Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (13 page)

Like meat, titanium has grain. It can flex and flow like muscle. When titanium gets hot, it can smear like peanut butter. But within that muscle of metal we find crystals. The engineers themselves may sometimes think of their metals as living things. In public testimony during the investigation of the crash, one of the designers of the CF6-6 engine from General Electric,
Christopher Glynn
, was trying to explain how these engines can break. He said, “You have to ask the material, ‘How do you feel about having a crack in you, and how fast is it going to grow?’ ” He described the tests in his lab this way: “It’s letting the material tell you how it feels about that.”

It is preferable that the crystal structure of titanium be perfect. However, minute imperfections, small impurities, can creep into the process of making those fans and compressors and turbines. Impurities can sometimes cause the metal to fail under the tremendous strain of spinning.

Titanium can also burn. Sometimes the spinning titanium wheels catch fire, and the flame passes from wheel to wheel and destroys the engine. That provided yet another possibility for what might have happened to the number two engine on 1819 Uniform.

As Kevin Bachman watched the DC-10 approach Sioux Gateway Airport, he was convinced that it would land safely. Hundreds of others were watching too—Zielezinski and Weifenbach, Mleynek, Bates, Charles Owings, Terry Dobson, and all the other controllers who had joined them in the tower, as well as the A-7 pilots waiting on Taxiway Lima, along with scores of fire fighters, police, and Air National Guard men and women, and Gary Brown with his binoculars raised to his eyes—they all watched as the jumbo jet unfolded against the sky into a great winged shape. As the controllers gazed out the wraparound windows of the tower cab, they saw that the plane wasn’t floating the way airliners ordinarily seem to, that deceptive illusion of slow motion. Rather this plane was howling down the glide slope, dropping like a stone under the high summer sun in a sky full of majestic cumulus clouds.

In the cockpit, Haynes was still trying to hear the wind speed and direction. “Okay,” he said to Bachman, “we’re all three talkin’ at once. Say it again one more time.”

“Ah, zero-one-zero at one-one and there is a runway, ah, that’s closed, sir, that could, ah . . . probably work to the southwest. It runs, ah, northeast to southwest.”

Haynes wasn’t sure what runway he was aiming for, but he said, “We’re pretty well lined up on this one here . . . think we will be.”

As the jumbo jet blossomed in Bachman’s field of vision, he realized that Haynes was going to attempt to land on the old runway where the fire engines waited. Haynes could detect the urgency in Bachman’s voice when he spoke. “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, ah, roger, sir, tha-that’s a closed runway, sir, that’ll work, sir, we’re gettin’ the equipment
off
the runway. They’ll line up for that one.”

Zielezinski turned to Mleynek and called for him to clear Runway 22. Mleynek keyed his mike and said, “Bat Four-One, hold your position there. Bat Eight-One, hold your position.” A moment later, Mleynek called the fire trucks, which had assembled on the old closed World War II runway, and said, “Red Dog One and Red Dog Three, exit Runway, ah, Four-Two-Two. That DC-10 will be landing Four-Two-Two.”

One of the fire fighters responded, “We’ll exit and get outta here.”

Mleynek’s voice shot up then, as he said, “Red Dog One and Red Dog Three and Red Dog Six, exit Four-Two-Two immediately!” And in another few seconds, he said, “Red Dog Two and Red Dog Four, that DC-10 is three, uh, two mile final Runway Four-Two-Two!”

Five seconds later, Mleynek said, “All emergency equipment, remain to the right of runway Four-Two-Two. That DC-10 is on one-and-a-half mile final.”

Dave Hutton, the assistant fire chief who drove Jim Hathaway, the base fire chief, in a Jeep truck, said many years later, “We were at the southwest end of Runway Two-Two-Four. We were looking toward Runway Three-One-One-Three, waiting for the plane to land on that. About a minute before it came in, they said, ‘All crash equipment, get off that runway, because the plane’s comin’ in.’ ”

Off to the side of the command vehicle that Hutton was driving, the Corsair pilots sat watching through their open canopies as the jumbo jet appeared as a white shark shape with a red stripe, trembling in heat waves against the blue July sky, even as the fire trucks began to blow black diesel smoke and roll forward, and the mammoth ship settled in and dove toward the field.

“How long is it?” Haynes asked.

“Sixty-six hundred feet,” Bachman said, his voice rising. “Six thousand six hundred feet, and the equipment is coming off.”

As the plane neared the field, a number of fire fighters on the ground radioed, “We got him in sight over here!”

After twelve seconds of radio silence, Bachman added, “At the end of the runway, it’s just a wide open field so, sir, so the winds won’t be a problem.” The plane was landing with the wind on its tail, so it carried even more speed than it would have otherwise. Even if the plane reached the runway, it was going to go off the end.

Haynes said, “Okay.” The time was 3:59 and 34 seconds. Less than a minute remained in the life of 1819 Uniform.

The first of several alarms went off, the Ground Proximity Warning System meant to tell a pilot when the plane was descending too rapidly while too close to the ground. Haynes groaned audibly as the whooping klaxon sounded and a lazy mechanical voice insisted, “Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.”

Of that moment, Records would later say, “We discussed it on short final about pulling the power off, but Denny [Fitch] said, ‘No, that’s what’s controlling us.’ And we were rapidly running out of time to discuss it any further.”

As the right wing dropped, Records was saying, “Left throttle. Left, left, left, left, left, left left. Left, left . . .”

One second before impact, someone said the word
God
.

Many years later, I met Dave Randa in Geneva, Illinois, a sleepy historic river town west of Chicago. We ate lunch at an airy bar and grill called Fox Fire, because of the Fox River and the flames the chef had kindled to sear burgers and chicken and fish. The room, with its bare brick walls and curving vaulted ceiling of nineteenth-century rough-hewn pine beams, looked like a refurbished factory. Dave commented that the ceiling resembled the interior of a DC-10 after the decorative walls and ceiling had been ripped away. He was right. I had seen many of those unbuilt frames at the Douglas factory in Long Beach, California, and Dave had seen one from the inside, even as it was torn asunder around him.

Dave was tall and athletic, thirty-one years old by then, with black hair and dark eyes. In his role as vice president of a bank, he wore a business suit and tie. He looked sharp. He sat next to me at a table for four, and he was trying to remember what Captain Al Haynes had said over the loudspeakers as the plane approached Sioux City for the attempt at landing. He could not recall the word that had been meant to prepare him and his mother Susan for the worst. Dave had banished it from his memory, kept it out of his conscious mind all these years because the word had been paired with a rush of black fear, dread, and even sorrow. But I knew. I knew the word he was searching for.

I waited as he struggled against himself, his sense that he was better off not knowing, better off not remembering, and then I said the word.

“Brace.”

I watched Dave go into a flashback. I had no idea that this would happen. I had never seen such a thing before. His face changed into a mask of horror, of sorrow, and his eyes went into a strange neutral mode, as if he were looking far into the misty distance. A thousand-yard stare. It lasted only a second, a flicker, but he was rendered incoherent as he tried to speak, because, as he later said, the whole scene was there before him again, the sight of looking over the seats ahead of him, the wobbling heads of people who in moments would be torn apart between the shearing of metal and the disjointed slabs of concrete runway, the sharp and toxic smells of the crash, the sensations, the unfamiliar violent forces, wrenching, jerking, tearing at him. His clothes and his mother’s splashed with the blood of the people two rows ahead,
most likely Roland Stig Larson
, forty-nine, and Marilyn Fay Garcia, thirty-five. (Larson suffered a fractured skull so severe that most of his brain was missing when he was found. He was torn limb from limb.) And then the flashback was over, and Dave was back in the restaurant with me. More than twenty years after the crash, the memory lay dormant like a snake, raw and alive within his emotional system. He picked himself up and went on with his breathless narration.

“Then we’re going down. You could feel we’re good. And then we got wobbly.” As he tried to tell me about this moment, his eyes grew red and teary, and he became intense and struggled with his words. Perhaps I saw anger, perhaps a deep sadness. He could not tell it as if it had happened to him. He told it as if it had happened to someone else—that boy, that vanished boy, so long ago. This is how he said it: “And then there’s three big . . . We hit. And you could feel the dirt and the impact and glass and things fly by your face and head and everything. I mean, the dirt and smell of mangled metal and dirt and kind of that rustic—is very vivid. You know, I can still, if you’re near a manufacturing plant or something, you still have that feel and taste and smell. So I still have that.”

The “glass” Dave felt was sharp bits of concrete ground up from the runway by the metal frame of the airplane. The loamy smell of the earth came from the tail tearing up the tall weeds that grew between the abandoned concrete slabs and from plowing up the summer earth off the side of the concrete, flinging the soil into his face. And to this day the smell of summer earth hurtles him back into the lethal mayhem he survived. That’s what he meant when he said, “So I still have that.” He means that he possesses it within him. It will never go away.

As he continued his story, he became that nine-year-old boy again. Little things could always bring back the boy. In a sense, the boy died in the crash, and his spirit went on to inhabit Dave Randa the man. Most of the time these days, the man protects the boy. But sometimes the boy surfaces, interrupts the attention of the grown man, and rattles him to his core.

As we sat together in that restaurant, he had trouble speaking. He squared his shoulders and went bravely on, reverting to an almost primitive-sounding cadence of words as he groped for clarity and at last found the first person in that boy. “So we’re going down, and you hit. And then we kind of flipped, and you hit. And I think we broke off on the first or second hit. I didn’t know it until we stopped, because my head is down and my eyes are closed. And then some people were screaming. I stayed down and just said, ‘Stay low, stay low,’ you know what I mean? Not said, but I just, just said, ‘Okay, I’m still going. We’re still good. We’re bouncing.’ I don’t know that we’re on fire. I don’t know that we’re dislodged from the main cabin.” And as he said those words, he laughed in disbelief as if to refute it all.

“As we pancaked onto the runway,” Records recalled, “the number two engine came out of the mount. So with no weight on the tail, the left wing comes up, and we’re essentially pirouetting on our nose, touching down about three or four times, finally ending up scuffing the cockpit clear off the airplane.” He was awake and alert through most of the sequence. The windows burst, and “I could feel the debris coming into the cockpit.” He momentarily lost consciousness or suffered retrograde amnesia, “and the next thing I know, I’m lying in a bean
*
field with my left ear sideways by my right thigh.” Records’s seat had collapsed, crushing him and trapping him inside its metal frame. “I realized at that time that we had crashed and I was alive. I didn’t know whether my limbs were attached or what condition I was in. I could see a fireman in one of those big aluminum-colored suits coming across the field. So I mentioned to someone in the pile of debris who was moaning, ‘Just try to relax. I see help coming.’ ”
He may have been seeing Larry Niehus
, who crossed the field in a so-called proximity suit not long after the crash. But the fire fighter Records saw walked right past the cockpit.

Dvorak said that he didn’t remember anything about the crash itself but woke to the quiet that followed. “I’m in the wreckage and I could tell I’m basically upside down. Everything’s closed in around me. And I tried to kick some material that was above me out of the way, and that’s when I realized my right [ankle] was broken. I could hear Denny Fitch. I didn’t know who it was at first, but, uh, he was in shock. He was just saying, ‘Help me, save me, get it off me, help me, save me,’ just over and over again. And then I heard Bill Records. Al [Haynes] was just moaning. Bill and I had a little bit of a conversation. He asked me what I could see and I said I could see a little bit out. There’s something burning in the distance and there’s people over there that I could see and stuff like that. And then Al quit moaning, and I said, ‘I think we lost Al.’ ”

Records said, “Yeah, I think so.”

Records and Dvorak tried to talk to Fitch, but he just kept saying, “Help me, save me, get it off me, help me, save me . . .”

“And then Al came to and he was very lucid,” Dvorak said. “He was completely aware of everything.”

“Where are you?” Haynes asked Dvorak.

“I’m right on top of you,” Dvorak told him.

“You’re gonna have to lose some weight,” Haynes said. “You’re too heavy.”

Dvorak broke a piece of plastic off of Haynes’s seat and stuck his handkerchief out on the end of it, “but the wind was blowing so fast I think that it blew the handkerchief away.” Still no one came.

Haynes had been knocked unconscious on impact and was able to remember only bits and pieces of the rescue. He remembered wailing, “Oh, I killed people!” Haynes was bruised and cut up. One of his ears was nearly severed. He received ninety-two stitches in the hospital. But he had broken no bones and suffered no internal injuries. Records broke his pelvis, both hips, his sacrum, and numerous ribs. He suffered compression fractures of his spine and internal injuries, as well as a variety of bruises and contusions. Fitch suffered facial lacerations, a compound fracture of his right arm, and compression fractures in his spine, among other injuries. The tendon that controlled the use of his thumb was severed. Dvorak sustained a broken ankle and burns on his arm, probably from electrical wires when they were pulled apart and shorted out as the cockpit was torn away from the plane. As the pilots came to their senses, trapped in the wreckage, they could not understand why rescue workers were passing them by.