were in a boat in rough waters rocking back and forth.” Sometimes the plane went into a bank as steep as 38 degrees. To the passengers the plane appeared to stand on its wingtip in knife-edge flight.

Immediately after the engine exploded, the man next to Ruth Anne, Tom Postle, brought out his old Bible. He had been reading it through much of the flight. Now as the Osenbergs talked among themselves, Postle glanced over and asked, “Are you praying people?” Ruth Anne said that indeed they were—they had been praying since the explosion. Now they all held hands and began to pray together.

In the cockpit, grunting with effort against the yoke, Haynes told his crew, “If we have to set this thing down in dirt, we set it in the dirt.” Haynes maintained his sense of humor throughout this grim interval. At one point he laughed and said, “We didn’t do this thing on my last [check ride].” Yet at the same time, the cockpit voice recorder picked up swearing, sighing, and groans of despair as the crew fought a losing battle.

As the plane approached Sioux City, Ruth Anne finished her last prayer with Postle and Bruce and Dina. She felt no fear. The praying had put her into a serene state of otherness. “I felt God’s presence,” she would say later, but she still had one concern that was gnawing at her in those moments before the great calamity of her life overtook her. “I had on a fairly new outfit that day, and in those days, very full skirts were in style.” In the middle of a hot July, she imagined that she could get away without wearing pantyhose. And wouldn’t you know it, she was about to be in a plane crash. “And my fear was that we were going to have to go down the chute and that my skirt was going to fly up, and whoever was on the ground to catch me was going to see that I didn’t have on pantyhose.”

Dvorak continued to plead with SAM. Haynes described this facility as “
maintenance experts
sitting in San Francisco for each type of [aircraft] that United flies. They have all the computers . . . all the history of the aircraft, all the other information that they can draw on to help a crew that has a problem.”

Fitch later said, “
They know this airplane cold
, they know all the systems, they have all the technical manuals, they have everything at their disposal, and if there’s a backdoor way of pulling a circuit breaker or something to do, they can see this backdoor way of helping you out.”

The first difficulty Dvorak encountered was that the engineers at SAM didn’t believe him when he said that the plane had no fluid in any of its three hydraulic systems.

“We blew number two engine and we’ve lost all hydraulics,” Dvorak said in his first transmission to SAM around 3:30 in the afternoon over Iowa, about eleven minutes after the engine exploded.

The engineer on the line at SAM said, “Your, ah, system one and system three? Are they operating normally?”

“Negative. All hydraulics are lost. All hydraulic systems are lost.”

“United Two Thirty-Two, is all hydraulic quantity gone?”

“Yes! All hydraulic quantity is gone!” Dvorak answered in frustration.

In his stuttering disbelief, the engineer at SAM asked, “Okay, United, ah, Two Thirty-Two, ah, what-what-what-what’s, ah, where you gonna set down?” In other words, Where can we find the wreckage?

Dvorak was practically begging by then, saying, “We need some assistance right now! We can’t, ah, we’re havin’ a hard time controllin’ it.”

When the engineer at SAM ran out of ideas, he said, “I’ll pull out your flight manual.” SAM had wasted two precious minutes getting to that point. The engineers at SAM thought that the crew had to be mistaken in its diagnosis. And in fact,
later that evening, the chief training officer for the DC-10
at United in Denver, Mike Downs, would tell Roger O’Neil, a reporter for NBC television, that he had been listening in on the conversation between Dvorak and SAM. To begin with, Downs claimed that Dvorak never said that the plane had lost all hydraulics. (In fact, as Dvorak told me, “I repeat[ed] it over and over again to them.”) Downs further told O’Neil that he didn’t believe United 232 had suffered a complete hydraulic failure, because if it had, the plane would not have been able to fly at all.

But in the cockpit that afternoon, Dvorak opened his flight manual to compare notes with the engineer at SAM. Both men were realizing at about the same time that no procedure existed for what they were facing. In fact, during the investigation of the accident, a SAM engineer was heard to comment that they had no idea what to say to the crew, because they felt that they were talking to four dead men.

SAM replied to Dvorak, “United Two Thirty-Two, ah, in the flight manual, page 60 . . .” The engineer from SAM went to call other engineers, but no one had even a suggestion of what the crew might try.

“With all those computers, with all the knowledge at their fingertips . . . ,” Haynes said years later, “there’s absolutely nothing they could do to help a crew.”

Fitch later said that as he flew the plane with the throttles, he was wondering if “the aircraft was going to be a smoking hole in Iowa.”

Several minutes into the conversation with Dvorak, SAM was still asking him to confirm that he had lost all three hydraulic systems. Haynes was getting really angry, as Dvorak responded, “That is affirmative! We have lost all three hydraulic systems! We have no quantity and no pressure on any hydraulic system!”

CHAPTER THREE

J
an Brown had begun to realize that the crisis was even worse than she had imagined. Because of a United Airlines promotion, more than fifty children had come on board. Some people were holding infants in their laps. They had no seats, no restraints. Sylvia Tsao, for example, was trying to hold squirming Evan. Now rather helplessly, Brown made the decision to tell mothers to place those lap children on the floor, because that was how she had been trained. And for the first time, the idiocy of this idea struck her with its full force. She understood at last: There is no provision for protecting babies on airliners. None at all. She watched with her heart sinking as her flight attendants went up and down the aisles, telling people to take off their eyeglasses and remove items such as pens and combs from their pockets. They passed seventy-six-year-old Linda Ellen
Couleur. She had a titanium shoulder
. They passed Walter Williams. He had perfect teeth. He had never needed a filling in all his twenty-eight years. He wore a mustache and a tie tack with a
W
on it.

As the flight attendants moved down the aisle, they heard mothers ask, “What should I do with my baby?” Brown was sickeningly aware that in all likelihood, in a few minutes, some of these children were going to die.

None of the flight attendants remembered who helped Sylvia Tsao change her seat. She should not have been in an exit row with a baby, and no one was sure how she came to be there. Nevertheless Jerry Schemmel recalls that a female flight attendant led Sylvia and Evan to another seat. Schemmel had been the last person to board the flight. He and his boss and best friend Jay Ramsdell had waited all morning as flight after flight took off without them. All the planes had been full. Ramsdell had been given a seat assignment on an earlier flight, but there had been no room for Schemmel. Since Ramsdell was the commissioner of the Continental Basketball Association, it seemed more important for him to get to Columbus first. And although Schemmel urged him to go, Ramsdell said, “
Hey, we’re in this thing together
, we’ll fly together.” It seemed a trivial decision at the time. Allowed at last onto Flight 232, Schemmel and Ramsdell were greeted at the gate by Susan White. “How are you fellas doing today?” she asked cheerfully. Schemmel told her that they weren’t doing all that great. She took their tickets and joined them for the walk down the Jetway, as Schemmel and Ramsdell complained to Susan about how they’d been at the airport all morning trying to find a flight to Columbus, Ohio.

“Hey!” Susan said. “I’m from Ohio!” Schemmel and Ramsdell good-naturedly grumbled a bit more, and Susan advised them, “I hope you’re not planning on getting any sleep on this flight, because we have a lot of kids on board today.” Ramsdell sat seven rows behind Schemmel in the starboard window seat, craning his neck to see his friend.

Whoever reseated Sylvia spoke to
Charles Kenneth Bosscher
, thirty-seven, who willingly gave up his seat in the center section for the mother and child. He took the aisle seat by the 3-Left exit. He would arrive home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, many days later in a Batesville casket that had been delivered to Sioux City from Batesville, Indiana.

Jan Brown helped Sylvia place Evan on the floor at her feet and gave her pillows to pad him. As Sylvia tried to arrange Evan on the floor, the toddler squirmed and struggled into his mother’s lap. Then he stood and grinned at Schemmel from over the back of Sylvia’s seat.

“
I never would forget that face
,” Schemmel later wrote in a memoir. As he prepared for the crash, planning his own survival, he resolved that he would help Sylvia and Evan as soon as the plane stopped. He told himself to stay calm, to avoid panic, and above all to help others. He noted the emergency exit, 3-Right, two rows ahead of him. As he looked back down the aisle, he saw Ramsdell smile and give him a thumbs up. Schemmel returned the signal.
Two rows behind Ramsdell
, fourteen-year-old Tony Feeney, a skinny kid with big glasses, watched the two men signal each other. They looked so competent and confident in their business suits. Feeney wondered if they had a secret plan. He wondered if they thought they were going to die. The teenager was traveling alone to Chicago to attend Michael Jordan’s basketball camp. Now he thought that if those two business guys had a plan, he was going to follow them out of this mess.

After her first visit to the cockpit, Jan Brown quickly briefed Barbara Gillaspie, Jan Murray, and Rene Le Beau. Brown then hurried to the aft galley to let Susan White, Donna McGrady, and Tim Owens know what was going on.

Before takeoff, Jan Brown had noticed Janice-Long Brown and her eleven-year-old daughter Kimberly Allison on board. She had made a point of going back to greet them. Janice had been a flight attendant with United. “Out of this packed airplane, I spotted her. They always got us mixed up. Our mailboxes were together.” About a year after she started flying, Jan Brown met Janice Brown, and the more senior woman helped Jan Brown to get flights that were more convenient so that she could spend extra time with her children. Janice had married a successful businessman and didn’t really need to fly anymore. She now wore a Piaget watch. Kimberly had a single pierced ear. As Jan Brown hurried back to brief her flight attendants in the aft galley, she passed down the port aisle and her eyes met Janice’s. “It was like this nonverbal conversation we had. She looked at me like:
How bad is it?
And I looked at her like,
It’s as bad as it could possibly be
.” Jan Brown desperately wanted to ask Janice for help, “but I couldn’t because she was traveling with her daughter.” Jan Brown later berated herself for not moving them up to the two empty seats in row 9. Everyone in that row survived. Of course, she could not have known that beforehand. Still, many people would feel undeserved guilt long after the crash.

Jan Brown hurried down the aisle
past Karin Elizabeth Sass, thirty-two, who was pregnant
with her second child. Brown encountered Tim Owens and whispered that they were going to deliver a “quick and dirty” briefing to the passengers. Owens followed her aft. They joined Susan White and Donna McGrady in the rear galley. “Okay,” Jan said. “We have no hydraulics. We have no way to steer and we can’t brake. Be prepared for fire. Also, be prepared to ditch, because there’s a river near there. Just be prepared, because I don’t know how this is going to turn out.” Then she added, “Don’t bother reconciling the liquor.”

At twenty-seven, Tim Owens was the only male flight attendant on board. He had joined United Airlines a month before. As soon as Brown explained the situation, she returned to the forward cabin. The others watched her go. Then Donna took the hands of Owens and White and led them in a prayer right there in the galley behind Martha Conant’s back. “It wasn’t the longest prayer,” Owens later said, “because we were kind of busy at the time, but it was powerful and succinct.”

As she passed up the starboard aisle, Jan Brown knew that she had to keep a tight grip on herself. Earlier, she had seen her own hand shake. She knew that she would have to stand before the congregation in this doomed cathedral and lift a microphone to her lips and speak the words of preparation. And she would not be able to if she was palsied with fear. She had no desire to try to evacuate a plane full of panicked people. She passed near Lena Ann Blaha, sixty-five, who sat beside James Matthew Bohn. The boy had celebrated his twelfth birthday in May. Blaha reached out to Jan Brown. She told Brown to look out the starboard window at the tail. Already deeply afraid, Brown leaned over the woman and the boy and craned her neck to see toward the rear. And now she understood that the situation was so much worse than she had imagined. She saw a piece of torn metal sticking up from the tail “like you’d peeled a pop-top tab off.” The hole was a foot wide. As she raced from C-Zone to B-Zone, Wilbur and Vincenta Eley, both in their seventies, waved at her. “I think I’m having a heart attack,” the woman said.

Brown later mused with a laugh, “I can’t believe I said, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ I was walking away through B-Zone going, ‘Jan, was that you that said that?’ I mean that is so totally contrary to who I am.” As she passed into the forward galley, she said to Jan Murray, who had been a nurse, “The woman in 22-F thinks she’s having a heart attack.” Then she continued on toward the cockpit. She knocked on the door for the second time that day. She received no response.

Behind the door, after almost twenty minutes of working together at the edge of human tolerance, Haynes had introduced himself to Denny Fitch, reaching his left hand over his right shoulder to shake Fitch’s hand without looking.