Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (23 page)

In early 1971, TIMET had to blend
the fragmented titanium sponge with other materials, such as recycled Ti-6Al-4V—an alloy of titanium containing 6 percent aluminum and 4 percent vanadium—as well as aluminum shot (small spheres of the metal) to make up the raw material that would ultimately be melted. About a third of that mixture came from scrap titanium—plate, bar, and the leftovers from previous melting operations. Technicians in great domed helmets with green glass visors wielded gas torches to cut this material into four-inch pieces.
They then chemically cleaned the chunks
and crushed all of them once again into small bits and then mixed and remixed the bits and mechanically pressed them into solid masses, each weighing about 310 pounds and shaped like cylinders cut in half lengthwise. The technicians then welded those half-cylinders together to form a long mass called an electrode. The melting process was called “vacuum consumable arc remelting” because it consumed the electrode. In fact, each melting operation consumed two of them. The first electrode was put into a water-cooled copper furnace, a columnar chamber twelve or fifteen feet long. Some titanium turnings were placed in the bottom. The furnace was sealed and all the air evacuated from it. Then, as General Electric’s own report on the crash put it, “
an arc of specified amperage
and voltage, was struck across the bottom of the primary fabricated electrode and the bottom of the crucible, and the first fabricated electrode melted.” After the furnace had cooled, the second electrode was loaded into the furnace and melted on top of the first. After the furnace had cooled once again, a giant overhead crane picked up the mass of metal and removed it for cleaning with acid to eliminate impurities. The crane then inverted the ingot and inserted it into a furnace crucible for a second melting. The temperature was raised several hundred degrees Fahrenheit above the melting point of the metal in the hope that this would melt away any remaining impurities, which have a higher melting point than titanium itself. Some impurities would disappear during that so-called double-melt process. However, like a meteor passing through the atmosphere, if an impurity were big enough, some of it could survive intact. Each melting operation, when complete, was known as a heat, and each heat was given an identifying number. On that February day in 1971, the heat TIMET melted was given the number K8283.

From Henderson, Nevada, heat K8283, was shipped to the TIMET facility in Toronto, Ohio, to be turned into what’s known as a billet. Technicians there heated up the column of metal and worked it until it was sixteen inches in diameter. They then ground the surface of the ingot and put it through a contact ultrasonic test. That test is similar to the ultrasounds used in medicine. The technicians put a transducer on the surface of the metal and moved it around, looking for defects in the interior structure of the billet.
They were searching for places
where the material hadn’t melted completely or had been contaminated by gases, such as nitrogen or oxygen. General Electric, the ultimate customer for this metal, had not ordered the best quality of titanium that was available at the time. In 1966, TIMET had introduced the triple-melt process, which produced purer titanium, less likely to have defects. Donald Cooper, the vice president for technology and quality assurance at TIMET, said, “
There’s basically two levels of quality
: Premium and non-premium.” The metal for the engines at General Electric “was ordered to a non-premium quality.” Cooper went on, “We have always found that . . . the [triple-melt] material had a lower rate of anomalies or irregularities.” (That said, the accident may have happened even with triple-melt titanium.)

The technicians at TIMET removed six and a half inches of metal from the outer surface of the billet and discarded that material. Then they cut a slice from either end of the billet and cut each slice in half across its diameter. They “upset” it in a forge to see if it was workable. The word
upset
means they mashed it. Working metal could be compared to working bread dough. Forging operations involve kneading and mashing the metal.

The
technicians then impressed the identifying label
“K8283” into the top of the billet, which weighed 6,208 pounds by that time. Heat K8283, now about fifteen feet long, left the TIMET facility at Toronto, Ohio, on March 26, 1971, along with certificates of testing that guaranteed the purity of the material and its suitability for the spinning disks that would be made from it.
It left on a Glen Cartage truck
along with four other heats, each weighing about six thousand pounds. Heat K8283 came with papers describing its exact chemical composition. The metal, said this pedigree, was mostly titanium. But it contained 6.2 percent aluminum and 4.1 percent vanadium, close enough to the formula for rotating aerospace parts to satisfy the customer. It also contained trace elements that couldn’t be avoided, such as .026 percent carbon, .18 percent iron, and .008 percent nitrogen—all within allowable limits.

Throughout the long journey of this bland hunk of metal, with all its hidden mystery and its curious properties, everyone involved in the process knew that it would ultimately be subjected to tremendous forces once it went on duty carrying people and families and sisters and lovers and children and pregnant mothers aloft in the heavens.

TIMET trucked that billet of metal to ALCOA, the Aluminum Company of America, for the next steps in manufacturing the number one fan disk, serial number MPO-00385, that would wind up on the General Electric CF6-6 engine with the serial number 451-243 on the last flight of 1819 Uniform.

Terri Hardman boarded United Flight 232 with her sixteen-year-old daughter Sheli and her fourteen-year-old son Ryan. Her husband Fred had stayed home to work until Friday, when he would join them in Illinois for a wedding. Their other daughter, Christine, wasn’t planning to attend because she was involved in softball playoffs. She would stay with friends. Since the Hardmans were originally from Illinois, Terri was excited for the chance to visit family.

Terri and her children had been assigned seats in row 28. When Fred Hardman led them to the gate, he asked if they could move forward. Luckily, seats opened up ahead, to the right of Rod Vetter, Margo Crain, and Ron Sheldon. Like Vetter, Terri wasn’t really concerned about the explosion until Dvorak came rushing past, between her and the two teens, who were seated across the starboard aisle from her. A number of passengers called out and reached up to Dvorak to learn what was going on, but he was fixed on his task and kept going. Terri thought his behavior was strange. She later described the cabin as “very quiet. I think everybody was listening.” Deep down, she knew now that they were in trouble. She reached across to Sheli and squeezed her knee. “I love you,” she said. Sheli gave her a strained smile. She reached farther across to squeeze Ryan’s knee and Ryan pushed her hand away, saying, “Mom, don’t do that.” Terri withdrew, thinking of thirteen-year-old Christine at home. She felt relieved that she had not brought all three of her children. At least Fred could raise one child.

After Haynes had told the passengers how rough the landing was going to be, after Jan Brown’s dire, if formal, briefing, Terri insisted on touching Ryan again and saying, “I love you.”

This time, Ryan gripped her hand and whispered, “I love you too.”

Once Terri and her children were bent over, bracing, she recalled, “I peeked up a couple of times, I have to admit.”

Jan Brown and Jan Murray saw her head come up and shouted, “Get your heads down and stay down!”

“It’s amazing what things run through your mind,” Terri said. As she bent to brace herself, she said, “Your mind races. I thought I should have got my purse and got my pictures out. I should have written something down and put it in my purse to Fred and to Chris. Then when we hit, it was a severe bump and something popped up in front of us on the floor.” It was one of the aluminum floor panels, firing up and away with the force of the crash. The moment it was gone, Terri said, the air around her was suffused with the smell of spring and freshly mowed grass. Then the grass and earth began spewing out of the newly opened hole in the floor, and Terri closed her eyes and held onto her legs as tight as she could, hoping to God that her children were doing the same.

Rod Vetter found himself hanging upside down from his seat belt with the aft bulkhead collapsed onto his intact row of seats. Because the cabin was inverted, he was actually above the bulkhead. When he opened his eyes, he could see fire and smoke and a hole in what had been the floor, which was now above him.

“Margo, are you all right?” Vetter asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s get out of here, this place is on fire.”

Ron Sheldon had already released his belt. Sheldon had an advantage over many of those around him. He had been an infantry soldier in Vietnam and had seen friends lose their lives. He had nearly lost his own life in rocket and mortar attacks. Now he deeply believed that he was going to live. He could see sunlight through the windows, “very dusty, hazy.” He began reaching up to people who were still strapped in. He pushed them upward to relieve the tension on their seat belts so that he could unsnap them, saying, “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”

Vetter searched for the nearest exit, but all he saw was fire. He unbuckled his seat belt and didn’t fall because of the collapsed bulkhead pressing against his back. He checked for the hole in the floor that he had seen above him. He saw feet going out of it, so he knew that a person could fit through. He squirmed out of the space between the bulkhead and his seat and made it into the aisle. He saw another hole with people streaming out of it. This second hole was more attractive because he could simply walk over the debris to reach it.

“That way,” he told Crain. “Go. Get out and keep going.” But Vetter himself stayed behind.

On the far end of their center section of seats, Clif Marshall had been on his way home to Ohio from a meeting of his industry association in Denver. Marshall sat on the starboard aisle. Two colleagues from his company had also attended. Ron Rohde sat directly behind him. Robert Boese was far in the back in C-Zone.

About the crash, Marshall said, “It went ker-bang, and it felt like my teeth were falling out of my head.” He ignored the instructions to brace himself. He instead looked out the window and saw something amazing: a shower of sparks streaming back from the right wing. The oxygen masks dropped, and as the plane rotated upward and rolled right, the overhead bins opened up, and as Marshall put it, “Shit was flying all over the place.” He said that when the plane rolled over and went up onto its nose, that it was “sort of a very soft going over and landing on the back.” He described the sound the fuselage made as it entered the cornfield as “swishing”—a loud whispering noise, as if a bucket of pebbles had been thrown into the sea.

“Comes to a stop,” Marshall said. “Then it gets quiet as hell, and everything’s very dark.” Marshall dropped from his seat and stood up. He saw the exit over the right wing, but the crash had deformed it. Flames rose beyond the window. Marshall began to think that he had survived the crash only to die in the smoke. His story, as well as his life, might have ended there, as many others did in that area of the fuselage, but “it so happens that I looked up, and a panel of the floor had fallen out in the aisle, which was now right above my head.” Marshall was looking up through a luggage bay and out a hole about sixteen inches on a side. “And I see blue sky!” He thought, “I know where I’m going.” He was looking through the hole where the aluminum floor panel had blown out between Sheli Hardman and her mother Terri, filling the cabin with the shocking aroma of freshly mowed grass.

While Marshall was trying to figure out a way to get up there, Ron Sheldon stepped forward and knelt before him like a knight before a king. He interlaced his fingers, making a stirrup of his hands. Marshall was about to step into Sheldon’s hands when he saw eight-year-old Alisa Hjermstad standing nearby, looking lost. He picked her up and boosted her into the hole. Then he stepped into Sheldon’s waiting hands and climbed up after her. Sheldon began urging people to step into his hands and climb into the luggage bay.

Inside that luggage bay, Marshall picked up Alisa and lifted her out through the hole in the fuselage. He had to jump to reach the edge of the hole. He caught the jagged lip of metal, performed an adrenaline-charged pull-up, and climbed out after her. The metal of the airplane’s skin was hot to the touch.

Marshall found himself standing on the bottom of the inverted fuselage, out in the hot July sun in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, twenty feet or more off the ground in the company of a little girl. It was like standing on the roof of a two-story house. Only it was a house in hell. The world was on fire. He turned and looked all around him, at the wreckage, the overcast of smoke and windblown papers and money, seats wrenched apart and scattered in the distance. Marshall looked at Alisa, who seemed to have gone mute. He saw how concerned she looked. His first thought was to get away because the plane might blow up, but he looked down and saw more people in the luggage bay who were trying to jump up to the hole in the fuselage. They had climbed into the trap and doomed themselves. Marshall peered into the smoky murk and saw their imploring faces.

“So I started reaching down and grabbing hold of their hands and pullin’ ’em out.” In the next minute or two, Sheldon boosted up—and Marshall pulled out—at least eight people, perhaps more, among them Alisa’s brother Eric, eleven, and their father, Lawrence Hjermstad. Marshall had no idea that he was working with Sheldon. He peered between his feet and pulled out anyone who appeared in the hole. Sheldon knew that he had a partner up above, but he had no idea who it was. Yet working together, they also helped to rescue Terri Hardman and her two teens. (Terri stayed back to help Sheldon with her children, then let Sheldon boost her up.) Once on top of the inverted fuselage, “we went across the belly of the plane,” Terri said. She and her children slid down onto the wing and jumped. While the Hardmans were escaping into the corn, Marshall pulled out the teenage girl from Norway who had annoyed Joseph Trombello with her pop music turned up so loud that he could hear it, even though she wore earphones. Trombello, forty-two, a corporate auditor, had been seated ahead of Crain and Vetter, across the aisle on the port side. Before takeoff in Denver, Trombello had been settling in, planning to read his newspaper, when Gitte Skaanes, seventeen, of Trondheim, Norway, sat down next to him. A striking blonde, she wore a short sleeveless black dress. Trombello found it hard to concentrate with her music blaring. He communicated with her using hand signals, and she turned down the volume. They fell into conversation. Skaanes had spent the summer in Wyoming as an exchange student and was on her way home. Now Marshall reached down between his feet through the broken fuselage and pulled Skaanes out.