Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (27 page)

“I thought they had a plan,” Feeney told Poole, “or maybe they knew they were going to die.”

As he watched, the right wing struck the runway and the plane began coming apart around him. Then, according to the story he told Poole, he saw Schemmel and Ramsdell leap out of their seats and wrench open the emergency exit. “I saw them bail out,” he told Poole. Then he leaped up and followed.

“Tony described the struggle up the aisle,” wrote Poole, “against a force that was pushing him back. When he reached the exit, he hoped there’d be a cushioned ramp to jump onto.”

“But there wasn’t,” Feeney said. “And I just jumped.”

Not long after that,
Life
magazine interviewed Feeney, and he told a different story. “
After impact, I made my way
through an exit,” he said, “but I missed the emergency chute and fell to the ground.” By whatever means, Feeney came free of his seat, the fuselage broke apart immediately in front of him, and he wound up on the easement between the runway and the corn. A
startling number of people who were thrown out of the plane
lived, including the man seated next to Brad Griffin, Michael Kielbassa, and thirty-nine-year-old Paul Olivier, who sat in the row behind Feeney on the port side next to sixteen-year-old Nina Skuljski. When Olivier’s seat came to a stop on the runway, he was alive and Nina, still strapped in beside him, was dead.

Feeney told me that as he hit the surface of the runway and began tumbling, “I fractured my skull. Hit my head pretty good. I have bits and pieces of memory from coming in and out of consciousness as I was tumbling and rolling.” He remembered “rolling along the side of the runway. And I remember a specific thought being, When am I going to stop rolling?” I asked how he thought he might have survived. “I was a super scrappy, skinny little kid,” he said. “I kind of came to a stop on the side of the cornfield. A rescue worker had come around that area of the crash and found me. He picked me up like you would pick up a baby. My back was broken, so I remember screaming in pain. He put me in the back of his truck and drove me to triage, and from triage I was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital” because that hospital had a burn unit. “I had third-degree [friction] burns all along the right-hand side of my body.”

His father drove about twelve hours straight through from Casper, Wyoming. He found his son in traction. Tony was in St. Luke’s Hospital for more than a month. He said that when he returned to high school that fall, he “received a lot of attention.” He tried as much as possible to have a normal experience at school. But at the same time, the crash marked his life, and it “began to be how people knew me: Oh, he’s the kid from the plane crash.” In fact, he soon acquired the nickname Skip, owing to his traverse along the runway and perhaps to the tale he told Marcia Poole.

Feeney said that when he was eighteen or nineteen years old, he saw the movie
Fearless
and, “that had a large impact on me.” The film was based on the novel of the same name by Rafael Yglesias, which was loosely inspired by the crash of United Flight 232. The main character, Brad Klein, played by Jeff Bridges, borrowed some elements of Jerry Schemmel’s story. In the movie, Klein emerges unscathed from the crash carrying a baby. He comes to believe that he can’t be killed. Klein takes a number of risks that endanger his life, such as driving his car into a brick wall and eating strawberries, to which he’s allergic. Feeney said he started to do “stupid things like that,” such as sitting on the edge of the roof of a tall building at night, tempting fate to take him.

“I went through periods of extreme recklessness, almost invincibility-type behavior.” Looking back at his actions during those years, “I thought: ‘Really? I was doing that?’ ”

When I asked him to be more specific, he said, “Well, you know . . . I jumped off a train.”

I said, “That’s an interesting choice. How fast was it going?”

Feeney laughed. “I don’t know. Pretty fast.” He had the idea that he could run in the air and then run out the speed of the train once he touched the ground, as you might imagine a cartoon character doing. It was a real-life reenactment of his dreamscape fantasy: following Schemmel and Ramsdell and jumping out of the crashing plane. And instead of successfully running, he experienced the same traumatic tumbling that he’d gone through when he was ejected from the plane. “I was all beat up and bloodied and couldn’t breathe. I had bloodied my face and bloodied my hips.” As the train roared off into the distance, he started crawling. After he caught his breath, he was able to stand and begin walking. Once he came to his senses, he realized that he had leapt off of a train in the middle of a desert in Wyoming. He walked back to the last town the train had passed through “and bought some pancakes and coffee and called some friends, who drove out and picked me up.”

During that period of his life, he might wake up in the middle of the night and just take off and drive across the country for no reason. “I guess that’s even how I got to Latin America. I just sold off all my possessions and ran away one day.” When I spoke to him, he lived in Costa Rica.

Both Reynaldo Orito, who gave Feeney his Oreo cookies and reassured him, and Priscilla Theroux, who gave him the religious medal, were killed after being thrown from the plane. They lay dead on the runway when Charles Martz, the ex-Navy fighter pilot, walked past.

In the moments immediately after the crash, the control tower was quiet
. After the intensity of Kevin Bachman’s dialogue with Captain Haynes, the drama had been snatched away, and the tower cab became an odd and uncomfortable sanctuary high above the sea of suffering and smoke and the tiny human figures running to embrace the calamity. Occasionally the silence would be broken by a radio transmission from a pilot overflying the area high above. The controllers who had been working the crash were relieved from their duties by other controllers. Matt Rostermundt had taken Dale Mleynek’s position on ground control.

Then Rostermundt answered a call from the field, startling everyone. Sam Gochenour, a technician from the FAA, helped maintain the electronic equipment on the field and in the tower. The communications antennas that many survivors had noticed near the Grassy Knoll were his responsibility. A small building sat inside the array of four antennas (a fifth was added later), with a parking apron next to it and a gravel road leading away along the perimeter of the airfield. Those antennas, known as the remote transmitter / receiver, or RTR site, carried all of the frequencies used by the Sioux City airport. Gochenour, in his mid-fifties, had been in a lower floor of the control tower all day realigning the thirty-six channels of continuous tape recording that captured everything that was said over the air. “Here I had all the voice tapes,” Sam said, “but I wasn’t listening to ’em. I was just doin’ my job.”

Just before 4:00, he signed off the work he’d done and crossed the ramp beneath a pile-driver sun to FAA vehicle number 636, a late-model Jeep. He made the short drive down the ramp to the FAA shop, which served as the headquarters for the technicians. As he parked his car, he noticed several people standing outside the shop, watching the sky. Gochenour stepped down from his Jeep, and one of the other workers told him about the emergency. He stood beside his car and watched the horizon. “I seen it come in,” Gochenour said, “and I seen it tryin’ to land. I seen it blow up. I seen it flip in the air.”

He knew that his first order of business was to make sure that the crash had not harmed any equipment that was vital to flight operations. He returned to his car and drove to the gate. Then he saw the mobs of people and emergency vehicles. As he was considering how to reach his equipment, a recently hired technician named Tim Norton pulled up behind him in FAA vehicle number 637, a yellow late-model Dodge Caravan. Gochenour stepped out and went to Tim’s window. “Tim,” he said, “let’s go around back. Let’s don’t go through that mess up front.” They turned their vehicles around, and Tim followed Gochenour to a gate that led onto the perimeter road and about two miles around the south and west sides of the field, away from the wreck. They parked on the gravel apron beside the radio antenna towers. The RTR site was on the north side of the vast cornfield, on the far side of which the plane lay burning. Most of the emergency vehicles were approaching the crash from the south and east sides. Gochenour and Norton could see the boiling black smoke on the horizon, but nothing more beyond the horse-high corn, which blocked their view. As they stood watching, Norton, twenty-five, saw Helen Young Hayes walk out of the corn toward them. A moment later, an older man emerged behind her.

“God,” Norton said, “talk about rubber neckers.” He thought the people had come from I-29 and jumped the fence to gawk at the crash. As Hayes drew closer, though, Norton was struck by something odd about her. He realized that her synthetic clothing and her sheer nylon stockings were melted onto her body. She was burned. She had been seated between Upton Rehnberg and John Transue when the fireball came through the 2-Left exit. Norton watched her advance toward him and further realized that she was in shock. She could only mumble and stammer her response when they asked her to sit down. Then the elderly man caught up with her and said that he was having pains in his chest. When they looked up, there were dozens of people streaming out of the corn, some running, some staggering, and others moving in the rigid, awkward gait of shock.

Gochenour crossed to his Jeep, picked up the microphone, and called the tower. Matt Rostermundt answered, listened for a moment, and then turned to Mleynek. “
Sam says he’s got survivors out there
.” Mleynek gave him an incredulous look.

“They thought I was nuts,” Gochenour later recounted. “He thought I was crazy.”

While Gochenour called for help, Norton opened up the air-conditioned electronics building and began guiding people into the small room. He let some of the passengers drink the water that was used to refill the batteries. And then the first class flight attendant, Jan Murray, came walking out of the corn.

Before the plane crashed, Murray recalled later, “I went up to the front bathroom, because I wanted to pray. I got down on my knees in that dirty bathroom, and I just remember praying. I don’t know what I was praying for. I was just praying, I guess, to get us there safely.” She came out of the starboard first class lavatory and walked back through A-Zone to exit 2-Right, where she strapped into her jump seat. Across the airplane at 2-Left, Jan Brown strapped into her seat as well. Murray waited, listening to the strange sounds around her. “My whole life was going through my mind. I mean I thought . . . I thought probably that this was the end of my life.” And she was filled with “yearning,” she said, “to be with my mom and dad, just
yearning
to be home and be safe. I wanted my mom and dad so bad, it was awful, it was just an awful yearning.” Telling me this, Murray heaved a trembling sigh and began weeping. She fell silent for a long time. When she resumed, she said in a whisper, “I can remember looking at the two guys, the gentlemen that were facing me.” Bill Mackin, fifty-one, sat in the window seat with Craig Koglin beside him. As she watched Koglin, forty, he began limbering up for what was to come. “I could see him stretching and kind of getting ready for the game. You could just see him trying to relax his body and that sort of thing.”

“How close are we?” Murray asked Mackin, who had a view out the window.

“Pretty close,” he said, as he gazed at the ground rushing up.

Murray braced herself. Then both she and Jan Brown began screaming, “Brace! Brace! Brace! Stay down! Stay down! Stay down!” at the top of their lungs, and Murray found herself looking out over what appeared to be an empty cabin. “Boy,” she said with a sigh. “That was eerie, to look back and not see a head. That seemed like an eternity while we were hollering ‘Brace!’ And then . . .” She paused, as if to try to think if she had any more to say. When nothing came to mind, she said, with simple finality, “We hit.”

She heard no sound at all, but in the vivid light that poured in through the hole where the tail had broken off, she watched the doors to the overhead bins blow open, and “bags started flying everywhere.” When the tail and nose tore away, a storm of dirt and runway grit began blowing through the cabin with hurricane force, and all of it still going in slow motion. Then she was dangling upside down in her harness. The force of the crash was so great that it drove the round steel clasp of her harness into her flesh and up under her ribcage, breaking several ribs. In the confusing smoke and haze, she could feel people moving around her. “It was smoky and it was black and it was nasty.” She dug the clasp out of her ribcage and somehow managed to open it. The straps had wrapped around and around her arms, “like an ACE bandage. And I couldn’t get down. I heard people scampering by and I had heard voices. Then I remember flailing my arms, and finally I dropped to the floor. And . . . I couldn’t see anything and I was on my hands and knees and I didn’t know which way to go and I looked up and there was this tiny pole of light, so I just started crawling for that light.”

Then Craig Koglin was beside her, calmly saying, “I think we can get out here.”

As her eyes adjusted, Murray saw corn jammed up into the area where the light leached through. Koglin pulled at something, and a space opened up, and they stepped out into the high corn. “It smelled like fresh-cut grass,” she said with an astonished tone of voice as she recalled those first moments of release. “There was nowhere to go but to follow the rows of corn.”

Murray again began to weep. She said in a high keening voice, “And the sky was blue—beautiful, beautiful blue—and the clouds were puffy white clouds. I thought we were in heaven.” She fell into silent weeping for a time and then said through her tears, “I said, ‘Are we alive?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, but we’ve got to run.’ We just ran and ran and ran. We just followed the rows. The corn was higher than I was.” When she staggered out of the corn, she was at the Grassy Knoll. She took her place among the other passengers, climbing the little hill with Margo Crain and looking back at the destruction. “The plane looked like it had exploded, and I thought that we were the only survivors.” She could barely speak through her tears as she said, “There were about . . . maybe twenty passengers on that bank.” She had no idea that the plane had made it to an airport. As far as she could tell, they had crashed in a cornfield in the middle of nowhere. “It was just surreal.” She called it “a peaceful little bank after what we’d been through.” She was also unaware that the two FAA technicians, Gochenour and Norton, were trying to bring order to this chaotic scene, which spread from the Grassy Knoll to the RTR site.