Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (22 page)

“I felt a hand just tap me on the chest,” Fitch recalled.

The hand belonged to a guardsman named Brian Bauerly, who said, “Don’t worry, buddy, I’ve got ya. You’re gonna be fine, we got ya.”

While the forklift was adjusting and readjusting, the wreckage separated somewhat, and “I decided that I could crawl out of there,” Dvorak said. He was the second person to be freed. As he squirmed out, Susan White was making her way across the field in a glow of adrenaline. He said, “I crawled out, they put me on a stretcher and hauled me over to triage.” He blew a mass of blood and snot out of his nose as White appeared. Dvorak believed that she was “grossed out by that,” as he later said, but after being told that the cockpit had disintegrated and that no one had survived, she was overjoyed to see him alive. She wiped his face and gave him water.

Al Haynes was the most difficult to rescue. Somehow in the tumbling of the cockpit, his head had been trapped by the yoke. His leg had been thrown up and over the control column as well. “We had to cut the yoke,” Allen said. After Bendixen crawled inside and pushed Haynes through the small opening onto a backboard, he turned to Records, who was trapped in his collapsed seat.

An ambulance from the Cushing, Iowa, fire department was moving along Interstate 29 by then, not making much progress. The paramedics had encountered a wall of parked cars with people standing on their hoods and roofs, trying to see the wrecked plane. The crew had to drive on the grass to get around the roadblock. Nevertheless, the ambulance arrived in time to transport Records. As the paramedics prepared to leave, one of the rescue workers leaned inside the open door and asked how many people had been in the cockpit. Records held up four fingers, and then Allen, Kaplan, and Bendixen knew that everyone was out. Records suffered some of the worst injuries of any member of the flight crew. As he later said, “I was pretty much out of commission for almost a month there. I was in critical condition for about the first week. Then they moved me down a floor to Intensive Care for another week. It was several weeks before I was even able to talk to the investigating team. I was unable to talk because my ribs were broken and I was full of fluid, and [I was] trying to keep from coughing.”

Haynes and Dvorak shared an ambulance. As it pulled away, John Transue stood by in his undershirt with an ice pack on his head and his crushed briefcase under his arm. Inside the ambulance, as it jolted across the debris and the uneven ground, Al Haynes winced in pain at every bump. He groaned and said to Dvorak, “Tell the driver to go back. I think he missed a pothole.”

At the same time, Jim Walker and his fellow A-7 pilots, who had been moving wounded people to triage, formed lines and began walking through the corn to make sure they hadn’t missed anyone in the confusing scene. Walker had begun to notice, “
a large amount of cash blowing around
, piles of it. Even days later you could find small drifts of various denominations against a fence or wherever the wind left it.” As soon as the plane crashed, people all over the field had begun to notice that thousands of hundred-dollar bills were swirling around within the snowstorm of paper and were drifting in piles, as the wind picked up through the long afternoon. The plane had been carrying an exceptionally large amount of U.S. currency. No one knew why. (The large number of pineapples was easier to understand, as many passengers coming from Hawaii were carrying them as gifts.)

Gary Brown said, “There was enough cash turned over to me that I could have paid off my house. I had one of our big Ford rescue trucks out there, and people were bringing me handfuls of hundred-dollar bills.” He was seated in the truck, using it as a temporary command post. He reached over and rolled up the window on the passenger side and locked the door. As people brought him the money, he threw it on the floor. He filled the passenger side of the truck with the bills.

Dave Kaplan, one of Gary Brown’s volunteers
, said, “I filled a body bag with crisp hundred-dollar bills. People were just walking up to me and handing them to me. I can’t begin to image how much money I handled in those two to three days on the field. Later someone from NTSB mentioned to us they were amazed that we turned that money in. The thought of keeping it didn’t cross our minds.” When I asked Gary if he knew where the money came from, he laughed. “We think we do. Nobody will admit to it. There was a lot of money on that aircraft. There’s a reason that nobody wants to talk about it from an official agency, because they don’t want people to know that large amounts of cash are being transferred on commercial airlines.” I asked him where it went. “The FBI took it,” he said.
United Airlines issued a denial
that the money had ever existed.

After Haynes and his crew were taken away, Bendixen crossed the runway once more. He returned to check the victims who had been left where they were because he or a medic had determined that they were too seriously injured to save. He found three or four people who had been thrown clear of the wreckage and now lay in the corn, still breathing. “We put ’em on a backboard, carried ’em out of the corn to the nearest ambulance, and let the ambulance go from there.”

Bendixen’s best friend Bill Shattuck lived in town, and he went to stay with him and his wife Marie that night. Bendixen was at the Sioux City airport for six days straight “with just my underwear and my flight suit. And every night, Marie would take my flight suit and my underwear and put it in the laundry and give it back to me the next morning, and away I’d go.” He said that to this day, he marvels at the fact that he was on the scene. “There was just no logical reason why I should have been there that day. I had been flying for two years before that, and they never scheduled me in the afternoon.”

*
Colonel Nielsen visited Spencer Bailey in the hospital and was met by reporters as he left. One reporter shouted, “How did you save the child?” Nielsen responded, “God saved the child—I just carried him!” Those words are inscribed on a plaque near the statue.

*
Go to laurencegonzales.com to watch the video.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

M
argo Crain, thirty-one, was on her way to Chicago
for training in her job at an insurance company. That morning she went down the hall from her office to visit Ellen, her travel agent. Crain wore a light-blue mid-length skirt with a long-sleeved white blouse, sheer hose, and light-pink high heels. She and Ellen chatted for a while. Ellen told her that she was seated in the back of the plane. She asked if Crain wanted to move forward.

“Sure, why not?” When Crain smiled, a dimple formed on the left side of her mouth.

Ellen told Crain that she would seat her over the wing. “It’s safer over the wing.” Ellen wished her a safe trip.

Then Crain visited another office to say good-bye to Sandy, an old friend from high school. At the time, they were both struggling with failing marriages and felt fortunate to be so close, both emotionally and geographically. Each of the women had two children. They talked about what it was going to be like as single mothers. Crain hugged Sandy good-bye and then left for the airport for what she expected to be a smooth flight on a beautiful summer day.

In the terminal, Crain walked down the wide corridor, following a flight attendant she had noticed because of her brilliant red hair with the big blue bow in it. The boarding lounge was overrun with people, especially families. “A lot of children. A lot of activity,” recalled Ron Sheldon, who would sit next to Rod Vetter and Margo Crain. “Typical summertime activity. The plane was way overbooked.” Sheldon saw Ruth E. Gomez, thirty-five, with her children running around, John A., ten; Paul, seven; and Leah, four.
Ruth wore a ring
inscribed with the words
Con todo mi amor
and signed “Anthony” with the date “1974.” John was wearing an orthodontic retainer. That afternoon, Chaplain Clapper would find Paul and Leah in the Air National Guard mess hall, looking lost and in shock without their mother and brother. He remembered Leah’s teddy bear earrings. Paul needed to go to the bathroom, so Clapper took him. “We were washing our hands, and the blood and mud was going down the drain together,” Clapper said later, “and that image always stayed with me.”

As Crain waited in the crowded boarding lounge, she watched Jerry Schemmel and Jay Ramsdell looking agitated at the ticket counter. She didn’t know that they had been trying without success to get on a flight all morning. She could see that Schemmel was steaming, frustrated by the delays. She saw Garry Priest and admired him. He was twenty-three, a big good-looking executive dressed casually in jeans, traveling with his diminutive boss, Bruce Benham, thirty-seven. In fact, Priest looked quite a bit like a young Marlon Brando.

Crain boarded through exit 2-Left behind first class. She stepped over Upton Rehnberg’s feet, passed Helen Young Hayes, the Chinese American investment analyst in her miniskirt, and headed down the port aisle. She found her seat on the aisle next to Rod Vetter, thirty-nine. Vetter rose from his seat and stowed her suitcase for her. They sat three rows ahead of the bulkhead that separated B-Zone from C-Zone.

When the engine blew, Sheldon, seated to Vetter’s right, said, “Oops! Sounds like we lost an engine.” Then he added, “Well, we’ve got two other engines. We’ll just keep on going, it’s just gonna slow us down a little bit.” He seemed preternaturally composed under the circumstances.

Crain was not nearly as sanguine. “They served chicken fingers,” she said. “And to this day I can never eat chicken fingers without reliving that moment and feeling the fear.” Crain began to pray. “I pictured my children growing up without me. I thanked God that they were not on the plane with me.” Memories of her children began playing “like a movie” before her eyes as she watched them grow from infants to their present ages, Bryson, ten, and Molly, seven.

About that time, Sheldon began to watch the spokes of sunlight revolving in the cabin—first appearing on one wall, then migrating slowly across and painting the backs of seats, then angling around the cabin and up the other wall—following them like a cat.

Although Rod Vetter was a former naval aviator, he had no idea what was going on in the cockpit. Even later, when the captain told the passengers that the flight was diverting to Sioux City, he didn’t think it was so odd. The captain also said it was going to be a “very difficult landing,” and Vetter wondered why. Then something happened that made his blood run cold. Dudley Dvorak emerged from the cockpit and rushed down the aisle. “He was white,” Vetter said later. “Absolutely white.” Then he noticed that the flight attendants had gone rigid in their movements, their faces strained and pale, and “you could tell that this was a severe situation.” He turned to Ron Sheldon and Margo Crain and said that when this thing was over, they were going to have a drink together. They all agreed.

“It took us several years to do it,” Crain said, “but we did have that drink.”

As the airfield drew near Vetter tried bracing, he realized that because he was big and tall, he couldn’t fold his body over correctly and so had to bend to one side. He was thinking to himself, “God, I’m going to break my neck.” And in another few minutes, that is what he did.

To make a useful engineering material
out of naturally occurring titanium requires almost super-human effort. The ore has to be dug out of the ground. One type of ore, called rutile (titanium dioxide), though inexpensive, is 95 percent titanium. Titanium is valuable only because it is lighter and stronger than any other metal, but to be strong, it must be pure, and to make it pure is difficult and costly.

Mixed with chlorine gas and petroleum coke, rutile produces Tickle. At that point, the Tickle is in the form of a gas. That gas—titanium tetrachloride—is put through a series of condensers and purification towers to produce liquid Tickle that is more than 99.8 percent pure. The liquid Tickle, which looks like water but is in reality metal, is stored in tanks filled with inert helium.

Although Titanium Metals of America, TIMET, had its headquarters in New Jersey in the 1970s, the facility that fabricated the metal was located in Henderson, Nevada, near the Hoover Dam, because the process of extracting titanium from ore requires large amounts of both electricity and water. To convert Tickle to a pure metal at that time, four parts by weight was combined with one part of molten magnesium at about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit in a giant vessel flooded with argon gas to keep air out. That so-called reduction, known as the Kroll process, produced one part titanium metal and four parts magnesium chloride. On February 23, 1971, more than eighteen years before the crash of United Flight 232, TIMET used the Kroll process to produce a mass of some seven thousand pounds of what’s known as titanium “sponge.” It’s called that because it looks like a sponge: it has holes in it. Once the reactor had cooled, the sponge was removed and crushed into small pieces. Then the magnesium chloride was leached out with acid, and the pure titanium metal was dried.

James Wildey, the senior metallurgist at the NTSB at the time of the crash, explained that “pure titanium, by itself, is not a useful engineering material because it has such low strength and is very expensive to process. However, adding aluminum and vanadium significantly changes the properties to give a much more useful alloy, one that is very resistant to corrosion, has by far the greater strength-to-weight ratio of any other metal alloy, from room temperature up to several hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and excellent resistance to fatigue and cracking. This combination of properties makes titanium alloys the material of choice for the large disks and fan blades at the front of high-bypass jet engines.” To achieve that transformation requires what the makers of titanium themselves call an art. It requires a person, known as a melter, who has a sixth sense of how to make that metal. The textbook
Titanium
says, “
There is a significant ‘art’ content
involved in the melting operation.”