Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (15 page)

He reached the gate and introduced himself to Chuck Sundberg, the director of Siouxland Health Services, the ambulance company for the local area.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Sundberg said, and offered his hand. When they shook hands, a look of surprise crossed Sundberg’s face. “Wow,” he said. “I just got goose bumps shaking your hand.”

“You know, this isn’t the kind of thing you can prove,” Clapper said many years later, “but part of me wants to think, somehow, that holy spirit that I asked to come into my life was palpably noticeable to Chuck when we shook hands.”

Sundberg quickly prepared an ID for Clapper and recruited someone to drive him onto the field. Within minutes, he was walking through a scene that was beyond anything he could have imagined. Papers were blowing everywhere, and the sunny day had turned gloomy and overcast and gray with ash and smoke. Streamers of computer tape had come loose from the spools that had been packed in the luggage bay and now made shimmering serpents around his ankles as he walked. He squinted to make sense of the scene. Across the runway he went, stepping around a bank of seats in which the people lay beyond all hope. He passed the dead in all their ranks, in all their spectral attitudes. Some lay supine, mouths open in attitudes of near ecstasy, one upon the next, embracing. Some had bowed their heads as if in deep meditation or prayer. Others had been ground to pulp against the concrete and conveyed no expression at all. Clapper stepped off the far side of the runway and saw what was clearly a human form lying at the edge of the corn where the body had evidently smashed the stalks flat on impact.

Clapper crossed to the form and knelt. The man was not only alive, he was conscious. He was also badly injured.

Clapper asked, “What’s your name?”

“Brad,” Griffin said.

“I’m the chaplain, Brad. Just keep breathing in God’s spirit, and people are going to be here to help you.”

When the command to brace came
, Susan White and the other flight attendants took up the chorus: “Brace! Brace! Brace!”

“And as I’m yelling it,” White recalled, “I’m saying the Lord’s Prayer in my head and focusing on the bright light, the tunnel—that swirling tunnel that takes you to heaven—the harps and everything peaceful that I had imagined heaven to be like.” She looked out the window and saw that they were passing through a layer of clouds, so fluffy, so white, so beautiful, and she felt her love of flying once more. “Right before impact, I said, ‘Okay, I’m in your hands, Lord.’ And I had no fear at all. No fear. I took a deep breath. . . .” And then she felt the devastating concussion and saw through the porthole in her exit door that a ball of fire had engulfed the plane. “And I calmly said to myself, ‘I’m burning to death. That’s how I’m dying.’ And the fire was there. And then we started tumbling, and three times I remember it hitting on my door.”

The flight attendants always locked the bathrooms before landing so that someone trying to escape wouldn’t walk in there by mistake and die. Now as she watched, the lavatory doors exploded open, and the blue water from the toilets spewed out into her face and across her chest and legs. As the separated tail screamed along the runway, metal grinding concrete, “I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, how many people went to the bathroom in there?’ And I could hear the tanks: Clunk! Clunk! Clunk! I have my hands on my head, my legs are up in the air, as we’re tumbling around, and it was kind of . . . I don’t know, I would describe it as being in a tornado with the amount of soot and dirt that we were scraping up, and then pieces of metal were just flying around the plane. Something came and hit my leg and my butt and it tore my pants and sliced my shoe. I left my eyes open, because I wanted to block everything that was coming my way to protect myself.” The fire she had seen was gone now, and she fleetingly wondered where it went. She could see Martha Conant to her left, but she could not yet see what Conant would see when the tail came to rest. Since Susan was facing aft, she couldn’t see that the plane—the entire plane—was gone. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Hang on, Hang on,’ as I’m battling, and all of a sudden it was silent, and it just hit me, Oh, my gosh, I’m alive!” She immediately reverted to her training and began shouting, “Release your seat belts and get out! Release your seat belts and get out!”

Runway 17-35 formed a complex intersection where it met the old Runway 04-22 and Taxiway Lima. When the tail snapped off, it went rocketing down Runway 22 and came to rest at that intersection, mostly on the concrete of Taxiway Lima but with its open end on the grass easement. It had come to a stop on its side, tilted at an angle so that Dave Randa and his mother were suspended twelve feet or so above the torn and jagged metal of the hull. Still strapped into their seats, they were leaning sharply to their right, “looking down into scrap metal,” as Dave put it. “And the only way down is to jump.” Looking forward he saw a seat, “maybe two, and then a bunch of mangled metal. And daylight.” Despite the impact, the scraping and plowing and tumbling of this fragment of the aircraft, the row immediately ahead of him was intact, but beyond that, everyone was gone, the seats all gone.

Susan White continued to shout, “Release your seat belts and get out! Release your seat belts and get out!”

Susan Randa said, “I remember opening my eyes and thinking, ‘Oh, my God, we’re alive. How could we be alive?’ ” But she saw “absolutely nothing. It was just gray. There was no space, I don’t remember the seat. I remember Dave there. I still had my arm around him. But I did not know that we were up in the air.” A second, two seconds, may have passed when, hearing White’s words, Dave’s mother released her seat belt as directed. The boy watched his mother’s body recede in slow motion, growing smaller as she went. She landed in the jagged metal below.

Dave later said, “I look around, asking, All right, what’s going on? My mom dropped. She stood up and looked at me.”

On the way down, she hit something, “and I hope to this day that I didn’t hurt anyone,” Susan Randa said. She rose unsteadily to her feet. “And then I looked up, and I just saw Dave up there so high, and he had this blue shirt on, and all I could see was gray, plus his blue shirt, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, you left your kid up there. How are you gonna get him down?’ ” Susan Randa’s eyes would sometimes turn flame red as we talked. But when she spoke of leaving her son, she broke down and wept in the restaurant where we sat talking.

She called up to Dave, warning him to hold on before releasing his seat belt. The boy was athletic, big for his age. He braced against the seats and positioned himself so that he could drop feet first. His mother stepped back so that he could fall where she had fallen. She watched as he maneuvered, hung for a moment, and then let go. “Thank God, he did it,” she said. Some of the torn metal cut his ankle, but he was otherwise unhurt.

“So we’re in the metal,” Dave said. “We’re walking through metal. We see daylight.” Dave and his mother stepped out into a blaze of sunlight. They saw a fire truck grumbling at idle nearby. They walked fifty feet or so to the truck, and Susan asked the fire fighter, “Where should we go?”

“Go back in there and help those people,” he said, clearly unaware that she was from inside the plane and not some wandering volunteer. Susan held Dave’s hand and led him to a lighted sign on the taxiway. It was a metal box about thigh high with translucent illuminated panels. The markings on it meant nothing to her. She and Dave sat on the sign and watched the people come and go. As they waited in the midst of the unfolding catastrophe, Dave complained to his mother that he had lost his favorite Cubs hat and lamented the fact that they might miss the game.

Nearly a quarter of a century after the crash, Susan Randa told her son, “All I could think of when you said that, was ‘OMG, you’re lucky to have your head.’ Fortunately my parenting skills were working to the max that day and I said nothing. Still makes me laugh when I think of it!”

Dave told her, “What can I say, Mom? I started young with good priorities. . . .” He wanted to get to a Cubs game.

In those first few seconds of silence after the tail came to a stop, as Susan White was shouting for people to release their belts, she could not release her own. She was trapped. “I kept grabbing and grabbing and grabbing, and it wasn’t releasing.” Her every action was reflex from her training. But the jump seats on this particular aircraft had latch mechanisms that were different from the one she had used in training. She deliberately stopped herself to take stock of her situation. She was soaked with septic blue toilet water. The visual cues before her, the lavatory doors, were straight, and yet she felt as if gravity wanted to pull her at an odd angle to her left, and not down toward her feet as it had always done before. Concentrating on the task, she looked down at the clasp on her harness and realized that it was a different attachment. Now that she was focused, she was able to rotate the clasp. The belts released. She hung in her harness, still at that odd angle. She hooked her left arm into the shoulder strap and swung her leg around the way gravity took it. Thus dangling from her harness like a circus aerialist high above the crowd, she planted her left foot on her jump seat and braced her right foot on the magazine rack. Now she saw for the first time that the plane was gone. She had fully expected to turn and see the familiar cabin and all her people, but there was nothing. She saw seats torn asunder, people dangling, people falling, but no airplane. She saw Dave and Susan Randa below, departing across the grass. White had no memory of seeing John Hatch. Then as she was preparing to release herself and drop, she saw that a man was trapped beneath a piece of metal below her. He couldn’t get out. If she let go, she’d fall on him and crush him further. Someone, a woman, was with him. It was most likely the couple who had been sitting next to Martha Conant, Karl and Marilyn Walter of Denver.

“I’m stuck!” called the man, who was sixty years old and had injured his head.

White reached down for his hand but couldn’t span the distance. She took hold of the metal and pulled, but it wouldn’t move.

“I’m stuck!” he called again.

“Wiggle!” White shouted. “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle!”

The man followed her orders: “He wiggled. And he got out from underneath that metal. And the minute he got out from underneath that, I jumped down on that metal.” Facing yet another drop, White jumped once more and found herself face to face with Donna McGrady. When they were calling for people to release their belts, White had become convinced that McGrady had been crushed. Indeed, that part of the tail had been crushed, and now nine-year-old Yisroel Brownstein lay beneath Richard Howard Sudlow, who was twitching on top of the boy as he breathed his last breaths.

“And it was terrible,” Yisroel recalled, “just terrible.” Sudlow’s successful effort to use his body to shield the nine-year-old had cost him his life.

Down below, when White saw McGrady, she later said, “it gave me so much energy, because I knew she was alive!” White still didn’t realize how completely they had been detached from their craft until this moment, as she turned toward the opening. She immediately started running—yet another reflex—but then she heard voices, so she ran back to the cockeyed tail, towering above her. She could see Jerry Milford and his seven-year-old son, David, hanging from their seat belts. Blood was running down the father’s face. Against White’s advice, he had put his glasses in his shirt pocket. Then he put his head down, and under the extreme forces of the crash, something—perhaps his own knee—drove one of the temple pieces through his lip. Across the aisle, in seats wrenched nearly free of their mounting rail, sat Jerry Milford’s sister Kari and his other son, Tom, who was nine.

White took McGrady’s arm and said, “We have to go back in the plane, there’s still people in there.”

Inside the tail once more, she shouted up to Jerry Milford to release his seat belt, and he shouted back that he’d fall. “Release your son and we’ll catch him,” White called. The father held David’s arms and released his belt and dangled him down to the two flight attendants, who broke his fall. Then Jerry Milford was able to hold onto his seat and release himself in a controlled fall.
Kari and Thomas were able to let themselves down
, and by then the tail was swarming with rescue workers. White backed out into the hot sunlight. Being nowhere near the fuselage, they were not beneath the snowy overcast of ash and cash and smoke and paper. (
For mysteriously, money had begun to appear
in the blowing debris, in addition to a large number of pineapples that had gone tumbling across the field.)

Inside the tail, Yisroel Brownstein looked out from his position trapped beneath the dying man. He could see flames burning on the runway in the distance where fuel had been spilled. As if from a cave, he watched as the fire diminished and flickered and went out. He said that the silence was like none he has ever heard since then. “I thought maybe this was death. Like if there was a waiting room for death. I felt like that’s where I was.” He smelled burned foam rubber. As his senses began to return, he was overwhelmed by that smell. “One of the most terrifying nightmares I have on a regular basis is us rolling and that smell.”

Then he heard an urgent voice saying, “Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move! We’re going to get you out of there. Stop moving!” Yisroel didn’t realize that he was struggling.

The rescue worker tried at first to save Richard Howard Sudlow but quickly realized that it was not possible. Within a minute or two, he had died. His daughter, who was Yisroel’s age, had come home from school and was waiting for him in Carol Stream, Illinois.

The rescue worker turned his attention to Yisroel, who had begun screaming, “Thirty-five thirty-five West Winona Court!” The man who was trying to free him started laughing, but he kept reassuring the child, saying, “You’re gonna make it, you’re gonna make it.”

In the meantime, Yisroel caught sight of his own hand and had to look away because it was so obvious that he was severely injured. “I was losing a lot of blood.”

The rescuer was at last able to extract Yisroel from his seat and place him on a stretcher. “One of my clearest memories is lying on the concrete screaming my address and my parents’ phone number. I knew something was ridiculously wrong with my arm.” As his head lolled to one side, he saw the tall stalks of corn leaning away, as the afternoon wind kicked up to fifteen miles an hour. Then he looked up and saw the towering clouds marooned in the blue dome of the sky. The beautiful face of a weeping woman appeared over him, as if in a religious icon. But no, Yisroel realized, she was not an apparition. She wore an Air National Guard uniform and carried him on a stretcher with someone else holding the other end.