Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (3 page)

Dvorak sat at a console facing the starboard side of the aircraft. On his right was the cockpit door, which he had opened for Brown, and beyond that, the bathrooms, the first class galley, and then the first class cabin, A-Zone. As Brown stepped into the cockpit, holding onto the back of Dvorak’s chair, she watched Haynes and Records each wrenching his control wheel back and to the left, as the plane tipped more and more steeply to the right. The two pilots were not only trying to steer with the yoke, they were each manipulating one of the throttles, as the plane repeatedly tried to roll over on its back. “I could just feel the strength that was being put into that motion from both of them.”

The words that were exchanged between Haynes and Brown have been lost to history. The
Sundstrand model AV557B
cockpit voice recorder operated on a thirty-minute loop, and after the explosion, forty-four minutes elapsed before the plane crashed. The first ten minutes and thirty-six seconds of the recording were overwritten during the last minutes of the flight. Nevertheless, as reported by both Brown and her captain, Haynes said, “We’ve lost all hydraulics.”

As Brown explained to me, “I don’t know what that means, but I do know that we are banking to the right and I am looking out Bill’s window, and I’m guessing we’re at thirty-seven thousand feet. And I think this situation means we could go straight down.” Brown was not the sort to panic. But “I have not found the appropriate word that can describe the pure terror of an airplane that was always my friend, that I knew in the dark. If the lights went out and I was working in the Pit, people would lift the hatch and call down, ‘Are you okay?’ Oh, yeah. I could still keep working, because I could see in the dark. But now it’s a metal tube, and it holds my fate. And there’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to hide.”

She stepped out of the cockpit and shut the door behind her. She stood in the septic smell of the lavatories, “and I prayed, ‘Oh, please, God, let me be someplace else.’ ”

Jan Brown and I sat on stools at her kitchen counter. At the age of seventy-one, she was trim and neatly dressed. She smiled wryly and said, “Oh, wow. Quick answer. Okay, one foot in front of the other.”

She went on: “I told myself, ‘Jan, you’ve got to be tough, you’ve got to be calm, and we can’t let the passengers know.’ ”

She walked down the aisle, pale and shaken and almost in a stupor of fear and grief. She felt grief, she later said, for all the people, the children. “I couldn’t look at anybody,” she said. “It’s like I just withdrew into myself, because I was working a plan, and I didn’t want anybody to read the absolute terror in my eyes. I remember thinking as I came out of the cockpit and was walking through first class that the video was still running. So it gave the appearance of normalcy.”

Brad Griffin could see her from his first class seat, 2-E. When Brown came out of the cockpit, he saw how ashen and defeated she looked. All her faith cast out, she’d been gutted. Griffin didn’t know what he was seeing. He didn’t realize that her captain had told her in no uncertain terms that the plane was going to crash. But he knew that her expression and demeanor signaled something dire.

As she passed through first class, she decided she could not call the crew together for a briefing. It would be too obvious to the passengers. She would talk to her flight attendants quickly and quietly wherever they happened to be. In the forward galley she caught Virginia Jane “Jan” Murray and Barbara Gillaspie, the two first class flight attendants, and began telling them what Haynes had said. Rene Le Beau came forward and caught part of what Brown was saying, and Le Beau’s pale and childlike face took on a stricken look beneath her bright red hair. Then Brown added, “And I don’t know how this is going to turn out, so be prepared.” Then she squared her shoulders, forced herself into an attitude of professionalism, and began walking down the aisle, trying to figure out how to protect all those babies that people were holding in their laps. She proceeded to the aft galley and told Susan White, “Pick everything up.”

And White responded, “No second coffees?”

At around the time Dudley Dvorak declared
that November 1819 Uniform
*
had an emergency, Mark Zielezinski, thirty-six, the supervisor in the control tower at Sioux Gateway Airport, was attending a meeting in an office down in the bowels of the building that housed both the tower and the terminal. John Bates, an air traffic controller, was downstairs in the break room eating his lunch. In the tower cab—a fishbowl of glass atop the terminal building with a 360-degree view of the field and the surrounding land—the phone had rung a minute or two earlier, and a controller from Minneapolis Center had alerted Sioux City to the fact that the crippled plane was coming. Bates heard someone holler down the stairwell that an emergency was on its way. He didn’t think much of it. “An emergency at Sioux City was a daily thing,” he said, because the airport was an Air National Guard base. The pilots of the A-7 Corsair II fighter-bombers were taught to treat most anomalies as emergencies to be on the safe side. In fact, two emergencies had already been declared that day. Bates packed up his lunch and went trudging up the stairs anyway. As he arrived, Kevin Bachman, the approach controller, heard a voice from Minneapolis Center come over his headphones.

“Sioux City, got a ’mergency for ya.”

“Aw-right,” Bachman replied in his native Virginia drawl. At twenty-seven, he was a fairly new air traffic controller, having joined the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) at the end of 1985 and having been rated as a controller for Sioux City in May of 1989. Bachman listened to the breathless, speedy voice of the controller trying to bark out the information that had clearly scared him out of his wits. “I gotta, let’s see, United aircraft coming in lost number two engine having a hard time controlling the aircraft right now he’s outta twenty-nine thousand right now on descent into Sioux City right now he’s—he’s east of your VOR
*
but he wants the equipment standing by right now.”

Bachman could see United Flight 232 on his radar screen, a bright phosphorescent target with the plane’s altitude and an identifying transponder code beneath. “Radar contact,” he said.

Zielezinski picked up the phone and called downstairs to Terry Dobson, the manager of the tower. Dobson hustled upstairs. Once he understood the situation, he reported the emergency to the regional office of the FAA in Kansas City. Kansas City in turn notified FAA headquarters at 800 Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C., across the street from the Smithsonian Institution and the National Mall. Then someone at the tenth floor command center at FAA headquarters telephoned Terry Armentrout, the director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), located two floors below in the same building. The NTSB is responsible for investigating all air crashes, and from the sound of it, this emergency would soon fall into that class of events.

As Bachman listened for word from United Flight 232, the voice of the Minneapolis controller came on the air again sounding more rattled than before. “He’s havin’ a hard time controllin’ the airplane right now and tryin’ to slow down and get to Sioux City on a heading right now, as soon as I get comfortable, I’ll ship him over to you, and he’ll be your control.”

“Awright,” said Bachman.

Then Al Haynes said, “Sioux City Approach, United Two Thirty-Two heavy,
*
we’re out of twenty-six, heading right now is two nine oh, and we got about a five-hundred-foot rate of descent.” He meant that the plane was passing through twenty-six thousand feet, traveling roughly west, and losing five hundred feet of altitude every minute. The handoff from Minneapolis Center was complete.

Bachman gave 1819 Uniform the standard briefing, including weather, barometric pressure, and a compass heading to fly to reach the airport. He told Haynes that he could expect to land on Runway 31.
†

Haynes responded, “So you know, we have almost—no controllability. Very little elevator, and almost no ailerons, we’re controlling the turns by power. I don’t think we can turn right, I think we can only make left turns.” Then he paused and corrected himself. “We can only turn right, we can’t turn left.”

Bachman said, “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, understand, sir, you can only make right turns?”

“That’s affirmative.”

An
airplane is a submarine of the air
. Like a boat, it is steered by rudders, but since it moves in three dimensions, it has rudders for moving left and right (yaw), rudders (called elevators) for moving the nose up and down (pitch), and even rudders (called ailerons) to roll the airplane into a bank when it turns. On small planes all of those movable surfaces can be controlled by cables, a direct physical connection between the pilot’s hands and the controls. On jumbo jets, the control surfaces are so large and the airstream produces forces so great that the power of human muscle cannot overcome them. Hydraulic power is needed to move those surfaces.

If the driver of a forklift wants to lift a thousand-pound pallet, he moves a lever and the object rises off the ground. But the lever isn’t moving the pallet. The lever turns on the hydraulic power. The same is true of the DC-10. When the pilot moves the yoke, he is moving cables that move switches that turn on the hydraulic power to move the rudder or elevators or ailerons. Hydraulic fluid, not fuel, is what keeps the plane flying in a controllable fashion. If the plane runs out of fuel, the crew can deploy a wind-driven generator into the airstream to power the hydraulic system and then continue to fly as a glider. Without fluid in the hydraulic lines, Captain Haynes and crew were unable to steer with the precision needed to land safely. They had no way to extend flaps or slats to slow the airplane for landing. And even if they managed to get the craft on the ground, they had no brakes. Although most of the passengers did not yet know it, the great ship known as November 1819 Uniform was going to crash.

Bachman could see that on its present track, the plane would wind up eight miles north of the airport. It would also fly over the most populated part of Siouxland, as the locals call the neighborhoods at the confluence of the Missouri River, the Floyd River, and the Big Sioux River. Siouxland encompasses parts of Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska, and its spirited and capable people are used to responding to emergencies. Because the rivers flood with grim predictability, because farming involves chemicals and chemical plants explode, and because calamity has always seemed bent on routinely visiting Siouxland in one form or another, the people there pride themselves on being able to face adversity. It was as if Siouxland comprised a cargo cult of sorts and had been planning for the arrival of United Flight 232 for years. The Woodbury County Disaster and Emergency Services (WCDES) had actually simulated the crash of a jumbo jet during training.

As Bachman watched, he could see that the DC-10, rather than heading for Sioux City, was now heading back around into the airspace controlled by Minneapolis Center. He picked up the phone and called the controller out in Farmington.

“Yeah,” Bachman said, “that United, he can only make right turns. I’ll have to jockey him back around to the right into your airspace, too—”

“Yeah, you’ve got him for anything you need.”

As Bachman watched the radar track, he decided to adjust the heading and told Haynes, “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, fly heading two-four-zero, and say your souls on board.”

“Say again,” Haynes said.

“Souls on board, United Two Thirty-Two Heavy.” Bachman was asking how many lives were at risk.

“We’re gettin’ that right now,” Haynes said.

A little less than a minute later, Bachman asked again. “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, say souls on board and fuel remaining.”

“We have thirty-seven six fuel,” Haynes said, “and we’re countin’ the souls, sir.” He meant that the plane had 37,600 pounds of fuel in its tanks. (Fuel on planes is measured in pounds, not gallons or liters.)

Dvorak heard a knock on the door and opened it to find a first class flight attendant, Jan Murray, standing there. Her eyes grew wide as she saw the state of affairs on the flight deck. Without entering, she called out that a United DC-10 flight instructor was on board and had offered to help.

Haynes said, “Okay, let him come up.” Murray backed away fast, shaking from the shock of what she’d seen.

Addressing Bachman on the radio, Haynes began, clipped, staccato, breathless, “We have no hydraulic fluid, which means we have no elevator control, almost none, and very little aileron control. I have serious doubts about making the airport. Have you got some place near there that we might be able to ditch? Unless we get control of this airplane, we’re going to put it down wherever it happens to be.” In fact, as the flight data recorder would later show, in the first seconds after the explosion, the autopilot tried to correct the upward pitch of the aircraft with the elevator, and the controls responded. As the plane rolled right, either Records or the autopilot moved the yoke to the left to lift the left aileron and stop the roll as well. About twelve seconds after the explosion, though, the horizontal stabilizer started to move down and then froze. One minute and five seconds after the explosion, the nose pitched up again, and in response Records moved the elevator for the last time. The left inboard elevator went from –3.94 degrees to –1.55 degrees and then remained there for the rest of the trip. The
crew was then completely disconnected
from all flight controls.

The airplane, Bachman realized, was going to crash. He had no idea how to respond. He said, “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, roger, uh, stand by one.”

In the control tower, John Bates was still watching from the sidelines, waiting to see if his services would be needed. When he heard Al Haynes’s last transmission, he thought, as he said later, “Wow, this is an honest-to-goodness real emergency instead of what we considered to be play emergencies with the [Air] National Guard.” And now with the hair rising on the back of his neck, Mark Zielezinski rearranged the duties of his air traffic controllers to meet the demands of the situation. Dale Mleynek worked ground control, directing traffic on the surface of the airport. Charles Owings controlled aircraft in the local area, for 1819 Uniform was not the only airplane in the sky around Sioux City that day. And Zielezinski put John Bates on flight data, which is a catchall position for such tasks as delivering clearances to pilots and updating the recorded broadcast of the weather. The ground controller can normally handle flight data, but because of the emergency, Zielezinski wanted the two jobs separated. As the person on flight data, it would fall to Bates to determine what level of emergency response to request from the agencies in the area, such as fire departments and ambulance services.