Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (7 page)

“I’ll tell you what,” Fitch said, “we’ll have a beer when this is all done.”

Haynes said, “Well, I don’t drink, but I’ll sure as hell have one.”

Brown waited half a minute—an eternity—and knocked again. She didn’t know that the plane had been approaching a towering cumulus cloud. If the crew allowed the plane to enter it, they would have to fly not only blind but also in the turbulence usually found inside those incipient summer thunderheads. So the crew was trying to steer the plane clear of the cloud. Oblivious of this close call, Brown waited a quarter of a minute and knocked again—three distinct raps. She was thinking, as she later recalled, “The tail? No one said anything about the tail.” And “I have to tell the captain.” Another three-quarters of a minute passed before the door opened at last.

When Brown entered the cockpit, before she could get a word out, Haynes launched into his explanation of the situation. “We almost have no control of the airplane,” he began, as she stared in shock and horror, her mind frozen. “We have no hydraulics at all.”
He was so keyed up with adrenaline
and with the effort he was exerting on the yoke that his ability to make sense was deteriorating. “We can’t go to Sioux City, and we’re gonna try to put it into Sioux City, Iowa,” he said, a clear contradiction.

All Brown could say was, “Yeah . . .”

“It’s gonna be tough,” Haynes said as he struggled with the useless controls. “Gonna be rough.”

“So we’re gonna evacuate?” Brown asked.

“We—yeah. Well, we’re gonna have the gear down.”

“Yeah . . .”

“And if we can keep the airplane on the ground and stop standing up, give us a second or two before you evacuate,” Haynes said. “Brace—the brace will be the signal. It’ll be over the PA system: ‘Brace, Brace, Brace.’ ”

Brown was confused too when she asked, “And that will be to evacuate?” She later said that all she could think about was evacuating because she just wanted to be out of that plane.

“No,” Haynes said. “That’ll be to, ah, to, ah, brace for landing.”

Brown was practically speechless at that point. She said, “Uh-huh.”

“And then, if we have to evacuate, you’ll get the command signal to evacuate, but I think—really have my doubts you’ll see us . . . standing up, Honey.” Haynes paused and then said, “Good luck, Sweetheart.”

“Thanks,” Brown said, her eyes clouding with tears. “You too.”

As she left the cockpit and started down the aisle, his words rang in her head.
I doubt you’ll see us standing up
. Her mind was racing ahead, trying to cover her plans. She desperately wanted to reach that point of evacuating and be done with it. And she suddenly realized that she had been in such a state of shock from his declaration and from her focus on making a plan that she had neglected to tell him about the tail.

Brown spun on her heel and rushed back
to knock on the door again. This time Dvorak opened it immediately, and she bent to whisper to him. She quickly closed the door and left, still thinking that she had done something wrong. In her terror, she’d been unable to remember the term
horizontal stabilizer
or even
elevator
, so she told Dvorak that she had seen damage on “the rear wing.” And indeed, the stabilizer was larger than many wings, it being more than seventy-one feet across, twenty-seven hundred square feet, “
a good bit larger
than the average ranch house,” as Dale Warren, a vice president at Douglas Aircraft, later put it.

Now Dvorak announced to the cockpit crew, “She says there appears to be some damage on that one wing. Do you want me to go back and take a look?”

“No,” Fitch said. “We don’t have time.”

“Ain’t got time for it, no,” Haynes agreed. Then he thought better of it and changed his mind. “Okay, go ahead. Go ahead, see what you can see. Not that it’ll do any good.”

Dvorak unlatched his harness and left the cockpit.

Roughly twenty-five minutes had passed since the explosion. “So here I am,” said Martha Conant, recalling what seemed an eternity in the last row, “bargaining with God and reviewing my life, and all of a sudden, I had this vision of myself in the palm of God’s hand. And it was unexpected. It was intense. And it was immensely reassuring.” She had been looking for a miracle. Now she felt that she might get one. She could not imagine what it would look like.

Conant watched Dave Randa, the boy in the Chicago Cubs baseball cap, who sat by the window across the aisle and just ahead of her. Beside Conant, John Hatch had tried to reassure Dave, making something up to explain the fluid streaming across the windows, the white mist streaming back from the wings, and in the quiet of the failed engine, everyone nearby could hear his explanation: steam. The mist they saw was fuel that the crew was dumping. The fluid flowing across the windows was condensation from the cold aircraft descending into warmer air. But Hatch said it was steam. Conant saw Dave nodding while he listened to Hatch. Then Susan White said something to the mother and child, and Dave bent over and clutched his ankles. It was too early for bracing, but Dave was afraid. Terribly afraid. And his mother’s heart was breaking, as she placed her left hand on his back and whispered something to him. She told him that he didn’t need to brace yet, but the child would remain bent over, clenched tight, all the way to the ground.

Dave and his mother Susan, a librarian, had left Denver that Wednesday for vacation, expecting that Dave’s father Jim would follow on Friday. They would attend the Cubs-Giants baseball game on Saturday afternoon at Wrigley Field and then drive to South Haven, Michigan, for a few days at the beach. As Hatch reassured her son, Susan Randa looked over and their eyes met. “I know in my heart that he would have taken care of Dave if something happened,” she later said. “He was looking at me and looking at Dave, and I knew he’d do it. I knew it.”

Across the aisle to her right, Conant could see a young boy wearing a yarmulke seated next to a businessman with a mustache. They occupied the two seats by the starboard window. Yisroel Brownstein, nine, sat on the aisle. Donna McGrady came down the aisle and asked the boy to trade places with the businessman, Richard Howard Sudlow, thirty-six, because she might need the man’s help in opening the exit door that was immediately behind them. The boy looked terrified, his eyes darting all over, his posture rigid with fear. When the engine exploded, Yisroel had gone into a relentless state of terror. For Yisroel, it lasted in some forms into his adult life. The sensation that the plane was falling and rolling over only added to his panic, which was so deep-seated that he was struck deaf. Later in life, he would remember no noise, only the sensation of falling and rolling as the tail dropped.

Now Conant saw the tense and nervous pilot who came hurrying down the starboard aisle to look out the windows. After Jan Brown had talked with her flight attendants in the galley behind Conant, she had gone forward up the right aisle. Conant had seen the woman seated next to a young boy reach out and stop Brown and show her something out the window. Brown had hurried away toward the cockpit. Now Conant watched Dvorak, grim and drawn, look out the same window, his face ashen, his eyes walled like those of a horse in a fire.

As Dvorak recalled it, “I went down the aisle on the right side of the airplane, and these guys pointed out, showed me, and you could see pieces of metal sticking up on the tail.”

White was watching him too. “Dudley and I had known each other for three years,” she said later. They had lived in an apartment building designed for commuting airline employees. “And every time I’d see Dudley, he was joking and happy and funny. And now Dudley comes walking to the back of the plane, and I see him white as a ghost.”

Dvorak recalled that when he saw the tail, “basically I knew that the engine had destroyed itself. That was pretty obvious.” But he “didn’t have the time to sit there and think what could have caused the engine failure. All we knew is the engine failed.” And “if you’re doing your job, you don’t have time to analyze. I kept going back to the thing I was thinking: Have I missed something?”

“Dudley,” White said to him, “I need to show you something this pilot just showed me.” After Jan Brown had seen the damaged tail, a deadheading Eastern Airlines pilot had pulled his ID out of his boot and showed it to White. He offered to help the cockpit crew. She explained that a check pilot was already up there, and the man showed her the damage on the other side of the tail. Now she showed Dvorak. He peered out the window on the port side and then turned a grim countenance on her.

“Are you doin’ okay?” he asked evenly.

Although it was far from the truth, she said, “I’m okay. Are you okay?”

Dvorak watched her eyes for a moment. He later said, “Susan was really shaken up.” He told her, “You’re going to be okay.” Then he put his hand on her arm and said, “Good luck.”

“Good luck to you too,” White said, and she watched him hurry up the port aisle, past forty-one-year-old
Jasumati J. Patel, whose jewelry
would be photographed as part of her identification: the beaded necklace held together with two safety pins, its pendant shaped like a teardrop, and strands of her hair still tangled in it, and her two rings and her earrings and two braided bracelets and her keys on a key ring.

Susan White felt overwhelmed. She felt that at any moment she would burst into tears and make matters worse. The day before, she and Tim Owens had enjoyed some poppy-seed crackers left over from the first class luncheon service and joked about the headlines they would make if the plane crashed and their toxicology reports showed opiates in their blood from the poppy seeds. And now it appeared that they might make those headlines. She could feel her eyes watering and her nose stuffing up. She could see people going to the bathroom and others taking the cordless Airphones out of their cradles to make calls.

“I knew we had to be in front of everyone and I had to be together,” she would say later.

She saw someone emerge from one of the toilets and took the opportunity to duck inside. She blew her nose and straightened herself up as best she could. She looked in the mirror. She saw the young flight attendant in uniform, not ready to die. Especially not ready for all these others to die. “I finally had my dream job,” she later said, “and it’s turning into the nightmare of my life. You think you’re going to have this great job and this is what we all train for, but we hope that it never happens.” They had been less than an hour from Chicago. Now the captain was saying they were turning back west to make an emergency landing at Sioux City. She asked herself, “Where the heck is Sioux City?” She turned away from the mirror, closed her eyes, and then she prayed. She prayed and prayed. And when she emerged from the bathroom, she felt strong and ready to face whatever was coming. As she closed the door to the lavatory, she heard Jan Brown announce, “Demo positions,” so she strode forward to exit 3-Left, where she could stand before her congregation and demonstrate what needed to be done.

As Martha Conant watched White recede up the aisle, she thought, “Why won’t they tell us what’s going on?” Then again, Conant thought, perhaps she didn’t really want to know. Perhaps it would be quick and painless. She noticed a young woman ahead of her. Conant watched the woman—a girl, really, about college age—jump up, snatch an Airphone, and rush back to her seat. As Conant eavesdropped, twenty-one-year-old Kari Milford called her boyfriend, Kyle Persinger, the man she hoped would one day marry her. The cabin had fallen so quiet that Conant could hear everything Kari said. “Yeah, we’re going to be a little late, we’re having some kind of problem,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”

More than twenty-three years later, Susan Randa remembered nearly the same words: “We’ve had a problem with the flight. We’re going to be late coming into Chicago. So I’ll give you a call when we’re closer.”

Susan Randa realized that Kari was sitting with two children. She was traveling with her brother Jerry, thirty-eight, and his sons, David, seven, and Tom, nine.

“I’ve always remembered that,” Conant recalled, “because she was so matter-of-fact.”

And Susan Randa thought, as she later said, “Late coming into Chicago! You are so dreaming. Your reality is so much different from my reality.”

But she and Conant misunderstood what they were hearing. Kari had wanted to call her boyfriend to keep him from leaving for the airport, but he had already left. She reached his grandmother instead. Kari was trying not to upset her, even though she could feel her heart collapsing in her chest at the thought that she might never see Kyle again, might never marry or have children such as these two little boys traveling with her. And now she had missed her last chance to say good-bye.

At about nineteen minutes to four in the afternoon
, as Jan Brown left the cockpit to prepare the cabin, the pilots were trying without success to point the plane toward Sioux City, as the rudderless ship continued its right-hand spirals. In addition, the pilots were still struggling with the oscillations that were carrying the nose slowly up and down from a few hundred to more than a thousand feet each minute in an irregular undulating wave. The DC-10 was flying the way a paper airplane would fly if thrown from a height—first nose down, then nose up, then nose down, then nose up. That motion is called a phugoid oscillation, and the crew well understood that they could not possibly land the plane safely without putting an end to it. So they had been trying to get ahead of the plane and to control how much the right wing dropped and how much the ship pitched up and down during each phugoid cycle. They tried to anticipate the behavior of the craft, and in fact, they were gradually “
getting in tune
with the airplane,” as Fitch later put it.

Records said, “While Denny was in fact controlling the throttles, it was not without a lot of input from both Al and me. As he was not on headphones or microphone, he several times asked, Where do you want to go?”

In a documentary film by Errol Morris, Fitch said, “
It just became like the airplane
was an extension of me. And I could feel these stimuli coming at me before I actually felt them or saw them.” He said that at one point, “it struck me like a thunderclap. Dear God, I have 296 lives literally in my two hands.”