Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (49 page)

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June 7, 2000
: Compressor wheels blew up on a Varig Brasil Airlines Boeing 767 powered by General Electric CF6-80 engines. The metal was defective.

The philosophy of making rotating parts for jet engines is based on the assumption that new parts contain no defects. GE calculates the life of the part based on that assumption. That assumption clearly cannot be counted on. As an alternative, the NTSB has recommended what it calls a “damage tolerance” philosophy, which assumes that the part has a defect. In proposing this, the Board said, “
In addition to the separation of the fan disk
involved in the UA 232 accident, there have been many examples of life-limited engine components failing before they reached their life limit. The Safety Board believes that this fact demonstrates the need for a revision of the certification, design, and maintenance philosophies for turbine engines.”

The official NTSB report concluded that the cause of the accident was “the inadequate consideration given to human factors limitations in the inspection and quality control procedures used by United.”
Jim Burnett, the chairman and a staunch advocate
of airline safety, dissented from that conclusion. He listed three causes of the accident. The first was “the manufacture by General Electric Aircraft Engines (GEAE) of a metallurgically defective titanium alloy first stage fan disk mounted on the aircraft’s No. 2 engine and the failure to detect or correct the condition.” The second was United’s failure to detect the flaw. The third was the faulty design of the DC-10, which left it open to damage by fragments from exploding engines. Remove any one of those three causes, and the accident would not have happened.

The inspector cannot be faulted for missing the crack when he performed the last fluorescent penetrant inspection of disk 00385 in 1988. The
NTSB said that FPI is “inadequate
” and “deficient.” Although that test was standard practice in 1988, today the aerospace industry is leaning more heavily on ultrasound and eddy current inspections, a much more effective technology in which a magnetic field is used to detect cracks.

The question of General Electric’s culpability in the crash of 1819 Uniform still hangs in the balance. In the minds of many people involved in this event, including Jim Burnett, GE was primarily to blame. It is indisputable, however, that GE also built the finest contemporary jet engine in existence—as fine as it can be, given the limitations of the physical materials in our world. The model CF6-80C2 is a beautiful engine. The world of aviation has embraced it, giving GE the highest market share in the business.
In 2007, you could buy a GE engine
for about $6,250,000. And if anyone wonders why an airline wouldn’t inspect those spinning wheels more frequently, the first shop visit for a CF6 engine might have cost up to two million dollars that year.

In the end, General Electric achieved something stirring and powerful and remarkable. It took aviation technology to its highest level in the history of powered flight. And yet in doing so, it embraced a technology that was inherently flawed, inherently bound to fail, however infrequently. United Airlines, which bought the engine, understood that bargain. Even though GE failed to produce a perfect engine, and even though United failed to execute its maintenance perfectly, it was the failure of McDonnell Douglas to shield the hydraulic lines—or to separate them more effectively—that brought 1819 Uniform down.

On the afternoon of the crash
, Margo Crain was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall in the Air National Guard mess hall, when Garry Priest approached and asked how she was doing. Crain looked into his eyes, and “I felt like he was almost like an old friend already.” She recognized him as the handsome young man she had admired in the boarding lounge. Now sitting and talking seemed almost a miracle, when so many of her fellow passengers would never sit and talk to anyone again. Crain and Priest had been granted a strange gift: the knowledge of how precious and fragile life is.

They may have talked for an hour, cementing their bond that evening. When Priest’s boss, Bruce Benham, told him that they had been offered a bed at the local TV weatherman’s house, Priest bade Crain good night and promised to see her again. He left, even as Crain was shepherded with so many others to the hospital and then on to Briar Cliff College and its steamy dorm swarming with dazed people who smelled of fuel and smoke.

Crain and Priest saw each other a few more times in the months that followed the crash. They both lived in Denver and attended meetings of the support group that formed there. Each time they saw each other, a bit more of the tinder representing the intensely shared moment of their survival was ignited. When Crain’s divorce came through at last, Priest helped her to move out of her house. Priest, the big strong guy with the
S
on his chest, was lifting her furniture, tossing her life around. The day was giddy and emotional, his Superman to her Lois Lane.

Then they found each other at Sioux City again for the first anniversary of the crash. Crain and her father drove there from Denver. They stopped at a liquor store to pick up something for a drink at the hotel. As they were waiting at the cash register, a television played the news. Crain looked up and saw her own face.

“Dad! That’s me!” They lifted their gaze to watch. A news channel had interviewed her a few weeks earlier for the anniversary, and now in a liquor store in Sioux City, Iowa, she was watching herself talk about the crash.

That evening the survivors gathered at a restaurant that was a bit overdesigned, with flocked wallpaper and faux stained-glass windows, padded captain’s chairs, and candles in colored glass vases with plastic wicker sleeves.

The
next day came up overcast for the prayer service
. The sky-blue program was printed with the twenty-third psalm and a hymn called “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise.” A podium had been set up on the airfield so that the crowd could face the crash site. The prayer service was scheduled to take place at 4:00 p.m. on July 19, 1990. As the people assembled, said Gary Brown, “we had almost no time. There was a black cloud that came out of the west. It started raining five minutes or ten minutes before the first anniversary service.” And everyone made a mad dash for the hangar, where another podium was hastily set up.

Jammed inside the Iowa Public Service Company hangar, with the rain and thunder lashing the ramp outside, soaking the blowing corn, the crowd milled about and talked.
It rained so hard that manhole covers
all over the city were blown off by the force of the water coming down the storm drains, and Perry Creek rose ten feet. Two children were swept away near Thirty-Third and Jackson and pinned under a parked car, as Chaplain Clapper asked everyone to be seated. The crowd, however, was so big that fully half of the people had nowhere to sit. Clapper stood before the congregation and said, “We cannot rewrite history, though our hearts ache to do so. But we can open ourselves up to the God of the present, the God whose future is not limited by the past, the God who makes all things new.” Then an a capella quartet from the Grace United Methodist Church sang. The fighter pilots from the 185th chose that moment to take off for the presentation of the missing man formation. This is a tribute to the dead in which one aircraft pulls out of the normal formation, leaving a hole as the planes pass in review. It is ordinarily performed at altitude, but the clouds were too low.

As the A-7s thundered past on the way to form up, the noise of those turbines rattled every piece of metal in the hangar, and the hundreds of startled people jammed in that white-painted room jerked around to see. Then Clapper called for a minute of silence, during which many people wept, even as glum-looking children fidgeted and looked around. The silence was ended by the howling passage of the missing man formation.

“And when you looked out of the hangar, said Gary Brown, “they were eye level. I’m telling you, they should have had their landing gear down they were so close to the ground. That was a very moving service.”

A Catholic priest read from Ecclesiastes. Then Clapper read the twenty-third Psalm and introduced a rabbi, who read excerpts from a sermon that Rabbi Kenneth Berger had delivered to his congregation on Yom Kippur Day in 1986. It was entitled “Five Minutes to Live” and was inspired by the astronauts who were killed when the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded. It was a meditation on how much richer life is when you behave as if we have only five minutes to live.

As Captain Haynes left his chair on the podium and approached the microphone to say a few words, the crowd rose to its feet for a deafening round of applause. His words were brief and succinct, and he seemed on the point of tears throughout as he expressed “sympathy and our respect to the memory of the hundred and twelve.”

As the presentations drew to a close, Gary Brown was still upset, watching the sheets of rain outside. He had helped to organize the memorial service, “and you know, I’m pissed. I’m like, All that planning to have that thing outside, we had a news media staging area, and I’m just beside myself. And we were going live nationally.” Clapper made his way through the crowd. Brown began ranting at him about the rain. “Gary,” Clapper said calmly, “if we had done that outside like we originally planned we’d have all been—” and here Clapper stretched his arms wide—“this far apart. As it is, you couldn’t be in this hangar without physically touching someone. And it’s made it so much more personal. So you’ve got to look at it this way: it’s just God crying with us.”

Not everyone saw that day in the same way. Margo Crain described it as “long” and “somber.” Afterward, a number of survivors hatched the idea to have pizza and beer, to revel in this bonus of life that had been granted them. Someone volunteered a hotel room, and the group gathered there and began drinking in earnest. They were, she said, “celebrating life and being there after a year and a long day. We actually pretty much partied, I can tell you that. I don’t remember drinking that much beer in my life at one time.” At the end of the night, Garry Priest drove her back to her hotel in his truck. The party was not at the hotel where Crain was staying. When they pulled up, Crain pointedly stayed in her seat. And then without warning, she was in his arms, and they were kissing. “We were actually necking in the truck,” she said. As their passion rose, they heard a knock on the window—so loud, like an explosion—and the two jerked apart to find a police officer standing in the parking lot. Crain laughed and rolled down the window. “Yeah, I’m staying here,” she said. The police officer went away, “and we just kind of called it quits for the evening.” But she knew that the spark they had ignited a year before would not soon die out. “At the time I just really felt, wow, okay, maybe something like this could happen.”

She said, “I was up pretty much all night that night.” She and her father began the trip home the next morning. Crain was so tired and emotionally spent that her father drove the whole way.

Once they had settled back into life in Colorado, Priest seduced a willing Margo Crain with serenades of the songs he had written, which he sang as he played guitar. The crash had jolted Priest out of his eager ascent of the corporate ladder, and he quit his job with Bruce Benham to pursue his ambition as a musician and a DJ.

“We did share a very special bond, a mutual attraction,” Crain said. “And I realized that he’d always be someone in my life because of the bond we had with the crash in the beginning.” Although she married someone else three years after her divorce, she said she can now pick up the phone to call Priest, “and the years just kind of melt away.”

She said, “I keep thinking back to that very day we stepped on that plane. I remember boarding after Garry. He was tall and very good looking and I was like—Ooo! Just like a normal person would. But to just think back then and that now, twenty-three years later, he’s still in my life and still a very, very dear person, and it’s just amazing how sometimes the timing and the threads of your life just work together and around each other and bring you back full circle. It’s just amazing. I always have held a certain special place in my heart for him. My daughter had the biggest crush on him when she was little. My sister did too. And you know that that understanding and that bond with an old friend will always be there.”

Crain and Rod Vetter have also remained friends, and she and her husband have visited him and stayed at his house. “It’s another very special friendship and bond.”

Denny Fitch died of cancer in May of 2012
, having helped to fly so many to safety all those years before. When Priest heard the news, he sent an e-mail to Crain with copies going to many of the other passengers he still knew. In his e-mail, Priest talked about “the 232 Family,” and Crain realized that she had married into that family in a blood wedding on that terrible day and would forever be a part of it.

On the day of the first anniversary, deep thunder rolled around the area all day long, but most of the rain had fallen just before the ceremony. Once it let up, Crain with many others rode out in a van and stood in the muddy field where she had run through the corn the year before. It was planted in beans that year, 1990. She could see the RTR site with its four towers in the distance and the Grassy Knoll where she had stood and looked back at the wreckage and smelled the awful smells and where Jerry Schemmel had handed Sabrina Lee Michaelson to her. Now she let it wash over her, the recognition that this thing, this worst of things, had happened to her, to all of them, and that they were standing here now in the middle of a summer that might never have come, and she with her bare tan legs and her white sneakers and her short white dress with the white bow at the base of its V-neck, a pink flower pinned to her lapel and her brown hair all curly and tumbling around her shoulders and the air warm and muggy on her face and arms, all sensations made so much sweeter by the fact that they might never have been.

She bent over and reached down and pulled on something sticking out of the ground. She had found a part of 1819 Uniform. And as she moved about in the field with Bruce Benham and Garry Priest and the others, she bent and plucked and bent and pulled, like a little girl in a field of daisies, only she was pulling lengths of wire that had been buried as if by an unimaginable force, and each length of wire that she pulled free unearthed more and more parts, tiny electronic components, devices, shards of plastic and scraps of aluminum melted into odd shapes. Some of the fragments had identifying numbers on them and some were still painted with yellow-green inhibitor. She saw rivets and bolts, nuts and doublers, and a few hefty remnants as big as a man’s hand. And it dawned on her that this was not merely a scarred patch of earth. It was a virtual warehouse of scrap metal, avionics, knobs, switches, dials, parts, evidence. . . . And as many of the others had done, Margo Crain wondered what else had been left behind in that mud.