Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (16 page)

Susan White had backed out of the tail to make way for the rescue workers, and now she saw a woman lying on the ground, facedown. “She had a dress on. Her dress was up. Her nylons had big holes in [them].” White turned to one of the rescue workers and said, “We have to get that lady.”

He said, “Come on. We’ve already checked her.”

“What happened to the rest of the plane?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It just disintegrated. You’re the only survivors.”

Because White had taken the tickets in the boarding lounge in Denver, she had met everyone face-to-face, had spoken to each person individually. Now the full impact of it hit her. Thinking of Sister Mary Viannea, she could not imagine that a nun could die while she was spared.

“What about the cockpit?” Susan asked.

“It disintegrated,” said the rescue worker.

Oh, Dudley!

When Jan Brown was about to give the final briefing, her mouth was so dry she could not speak. Standing beside her jump seat, microphone in hand, she found that her lips had literally stuck together as if they had been bonded with glue. She leaned around behind the bulkhead and reached into the galley. The microphone cord was barely long enough to allow her to push the spigot in the galley sink and drip water onto her fingers. Then she brought her fingers to her lips and wet them so that she could talk. She keyed the microphone.

In that brief moment of delay, Haynes began his final announcement. For reasons unknown, what he said was not recorded, but Haynes was certain that he began his announcement by saying, “I’m not going to kid you.” He doesn’t remember the rest. Many passengers recalled that he said it was going to be the roughest landing any of them had ever experienced. Maybe worse.

For once, Brown had what she had wanted for all those years: The full attention of her passengers. All those years of businessmen reading the
Wall Street Journal
right through every word she spoke, of people sleeping—snoring!—ignoring her. Those seasoned travelers, they thought she was there to serve them coffee, bring them pillows. And now here they were at last, like little children, looking at her with imploring eyes:
just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it
. “They were right there in the palm of my hand,” Brown said, “because the minute he stopped, I went right into it before they had a chance to bat an eye.”

Here is what Jan Brown said:

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your first flight attendant
. While we prepare the cabin, pay attention as we use a checklist to review some very important safety information with you.

At this time, extinguish all cigarettes; bring seatbacks to the upright position; stow all tray tables; make sure seatbelts are low and tight about you.

Take the safety card from the seat pocket and look at the protective positions shown on the card.

With your seatbelt low and tight, lean forward and grab your ankles.

If you cannot grab your ankles, cross your arms, lean forward with the palms of your hands against the seatback in front of you and press your forehead against the back of your hands.

Flight attendants, check passenger protective positions.

Brown paused as the other flight attendants checked their passengers, going up and down the aisles to see if they were bracing properly. Then she resumed:

Ladies and Gentlemen, the signal to get into your protective position will be given by the captain about one minute before landing. The signal will be, “Brace! Brace! Brace!” and the flight attendants will shout the word “Brace.” Remain in your position until the airplane comes to a complete stop. The flight attendants will then shout, “Release your seatbelt and get out!” Leave your belongings and get out through your assigned exit.

As she finished the briefing and hung up the microphone, she heard from behind her, “Psst! Psst! Psst!” She looked into the galley and saw Jan Murray, knees bent, hunched over with an oxygen bottle in her arms like a baby. Brown had completely forgotten about Vincenta Eley and her heart attack. Murray had gone back to give her oxygen and now, in an urgent whisper, she asked Brown, “What should I do with this? Should I throw it in the lavatory?”

Brown imagined the heavy steel bottle bashing around in the bathroom and firing through the wall like a cannonball during the crash. “No,” she said, “put it in a cart.”

Brown strapped into her jump seat. She tried to think if she had covered everything in her briefing. “And then I come back on and I see parents, lap children,” and she made the announcement, telling them to put their children on the floor. “As I’m saying this, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, this has got to be the most ludicrous,
ludicrous
, thing I’ve ever said in my life.’ I’m telling people to put their prize, treasured possession on the floor? In other words, let’s just hope for the best. Everybody else has a seat belt. I was so appalled at what I was saying.”

Then her cabin fell silent, save for the restless uneven throbbing of the engines. For help with the door, Brown had recruited the three people closest to her, Upton Rehnberg, a big mountain of a man; Helen Young Hayes, the investment analyst from Denver; and John Transue, the businessman across the aisle. Brown’s work was done. She could only wait now. She looked across at Hayes, who held her fingers pressed to the side of her head as if she had a headache. Brown watched her, wondering what the woman was thinking. She looked beyond Rehnberg to the window by his head. She could see a sliver of the earth ripping past at a tremendous speed, like a green ribbon slithering through a fabulous machine being driven out of control by a maniac.

The time had come at last. Haynes made the call. And Brown and Murray began echoing him in alternating shouts as if in some twisted ritual gone amok: “Brace! Brace! Brace!” If she shouted it enough times, it ceased to have meaning. What does
brace
mean, anyway?
Brace
. Such an odd word. It comes from the Latin
brachium
, meaning arm. It means, at its heart, to embrace. It was a hug. A hug good-bye.

“When we yelled ‘Brace!’ ” Brown said later, “I always described it as if you watched a wind come across a field of wheat and everything bends. That’s how it was. Everybody went down. It was like a field of wheat being blown over.” She said she never trusted the alternate position for bracing—hands on the seat in front of you and head on your hands. It’s convenient, but “I always said you’ll survive the crash and get killed by your luggage.” Some people in that position broke their hands with the impact of their heads. Even fully bent over, some suffered black eyes from the impact of their faces with their knees.

Brown and Murray noticed two or three heads pop up at the back of B-Zone as people who were curious about their fate stole a glance out the windows. Together the two flight attendants yelled, “Get your heads down and stay down!” They well knew that this one simple precaution could mean the difference between life and death.

Brown watched the heads go back down, “and then we just smashed into the earth. I remember just involuntarily closing my eyes and then opening them again and thinking, I can’t believe all the body parts are still connected. It was
so hard
. And I think I saw an overhead bin or two open up and I just passed out, because I thought, There’s nothing I can do right now. I think I’ll just check out for a minute.” She entered a state of deep dissociation. Later she had the impression that she had been unconscious, but she could also remember everything about the crash, the noise and feel and smell of it. “All of a sudden, I realize that we’re starting to tilt, and I’m like, ‘Oh! I don’t want to do this! I don’t do roller coasters, I don’t do Ferris wheels, I don’t do any of this stuff!’ ”

Then as the door separated from its frame, a fireball came through her exit, and the flames washed over her. “I’m thinking the whole time, ‘Oh, jeez, you know, as if this isn’t bad enough, now I’m in fire. Oh, really! This is great!’ ” That’s Jan Brown all over: cynical, humorous, and ironic unto death. She could feel the right two-thirds of her body being flamed, as the hair on that side of her head shriveled to nothing, and her stockings melted between the cuffs of her slacks and the tops of her shoes. “Two-thirds of my body is in fire,” she said. “I was engulfed in the flames. And I just said, ‘Well, this is how I’m going to go.’ ” Death, it seems, can come to us tenderly. “It was the most serene moment of my life,” she said. “There was no fear, there was no pain, nothing but total peace.” And then Jan Brown was in limbo, suspended in her harness, neither awake nor asleep.

CHAPTER EIGHT

E
ven
before 1819 Uniform was within sight
of the airport, Bob Hamilton, chief of the Sioux City Fire Department; Gary Brown, director of WCDES, representing the three-state area of Siouxland; Jim Hathaway, the fire chief for the Air National Guard and the Sioux Gateway Airport; and Chuck Sundberg, the director of the local ambulance company, were preparing their emergency responders to move into action. When John Bates made the call from the control tower, announcing that the airport was experiencing an Alert Three emergency, roughly thirty-one fire departments and thirty-five ambulances responded. In addition, several hundred Air National Guard men and women were on alert to help in any way they could. Twenty-six law enforcement agencies also showed up, and forty communities sent emergency equipment of various kinds. Long before the plane arrived, all of those resources were arrayed across the countryside surrounding the field. Because Haynes thought that the plane might not reach the runway, emergency equipment waited along Highway 20 and at varying distances from the airport. Even so, everyone hoped that the craft would somehow arrive safely. Many rescue workers imagined that they would escort people off the field once the passengers slid down the yellow evacuation slides.
The radio chatter, however, betrayed
how keyed up and nervous many of those emergency workers were. The voice of the woman who was on duty as fire department dispatcher that day had already taken on a tone of weary and tremulous resignation. “All rigs in route,” she began and gasped—“to the airport, be advised this is now an Alert Three. I repeat, it’s an Alert Three. They’re advising that a DC-10 is five miles south. They won’t be able to make the runway.” She meant
north
, not
south
, but nearly everyone was in a state of confusion at one point or another during that afternoon.

As Dvorak was broadcasting the two-minute warning to passengers, the dispatcher transmitted in a trembling and broken voice, “All rigs, this aircraft is about six miles east of Hinton and still descending.”

A fire fighter some five miles northwest of the field radioed, “Red Dog Four has the plane in sight at Lawton. He’s descending.” And through it all cut the scream and whoop of sirens and the sound of heavy static.

One of the reasons for the level of the response and its coordination—rather than pure chaos—was that for many years before this emergency,
Gary Brown had lobbied
for a disaster plan for Siouxland. Specifically, he wanted to have a drill that simulated the crash of a jumbo jet. People rolled their eyes and referred to Gary as Chicken Little. They thought it made no sense. Sioux City was a small town, and big things don’t happen out in the Iowa cornfields. But Gary was a young and energetic bulldog of a man who believed in his mission, and with some crucial help from fire fighters, the Air National Guard, and the two hospitals in town, he managed to stage a full-scale exercise on the airfield in the fall of 1987, simulating a plane crash with scores of people injured. They performed the simulation on Runway 22, on the spot where United Flight 232 would come down.

Gary grew up in Siouxland at the confluence of the Missouri River, the Floyd River, and the Big Sioux River. He grew up in Sioux City, to be sure, but Siouxland includes South Sioux City, Nebraska; the towns of Dakota Dunes and North Sioux City in South Dakota; Sergeant Bluff, Iowa; and numerous other communities. The three rivers flood frequently, and the people by necessity have learned the art of resilience.

Sitting in his cluttered office in 2013, at the back of his wife’s gift shop, George Lindblade told me, “Sioux City’s greatest moment is when there’s a disaster. And this dates back to time eternal.” Lindblade, a photographer and videographer, had made it his business over the years to document big events in the town’s history. He became the unofficial custodian of memorabilia from the crash of United Flight 232. “Sioux City is a town that’s been plagued by floods throughout its history, and the town has always pulled together. It’s like an Irish family. They fight like hell among themselves. They want nothing to do with each other. But you throw a disaster at them, and they’re all shoulder to shoulder and they’ll do whatever it takes. They don’t stop for one minute to think what their personal cost or toll is going to be in it, they just do it.” During a flood in 2011, the Federal Emergency Management Agency came to town to teach kids how to fill sandbags. Lindblade laughed. “There isn’t a kid born in this town who don’t know how to fill a sandbag.”

Gary Brown said, “I never paid any attention to the way the community pulled together until 232. That caught me off guard. I had been in this mode of, I’m the disaster preparedness guy, and I gotta prepare for every possible thing that we need to do—food, water, porta-pods, traffic control, medical, blood—oh, my God, I got all these parts to make sure they’re gonna come into motion. But what you really find is: get the hell out of the way and let them things happen.”

That, more or less, is the definition of Siouxland, and the crash of United Flight 232, said Lindblade, “defined Siouxland.” It was the finest moment for these people to show what they were made of. And the people of Siouxland stepped up to the plate, drawing admiration from all over the world.

In the control tower, Kevin Bachman was telling Al Haynes that he might want to try landing on I-29, which the police had closed off for him, the roadblock that Greg Clapper and his family had encountered after driving from the movie theater in the mall. As the plane came within sight of the airport, one of the fire fighters transmitted, “
We have a DC-nine, er, ten
coming across Morningside Avenue. We’ve got him in sight here.” Southern Hills Mall, where Clapper had stood watching the plane, was two miles below Morningside Avenue.