Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (28 page)

She took stock of the people around her and realized that a number of them were seriously injured. Working alongside Georgeann del Castillo, her fellow flight attendant, Murray decided to triage the survivors for quick transport. She observed “a lot of blood,” she said. “It was hard to tell what the injuries were, because it was really messy,” but “We literally had a line ready. It’s incredible that we did this.”

An
Air National Guard nurse named Pam Christianson
had arrived on the field to help with triage. Her exact location was unclear, but she gave a sense of what sort of injuries people had sustained. She said, “The first lady I saw was literally scalped from her eyeballs back. When I first looked at her she was talking to me. I told her: ‘Don’t open your eyes. DO NOT open your eyes . . . ’ I put my hand on the back of her neck and felt her scalp and hair all in a clump. I pulled her scalp back over the top of her head as gingerly as possible.”

As Murray and del Castillo moved among the badly wounded people, they encountered Norton and Gochenour, who were also trying to organize the passengers. People had begun asking after lost relatives, and Murray looked for something on which to write their names.

“We didn’t have any paper,” Norton said, “so we were using our legs and arms and the backs of shirts. So we started writing as much information as we could down.” Murray, who was still wearing her apron from serving lunch on the plane, began to write names and telephone numbers on that.

Gochenour said, “People would come up to her and write their name and their number on her blouse.”

Norton loaded some of the most seriously injured people into his van and left for the hospital. While Murray and del Castillo helped the victims, Gochenour was faced with onlookers trying to climb the fence. “I had to go down there and run them off,” he recalled. He returned to the RTR to find a man climbing one of the towers. A woman with her two-year-old son was tearing her blue dress to give the man a piece of cloth to wave. The man on the tower was trying to draw attention to the survivors. Gochenour ran up and yelled at him to get down, help was coming.

A fire engine appeared out of nowhere and seemed to be heading right into the cornfield. Gochenour stood in front of the engine and put his hands out. He said, “You can’t go in that damned cornfield. Park it.” The fire fighter who was driving stepped down and looked around at the survivors. He saw two people he thought ought to go to the hospital immediately. He asked Gochenour if he could use his Jeep to take them. Gochenour gave him the keys, and the fire fighter loaded the victims. As he drove off, he called out to Gochenour, “When you leave, bring my fire engine!”

About forty minutes after the crash, a blue Air National Guard bus hove into view and parked near the RTR site. Murray and del Castillo said good-bye to Gochenour and joined the passengers as they filed on board to be transported to the triage area amid the wreckage. When the bus rolled away in a cloud of smoke, Gochenour sat in the heat alongside the fire engine and not a soul around. The only sounds came from the killdeers and red-winged blackbirds that flickered in and out of the torn-up corn. Gochenour went inside the air-conditioned RTR building and picked up the phone to call his boss. He explained the situation, then said, “You’d better come and get me, cause I’m not going to drive the damned fire truck.”

Gochenour waited, watching the smoke rise into the blue sky that was columned in all quadrants with the cumulus that grew out of the afternoon heat. Soon his supervisor came driving out along the perimeter road towing a rooster tail of dust from the sun-dried gravel. They drove back the way he had come, avoiding all the wreckage and carnage that Gochenour preferred not to see. “My logic was, there was enough people working on that. They did not need me. And I never seen a dead body, because I didn’t want to see one, because you have to forget it. My supervisor come and got me and we went back to the restaurant [in the terminal] and had a cup of coffee.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

W
andering around inside the McDonnell Douglas plant
, where 1819 Uniform was built, I had an overwhelming impression of sheer size: everything seemed forty times larger than normal. What philosophy, what intent or craft, I wondered, could inspire building on such a monumental scale? By golf cart, an executive from McDonnell Douglas and I glided among the clean brown-and-tan-colored buildings, buildings so large that I couldn’t quite gauge their scale until we drove inside of one and I saw, as we passed from yellow sunlight to a blue fluorescent haze, the sign warning,
IT TAKES SIX MINUTES TO OPEN OR CLOSE THIS DOOR.

I stood in a room—a single room—that contained ten DC-10s. That was but one room in a complex in which the workers traveled by bicycle from one desk to another, while others could be seen hitchhiking during the lunch hour. Some of those workers were third-generation employees of Douglas, where planes had been built without interruption since the early 1920s. That could not be said of either Boeing or Lockheed, the two competitors that were making jumbo jets at the time of my visit.

Long before United Flight 232 crashed, at about the time that Dave Randa and Yisroel Brownstein were infants, I was writing about airline crashes and airline safety, and I had the opportunity to visit the Douglas plant where DC-10s were being built. To get there, I flew in the cockpit of a DC-10, sitting in the jump seat behind the captain, as Dudley Dvorak would do during the final minutes of United Flight 232.

The DC-10 was built in stages, and each plane took eighteen months from start to finish. Some parts were made elsewhere by other companies. For example, engineers at Convair, a division of General Dynamics, designed the fuselage of the DC-10. The Convair factory built it. Other parts were fabricated right there in the McDonnell Douglas plant. Eventually the whole plane would emerge on the flight line at Long Beach Airport, and one day John C. Brizendine, who was president of Douglas at the time, would step forward for the traditional presentation of the new plane. One sunny day, I watched him deliver a snow-white DC-10 to the airline that had ordered it. Because of the time of year, the craft had a red Christmas bow tied around its entire sixty-two-foot girth.
It had taken twenty million hours
of engineering effort and fifteen hundred hours of flight testing to create this ship and its sisters.

We hummed along in a golf cart, my minder and I, to another building to watch a section of fuselage arrive on a special vehicle that one might have called a truck if it had not been so big. This was the same component as the section of fuselage that would wind up inverted and on fire in a cornfield, a piece of midsection made by Convair that would be fitted with a cockpit and a nose assembly, with wings and a tail: a marvelous cylinder of aluminum skin and skeleton, still displaying its coating of yellow-green strontium-chromate corrosion inhibitor. Apparently, even the employees were not used to the remarkable size of their own operations. Workers all over the area stopped to watch when the safety horn sounded, signaling that the great crane was lifting the object and moving it a few meters to its cradle at the end of a long line of partly finished fuselages. Since each airplane took a year and a half to build, the workers didn’t assemble them one at a time. They built them in gangs.

After two days in the Douglas plant, I had no doubt that the men and women I saw there were as dedicated and sincere, as talented and well trained, as any group of technicians in aviation. And out there beneath the Long Beach sun, in the spick-and-span, designer-toned atmosphere of the Douglas plant, watching the workers assemble the unimaginably complex DC-10 airplane, I found it difficult to imagine those sleek ships doing anything but flying off to greater glory. One of the passengers who escaped the burning wreckage of 1819 Uniform, Amy Mobley Reynolds, said that in the minutes before the crash, she was admiring the craft that was carrying so many of those people around her to their deaths. “It was such a
beautiful
plane,” she said with a sad sigh. (It was so reminiscent of the
Titanic
, a ship that, like 1819 Uniform, was unique and beautiful and had also carried a fatal flaw hidden deep within its structure.
Charles Burgess was the last member of
Titanic
’s crew
to retire, after forty-three years at sea. He was the baker on the
Titanic
and later sailed all the great ships, including the
Queen Elizabeth
and
Titanic
’s sister ship, the
Olympic
. He said that no vessel that ever sailed could hold a candle to
Titanic
. “She was a beautiful, wonderful ship.”)

I went to look at the electrical assembly line for the DC-10 and the DC-9. The room was so large, the DC-10s themselves so large, that the new Douglas Super 80s and a number of DC-9s in various stages of construction seemed like toys tossed into corners by forgetful children. Except that I could see the tiny workers swarming over them and hear the echo of rivets popping like machine-gun fire throughout the vaulted space. I could smell the flux of solder and see the arc lights glittering and the giant spider shadow of a welder cast high up onto the ceiling.

The man in charge of wiring was explaining how they create and then move the wire harnesses, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that what I saw before me was awfully spooky. Computers checked the accuracy of the connections, all of which were made by hand, mostly by women from the look of the assembly line. I was staring at a virtual wall of white wire that was but one-quarter of one section of an embryonic DC-10’s nose. “One hundred miles of wire in a DC-10,” said the man in charge. All that white wire, coiling endlessly, was mesmerizing. When the cockpit ripped away from 1819 Uniform, when the first class cabin was torn off, what remained for the passengers in coach to face—Upton Rehnberg and Garry Priest, Helen Young Hayes and Ellen Badis—was this wall of wire. And beyond that, strewn across the fields, as they emerged through the white curtain, they found the entire inventory of
270,000 parts
that had once been collected into a whole and stuck together by two million fasteners, nuts, bolts, rivets, solder, thread, glue, and hope.

While Susan White and Donna McGrady stood in the sun by the broken tail, watching the people flowing across the field, the paper and insulation blowing down the runways, and the ambulances and helicopters coming and going, White had a surreal and adrenaline-fueled sense of purpose, as if she had been put there by God himself to help. Then she began walking through the debris, past the broken pieces of the plane and the people who had tumbled across the scene in their seats, and saw her own tote bag on the ground. She hesitated. She felt that it would be somehow blasphemous to walk through all this destruction carrying one’s belongings. Triage had been set up amid the wreckage, and more people were being delivered there by Air National Guard buses all the time.

More helicopters were landing now, and the great swirling mass of smoke and soot and papers revolved around her as she went forward, she knew not where. Air National Guard men and women were running, and ambulances tore through the scene, their lights revolving, as she came upon a girl whose leg was split open, the muscle pulsating out of the gash in her skin. White leaned down and touched her and said, “Hang on. Someone’s going to be with you.”

As White and McGrady went among the dead and wounded, McGrady came across a woman who was badly burned, her synthetic clothes completely melted to her body, her hair singed away, leaving her skull blackened. One of her legs was so badly broken that the foot was up at the level of her waist. Her face was deeply burned, McGrady recalled. She was conscious, but “she was dying. She was saying something, but she couldn’t hardly say anything.” The woman may have worn dentures. McGrady said that her teeth had melted. She had most likely inhaled fire. “And at that time the only thing that I could think of was just to try to soothe the pain.” McGrady knelt beside her, trying to think how she might help. Emergency workers flowed around her, treating patients they thought they could save. McGrady looked around the scene of blowing debris, swirling money. Then she lifted her face to the sun beyond the sooty gloom and began singing an old spiritual song to the woman before her. She sang and sang out there in the smoke and the sunny overcast until a team of medics came at last to bear the woman away.

Nearby, Susan White had set up an improvised clearing station for people emerging from the smoke. Her uniform attracted those wanderers in search of a mother, a husband, a son. Schemmel approached, remembering her from the boarding lounge and from the walk down the Jetway in Denver.

“Do you remember my friend?” he asked.

“Of course, I do.”

“I can’t find my friend,” Schemmel said.

White promised to keep an eye out for Jay Ramsdell.

Susan Randa approached and hugged White, saying, “Thank you for saying ‘Release your seat belt,’ because I would have just waited for someone to come rescue me.”

“That’s just what we’re trained to say,” White explained.

Jan Brown came out of the corn, pale and shaken from her encounter with Sylvia Tsao. In the middle of that green maze of cornstalks and blowing pollen, she had run into Lori Michaelson carrying Sabrina Lee. She had called out to her, “Were you able to hold her?”

“No,” Lori called back. Reflecting on the crash a year later, Lori said, “
I had to put her on the floor
and once the plane hit, I was able to hold onto her, but once it flipped, then I lost her. And she was lost for a half hour or so.”

Jan Brown had not yet heard about the rescue, and she wondered how Lori came to have possession of her baby. As Jan moved through the rows of corn, unable to see anything but green, her mind drifted back to the movie she’d seen the previous week,
Field of Dreams
. And when she emerged at last, she found Susan White and Donna McGrady and Jan Murray, who had arrived by bus from the grassy knoll, and the four flight attendants hugged and leapt around, glad to see one another so impossibly alive.