Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival Page 2

  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.

  Dvorak sat at a console facing the starboard side of the aircraft. On his right was the cockpit door, which he had opened for Brown, and beyond that, the bathrooms, the first class galley, and then the first class cabin, A-Zone. As Brown stepped into the cockpit, holding onto the back of Dvorak’s chair, she watched Haynes and Records each wrenching his control wheel back and to the left, as the plane tipped more and more steeply to the right. The two pilots were not only trying to steer with the yoke, they were each manipulating one of the throttles, as the plane repeatedly tried to roll over on its back. “I could just feel the strength that was being put into that motion from both of them.”

  The words that were exchanged between Haynes and Brown have been lost to history. The Sundstrand model AV557B cockpit voice recorder operated on a thirty-minute loop, and after the explosion, forty-four minutes elapsed before the plane crashed. The first ten minutes and thirty-six seconds of the recording were overwritten during the last minutes of the flight. Nevertheless, as reported by both Brown and her captain, Haynes said, “We’ve lost all hydraulics.”

  As Brown explained to me, “I don’t know what that means, but I do know that we are banking to the right and I am looking out Bill’s window, and I’m guessing we’re at thirty-seven thousand feet. And I think this situation means we could go straight down.” Brown was not the sort to panic. But “I have not found the appropriate word that can describe the pure terror of an airplane that was always my friend, that I knew in the dark. If the lights went out and I was working in the Pit, people would lift the hatch and call down, ‘Are you okay?’ Oh, yeah. I could still keep working, because I could see in the dark. But now it’s a metal tube, and it holds my fate. And there’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to hide.”

  She stepped out of the cockpit and shut the door behind her. She stood in the septic smell of the lavatories, “and I prayed, ‘Oh, please, God, let me be someplace else.’ ”

  Jan Brown and I sat on stools at her kitchen counter. At the age of seventy-one, she was trim and neatly dressed. She smiled wryly and said, “Oh, wow. Quick answer. Okay, one foot in front of the other.”

  She went on: “I told myself, ‘Jan, you’ve got to be tough, you’ve got to be calm, and we can’t let the passengers know.’ ”

  She walked down the aisle, pale and shaken and almost in a stupor of fear and grief. She felt grief, she later said, for all the people, the children. “I couldn’t look at anybody,” she said. “It’s like I just withdrew into myself, because I was working a plan, and I didn’t want anybody to read the absolute terror in my eyes. I remember thinking as I came out of the cockpit and was walking through first class that the video was still running. So it gave the appearance of normalcy.”

  Brad Griffin could see her from his first class seat, 2-E. When Brown came out of the cockpit, he saw how ashen and defeated she looked. All her faith cast out, she’d been gutted. Griffin didn’t know what he was seeing. He didn’t realize that her captain had told her in no uncertain terms that the plane was going to crash. But he knew that her expression and demeanor signaled something dire.

  As she passed through first class, she decided she could not call the crew together for a briefing. It would be too obvious to the passengers. She would talk to her flight attendants quickly and quietly wherever they happened to be. In the forward galley she caught Virginia Jane “Jan” Murray and Barbara Gillaspie, the two first class flight attendants, and began telling them what Haynes had said. Rene Le Beau came forward and caught part of what Brown was saying, and Le Beau’s pale and childlike face took on a stricken look beneath her bright red hair. Then Brown added, “And I don’t know how this is going to turn out, so be prepared.” Then she squared her shoulders, forced herself into an attitude of professionalism, and began walking down the aisle, trying to figure out how to protect all those babies that people were holding in their laps. She proceeded to the aft galley and told Susan White, “Pick everything up.”

  And White responded, “No second coffees?”

  At around the time Dudley Dvorak declared that November 1819 Uniform* had an emergency, Mark Zielezinski, thirty-six, the supervisor in the control tower at Sioux Gateway Airport, was attending a meeting in an office down in the bowels of the building that housed both the tower and the terminal. John Bates, an air traffic controller, was downstairs in the break room eating his lunch. In the tower cab—a fishbowl of glass atop the terminal building with a 360-degree view of the field and the surrounding land—the phone had rung a minute or two earlier, and a controller from Minneapolis Center had alerted Sioux City to the fact that the crippled plane was coming. Bates heard someone holler down the stairwell that an emergency was on its way. He didn’t think much of it. “An emergency at Sioux City was a daily thing,” he said, because the airport was an Air National Guard base. The pilots of the A-7 Corsair II fighter-bombers were taught to treat most anomalies as emergencies to be on the safe side. In fact, two emergencies had already been declared that day. Bates packed up his lunch and went trudging up the stairs anyway. As he arrived, Kevin Bachman, the approach controller, heard a voice from Minneapolis Center come over his headphones.

  “Sioux City, got a ’mergency for ya.”

  “Aw-right,” Bachman replied in his native Virginia drawl. At twenty-seven, he was a fairly new air traffic controller, having joined the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) at the end of 1985 and having been rated as a controller for Sioux City in May of 1989. Bachman listened to the breathless, speedy voice of the controller trying to bark out the information that had clearly scared him out of his wits. “I gotta, let’s see, United aircraft coming in lost number two engine having a hard time controlling the aircraft right now he’s outta twenty-nine thousand right now on descent into Sioux City right now he’s—he’s east of your VOR* but he wants the equipment standing by right now.”

  Bachman could see United Flight 232 on his radar screen, a bright phosphorescent target with the plane’s altitude and an identifying transponder code beneath. “Radar contact,” he said.

  Zielezinski picked up the phone and called downstairs to Terry Dobson, the manager of the tower. Dobson hustled upstairs. Once he understood the situation, he reported the emergency to the regional office of the FAA in Kansas City. Kansas City in turn notified FAA headquarters at 800 Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C., across the street from the Smithsoni
an Institution and the National Mall. Then someone at the tenth floor command center at FAA headquarters telephoned Terry Armentrout, the director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), located two floors below in the same building. The NTSB is responsible for investigating all air crashes, and from the sound of it, this emergency would soon fall into that class of events.

  As Bachman listened for word from United Flight 232, the voice of the Minneapolis controller came on the air again sounding more rattled than before. “He’s havin’ a hard time controllin’ the airplane right now and tryin’ to slow down and get to Sioux City on a heading right now, as soon as I get comfortable, I’ll ship him over to you, and he’ll be your control.”

  “Awright,” said Bachman.

  Then Al Haynes said, “Sioux City Approach, United Two Thirty-Two heavy,* we’re out of twenty-six, heading right now is two nine oh, and we got about a five-hundred-foot rate of descent.” He meant that the plane was passing through twenty-six thousand feet, traveling roughly west, and losing five hundred feet of altitude every minute. The handoff from Minneapolis Center was complete.

  Bachman gave 1819 Uniform the standard briefing, including weather, barometric pressure, and a compass heading to fly to reach the airport. He told Haynes that he could expect to land on Runway 31.†

  Haynes responded, “So you know, we have almost—no controllability. Very little elevator, and almost no ailerons, we’re controlling the turns by power. I don’t think we can turn right, I think we can only make left turns.” Then he paused and corrected himself. “We can only turn right, we can’t turn left.”

  Bachman said, “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, understand, sir, you can only make right turns?”

  “That’s affirmative.”

  An airplane is a submarine of the air. Like a boat, it is steered by rudders, but since it moves in three dimensions, it has rudders for moving left and right (yaw), rudders (called elevators) for moving the nose up and down (pitch), and even rudders (called ailerons) to roll the airplane into a bank when it turns. On small planes all of those movable surfaces can be controlled by cables, a direct physical connection between the pilot’s hands and the controls. On jumbo jets, the control surfaces are so large and the airstream produces forces so great that the power of human muscle cannot overcome them. Hydraulic power is needed to move those surfaces.