Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (25 page)

A Board member was always included on the Go Team, and that day it happened to be the chairman of the NTSB, Jim Burnett. Burnett was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981. As Benzon put it, “He grew up pretty quickly into the accident investigation business soon after he was appointed. The Potomac River crash occurred about a half mile from our headquarters within a short time of his appointment.” Air Florida Flight 90 attempted to take off during a snowstorm with ice on its wings and in its engines and crashed into the river in January of 1982. “He stepped up to the plate, and over the years became a very good advocate for aviation safety . . . much better than later chairmen.” Although he was a young man, around forty at the time of the crash of United Flight 232, Burnett walked with a cane sporting a dog’s head for a handle. “He said that was so he could point his cane head at bureaucrats to bird-dog the Federal Aviation Administration and other government transportation agencies,” said Benzon. “In short, he didn’t care much who he pissed off.” Burnett would serve such functions as appearing on television to give interviews and presenting to the public the face of the Board, while providing the working investigators with a shield against the press. As such, he would work closely with Ted Lopatkiewicz, the public affairs officer, who sat beside him on the plane. Lopatkiewicz opened what he called his Go Bag and took out a list he always carried, which showed the worst airline crashes in history. Burnett studied the list for a moment. With a start, he understood that with 292 fatalities this would indeed be the largest death toll for an air crash in U.S. history. That was the number that Haynes had transmitted in response to Kevin Bachman’s request for “souls on board.” (The actual number was 296.) The next worst crash had occurred ten years earlier. American Airlines Flight 191—another DC-10—had crashed on takeoff from Chicago on May 25, 1979. The nation was shocked at the death toll: 273. In the vernacular of the NTSB, such accidents are called Crowd Killers.

Most airplanes at that time had a navigational radio called an ADF, for automatic direction finder, that operated on the AM radio band. MacIntosh asked the flight crew to tune it to a local AM radio station so that the team could listen to the news on the cabin speaker. “It was unbelievable to us,” said MacIntosh, “as we passed places like Pittsburgh and Columbus and Indianapolis and so forth, to hear that there were survivors—many, many survivors—being taken to local hospitals.” Cruising along in the dead of night, accompanied by the rumble and whine of the Gulfstream’s turbines, the glow of flame gently tailing out of each engine, they sat in their captain’s chairs, listening incredulously to that news. Lopatkiewicz said that Chairman Burnett was “flabbergasted.”

Ten minutes before 1819 Uniform crashed
, Jerry Schemmel craned his neck around to meet the eyes of his best friend and boss, Jay Ramsdell. Ramsdell grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. Schemmel smiled and returned the signal, as fourteen-year-old Tony Feeney watched. Then silence fell and the long wait began. Every emotion was represented in those aisles. Three rows ahead of Ramsdell, Charles Martz, the ex-Navy fighter pilot, was growing more and more angry. He usually flew himself around the country in the business aircraft he leased. Linda Pierce, seated across from Garry Priest, the young businessman traveling with Bruce Benham, was petrified. Priest tried to comfort her. Priest described himself this way: “I was twenty-three years old, bulletproof, big ‘S’ on my chest, a red cape behind. Pretty invincible at the time. I’m ten feet tall. And I guarantee you one thing: At that time?
Planes. Don’t. Crash
.” He didn’t believe the plane was going to crash until it crashed.

Pete Wernick, a bluegrass player known as Dr. Banjo, was holding his six-year-old son’s hand and trying to comfort Ellen Badis on his right, whose two-year-old, Aaron, had fallen peacefully asleep with gum in his mouth. Sharon Bayless, seated across the starboard aisle from Aaron, leaned over and suggested to Ellen that she take the gum out of the boy’s mouth.

A few rows forward sat the Mobley family, on their way to North Carolina to attend a reunion. Amy, nineteen, sat in the starboard window seat next to her eleven-year-old brother Rusty. Amy had married Doug Reynolds nineteen days before the flight, and this trip was doing double duty as their honeymoon. Rusty’s cousin Marci sat across the aisle from him, with his brother Dustin on her left. Amy was thrilled for her new husband, as she explained later, “because that was his first time flying. He got to watch the Kentucky Derby,” which was playing on the video screens throughout the plane. Doug was having the time of his life too. Pretty women were serving him food and drinks, and he was living in the lap of luxury. Amy said that although Doug had been afraid of the whole idea of flight beforehand, he could hardly believe that he was having such an exotic experience, traveling miles in the sky near the speed of sound with his whole new family of in-laws. He was a small-town guy. He worked drilling oil wells. Amy went on with a sigh. “It was just a dream come true for him. He just never ever got to do anything like that before.” She paused. “It just wasn’t quite what he was expecting.” She laughed softly and then said, “Now we don’t do it at all.”

Sister Mary Viannea Karpinski, across the aisle, was still praying with her red rosary beads.

When the order from the cockpit came at last—“Brace! Brace! Brace!”—time went into slow motion for Schemmel. He reflected that he felt strangely at peace. “I felt good,” he said. “I felt ready for whatever was going to happen.” But he could not remember if he had told his wife about the new life insurance policy that he’d recently bought. He opened his briefcase, found pen and paper, and wrote this note:

July 19, 1989

Aboard United Flight 232.

Whoever finds this note,

I have a new life insurance

policy. The papers are in

my guest bedroom closet.

Jerry Schemmel

He put the note in his briefcase and placed it beneath the seat ahead of him. Like so many people who wrote notes, he never saw it again.

Then began the breaking of the great aluminum ship, ripping and screaming across the ground, bursting into flames as it went. People were crying out. Schemmel was thrown against his seat belt. He watched in amazement as “a woman, still strapped in her seat, flew past me on the other side.” He saw a body fly through the air. A ball of fire roared down the aisle above him as Schemmel tried to cover his head, to make himself small. Then the vessel arched into the air, breaking up further as it angled over, pirouetted, and slammed down onto its back. Schemmel felt pain searing through his spine, up into his neck, and down into his legs. Hanging from his seat belt now, jerking like a rag doll as the open cylinder of metal tore through the corn, he wondered if he’d broken his back, as the plane slid on and on. A concussion sent an intense pain through his head, and Schemmel was lying on the playing field after being hit by one of his teammates in a high school football game. He opened his eyes and looked up at his coach and at the teammate. All the world was silent.

Then he was back in the plane again, hanging inverted, watching the lazy smoke illuminated by flickering flames in the darkness. He released his seat belt and dropped to the ceiling. His eyes began to adjust. The
man sitting behind him, Walter Williams
, the twenty-eight-year-old with perfect teeth, had received fatal wounds to his chest. Some of the people were dripping blood. One person’s severed arm hung down, held only by a strip of skin. Schemmel’s eyes darted all around. So many bodies lay in disarray on the ceiling, bereft of their seats in this smoky cave. He looked for Sylvia Tsao, who had been seated ahead of him with her grinning toddler Evan. They were nowhere to be seen in the smoke. He saw no way out. The darkness was punctuated only by the dancing firelight. Many of the windows were still intact, but the force of landing on its back had partially crushed the fuselage so that many windows were flat on the ground, pressed into the mud or the corn, admitting no light at all.
In some places the ceiling had been crushed
enough to trap people in their seats, alive but unable to get out. To Schemmel’s left and just behind him, going back from row 22 through 31, in the two-seat section on the port side, nearly everyone died of the smoke.

Now the filigree of flame had grown angry. The smoke, so wispy at first, began to turn and curdle as if the air itself were clotting. Schemmel began to choke. He helped seventy-nine-year-old Wilbur Eley down from his seat. He didn’t notice Wilbur’s wife, Vincenta, who had thought she was having a heart attack. The elderly man and woman began picking their way over the spilled luggage, moving slowly through B-Zone toward Jan Brown, who was politely ushering people out. Schemmel saw a spoke of sunlight lance through the smoke. “
I knew at that moment
that I was not going to die,” he later wrote.

As he began to move toward the light, he saw a woman heading back into the depths of the burning plane, into the syrupy coils of smoke. Schemmel struggled over the debris to reach her. He took her arm to guide her out. Then he saw that it was Sylvia Tsao, and he understood the horror in her eyes. Evan’s face rose up in Schemmel’s vision.

“I can’t find my son!” Sylvia shrieked at him. “I can’t leave without my son!”

Sylvia had done as Jan Brown had directed. She had put Evan on the floor and now he was gone. As she said later, “
I remember being in the brace position
, with my son’s head tucked between my knees, my left hand holding his ankle, my face pushing down on his head, my legs outside his legs.” But then “suddenly, the world seemed to end. I saw for an instant my son’s body floating and flying at a high speed down the right aisle towards the back of the aircraft, his head first, his face away from me.”

Now as flames lapped around the plane, Schemmel tried to think of what the correct action was at this, the moment of truth. He saw that Sylvia would go toward the rear in search of Evan and die in there. Desperate to get her out of the plane, Schemmel said the first thing that came into his head, the words that he knew would move her: “I’ll find your son. But you have to get out yourself. Now.” He led her to the forward galley, past the lavatories, and out of the open fuselage where first class had been torn away. Two men ushered her out.

Schemmel had said what he felt he had to say to save her life. Now he stepped down from the burning plane and felt the softness of the earth. He smelled a familiar scent from his childhood, and those memories snapped the scene into focus for him: he was in a field of corn in Iowa. As that realization descended on him, he also understood that he was standing next to a burning jumbo jet that might explode.
*
He prepared to run. But no sooner had he taken a step or two, than a sound stopped him. It was the voice of a baby crying from within the plane. Without thinking, he headed back toward the plane where he had told Sylvia not to go. A man tried to stop him, shouting, “No! We’ve got to go!”

“There’s a baby!” Schemmel said. Perhaps it was Evan. Perhaps he could find Sylvia’s son. He jerked free of the man’s grip and found himself back inside the darkened plane, choking, blinded by the smoke. As he went deeper into the burning wreck, the smoke grew so dense and toxic that he clenched his eyes shut, closed his mouth, held his breath. “
I know I couldn’t see anything
and I do remember homing in on the cries. ‘Keep crying,’ I remember saying to myself. ‘Please, keep crying.’ ” Schemmel groped toward the breathless wailing, hands out, feeling along the ceiling beneath his feet. He lifted away something that felt like a duffel bag. He pulled out a long piece of cloth, realizing as it passed through his hands that it was an airline blanket. He picked up something heavy made of metal and tossed it away. He reached down into an opening and felt flesh, soft and warm. It was an arm. He lifted the baby out, pushed the small body to his chest. Then he was outside once more, gasping for air in the sunlight. At last, he was running, clutching the baby, bracing himself for the explosion that he felt sure was coming.

When the order came to brace, Margo Crain held her ankles tight. She was slim and limber and was able to tuck deep down between the seats. Her first thought as she was blown along, so out of control, was, as she put it, “My kids! My kids!” She believed that she was about to die, and like Cindy Muncey ten rows behind her, Crain worried about who would take care of them. She hoped her husband would raise them right. Yet a feeling of inexplicable calm descended on her. She silently told herself, “Okay, ride it out.” She held on “for dear life” and managed to keep her body in a tight tuck. And with that, “things came to an abrupt stop.”

Crain remembers that she reflexively unbuckled her seat belt and fell on her head. “It was dark and smoky and dusty.” She called Vetter’s name, and he was calling hers and then “I saw his hand reach under some debris and grab mine.” He had to move debris to clear a path. Vetter told Crain to follow him, and together they crawled on hands and knees away from the collapsed bulkhead toward the light. As she passed a window, Crain could see flames outside, “glowing, menacing.” She called them “flickering, coppery, fiery.” She couldn’t seem to stop coughing. During the breakup of the ship, it was as if a great hand had come down and shaken out a rug, releasing all the dust that had accumulated for years in the upholstery and carpeting.

After pausing to watch Vetter, Sheldon, and the other men drag Sister Mary forward, Crain followed them past ten rows to the break in the fuselage that was their exit. She stepped out past Upton Rehnberg and the wires he held. “I came out and I looked around and it was this beautiful bright summer day, and I felt like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
when she came out of her house after it had been through the tornado.” As she stepped into the cornfield, she told herself, “I am going to change a lot of things in my life.”

She followed the rows. The tassels on the stalks were high above her head. It was like a green, green dream. “The heat of the July summer day, combined with the heat from the fire of the plane, plus the unsettled dust made the air around me very suffocating. I felt like I was in some kind of dense, overgrown jungle.” She emerged at last onto an open field. In one direction she saw radio towers, a parking apron beside them, and a gravel road leading away into the distance. In the other direction, she saw the Grassy Knoll, where others were gathering and where several aged scrub trees provided a bit of shade. Someone sat on a small boulder as if in a pastoral painting from another era. She went toward the people and the shade and climbed the rise in the land. She turned around and saw the pall of smoke, the wreckage, the tornado of money and ash that was turning the sunny day overcast. For the first time, she understood that the plane had actually crashed. Many years later she said, “The one scent I could really, really smell so strongly that it probably will never leave me is the scent of burning flesh.”