Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (19 page)

Walker watched in amazement as a businessman in a suit stood up and looked around as if searching for something. “He walked over and grabbed his luggage,” and walked away.

Overcoming their shock, Walker and the other pilots left the truck and began trying to render first aid. Some of the people who had been ejected from the plane were, according to Walker, “relatively unscathed.” But a woman in her fifties “sticks in my mind forever,” he said with a voice full of sadness and regret. “I hate it. Her skin was just shredded. She obviously had broken bones, but she was walking in shock. I couldn’t figure out where to grab her to help her without hurting her more. It was terrible. It was hard to tell what was skin and what was from her nylons.”

While Walker and others were ushering as many wounded as possible to triage, one of Bendixen’s fellow pilots approached him and said, “Doc, we’ve got three people trapped in the wreckage over here. Would you come over and supervise getting them out?” He could see a tangled pile of wire and metal on the side of Runway 17-35, but if he had noticed it before, Bendixen had dismissed it as inconsequential. It didn’t look large enough to contain a person, not a live one, and certainly not three people. In fact, it contained four.
As Bendixen approached, Chaplain Clapper
knelt beside the wreckage with his hand thrust inside it, touching the top of Records’s head and saying, “Keep breathing in God’s spirit. Keep breathing in and out. That’s your job. Everybody’s working as hard as they can to get you out of there.”

“Great, thanks,” Records said, sounding as chipper as can be. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Bendixen found it hard to believe that anyone was alive inside the tangled mess. “Here was this pile of aluminum and wires, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. And I sort of peered into there, and they were actually conscious, talking to us.” Now the question was how to get Haynes, Records, Dvorak, and Fitch out of that mess of agonized metal without injuring them any further.

Upton Rehnberg worked for Sundstrand
, which had designed the power system that was producing the electricity flowing through the hundred miles of wire all around him as he sat across from Jan Brown’s jump seat. In addition, the plane carried the Sundstrand model AV557B cockpit voice recorder and the Sundstrand model 573 flight data recorder. The investment analyst in the aisle seat next to Rehnberg, Helen Young Hayes, wore a miniskirt and nylon pantyhose. Rehnberg wore a Dacron polyester short-sleeved shirt. Across the aisle from Hayes, John Transue felt lucky because the seat on his right was empty, giving him a bit more elbow room. He had grown up in Milwaukee where his parents lived. From his home in Denver, Transue had driven his wife Jacqueline to Wisconsin for a vacation, along with their two daughters, Michelle and Lindsey, who were three and eight at the time. He left the car there so that Jacqueline could drive the kids around, and he flew back to Denver for his work. Now he was returning to Milwaukee by way of Chicago to pick them up and drive them home.

When Jan Brown appeared in the galley doorway with her pink emergency manual and her microphone in hand, Rehnberg leaned over to Hayes and said, “This is a very bad sign.” Then Brown asked the three to be her “door helpers” in case she couldn’t open the door “for some reason.” Transue tried to brace, clutching his ankles and putting his head in his lap. It was awkward at best. Rehnberg looked up and saw Brown a few feet away. She sat in her jump seat facing him, snug in her harness, having finished her briefing. Her mobile face went through contortions as if she might burst into tears at any moment, another bad sign, Rehnberg thought.

He later said, “We hit the ground really, really hard.” As we talked at his kitchen table in Rockford, Illinois, Rehnberg sighed and said, “Oh, dear,” and hung his head. Rehnberg has a powerful build, yet he was unable to keep hold of his ankles during the crash. The forces were so great that he had no control over his limbs, which were thrown straight up into the air. As that happened, he saw the fireball come through the door and closed his eyes in time for the mist of flaming fuel to wash over him. The fire passed him and flashed over Hayes, melting her pantyhose into the flesh of her legs before moving across the aisle to Transue.

Transue recalled that “the noise was just a calliope of screaming metal.” He was trying to hold his ankles when “the belly hit the ground, and then it started to roll, and something came flying through the air and hit me in the top of the head. At that point, everything started to be surreal, like it was moving in slow motion. I let go of my ankles, and as the plane started to roll down the runway, the fire came in where the doors crushed. There were big gaps on both sides of the door, and a wall of flame came in right across the galley in front of me.” The fire lit up the dark cabin, “and I could see that my hands and my feet were above my head in the air. I was pin-wheeling.”

Transue couldn’t remember where he had learned not to wear synthetic clothing on an airplane, not to expose any more skin than necessary. He wore woolen dress pants, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, wool over-the-calf socks, and leather Florsheim shoes. The fireball burned one of his socks down to the skin, but the natural fibers ultimately protected him from sustaining the second-degree burns that Rehnberg and Hayes suffered. In those long seconds of this catastrophic sequence, Transue had a simple thought, as he later reported: “I don’t like this part.”

Brad Griffin, who had been meditating in seat 2-E, was gone by then, flying into the cornfield. The crushing and burning of the first class cabin killed most of the people in A-Zone, but the crushing also dissipated a tremendous amount of energy and acted as a shock absorber, protecting Jan Brown, Upton Rehnberg, Helen Hayes, and John Transue.

The
wall of flame had passed through the coach cabin
, which fell into darkness once more. The metallic screeching had stopped, and now Transue began to hear a noise that he described as “dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut.” Very fast. “Dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut.” He wondered what it could be. Whatever hit Transue in the head had knocked him senseless, and he watched dumbly as the people in his row dropped to the ceiling below and fled. When all the motion had stopped, Rehnberg found himself hanging from his seat belt, hair and beard singed, arms and face and chest burned, his Dacron shirt melted. He had no recollection of how he escaped from his seat belt, but he moved toward the light that fell from one side. He entered a familiar passageway. He saw that first class was gone. He was looking into the corn through a jagged hole beneath the bluest sky he had ever seen. He paused and gazed around in amazement. The world looked like an overexposed photograph, though when he turned around, he saw the wintry scene of ash and smoke and the swirling snowstorm of paper and money.

Still inside, Transue had begun to regain some of his senses. It was dark, save for a faint glow of sunlight. He was alone, or so he thought. The galley was still in front of him. Smoke coiled in the air. “I just kind of hung there suspended for a while,” he said. “I didn’t yet have full use of my brain.” Finally Transue released his seat belt and fell onto his head and hands and knees. “I wasn’t awake enough to catch myself.” But he was down. The smoke was up. And with each breath, he regained some of his reason.

He recalled making a promise to himself before the crash: he would clear his row of people before leaving. Now he checked once again. His row was empty. He was about to bolt for the rays of light when through the smoke he made out the dim figure of a woman hanging upside down near the 2-Right exit. “She wasn’t really conscious or unconscious. She was in that in-between state where I was for a while.” Transue watched her slap ineffectually at her chest, trying to release the clasp on her harness. He could see now that she was a flight attendant, and it was
clear that she would not be able to escape
without help. “She just hung there when it didn’t release.” It was dark enough that Transue had to bring his face close to her chest to see the mechanism. He turned the rotating clasp, and Jan Brown fell right on top of him. All the hair on one side of her head was singed away, but that hair had saved the skin of her face. The right side of her white cotton blouse had been singed to the color of toast.

At that point, she seemed to come to life. She stood up and her training took over. She shouted, “Get out! Get out!”

Transue said, “I just thought, Thank God I’m released.” To his left he saw fire. He crawled through the wreckage where first class had been. As he went through the breach in the fuselage, he faced a tangle of cornstalks and realized with a start what that rapid “dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut” had been. As it skidded along in the mud, the torn fuselage had been cutting corn stalks.

Still in something of a daze, Jan Brown began yelling for people to get out, as a steady stream of passengers made their way across the ceiling, struggling over the spilled contents of the overhead bins. Thus with the evacuation in progress, Brown stood at the opening, where she and Upton Rehnberg held a bundle of wires out of the way, and she ushered people out. Many years later, sitting in her kitchen eating her chocolate chip cookies, I told Brown that a number of people had commented that her demeanor was crisp, courteous, and professional, as if the plane had been parked at the gate, and she was saying, “Thank you for flying United. Come see us again soon.”

And with a puzzled expression, Brown exclaimed, “I had the same feeling!”

After a time, the procession of people slowed and stopped. Brown was actually standing just inside the wrecked cabin. She happened to look up. “I’m looking up at the floor, which is now the ceiling, and I mean—you know how you see pictures of tornadoes that are moving across [the land]? Well, this was like that.” She watched a rolling vortex of greasy black and gray smoke undulate toward her. “I have never ever seen anything so deadly looking.”
From the time of the crash
until the last survivor escaped, only minutes had elapsed. The fire fighters in the rear of the plane estimated that the fuselage burned through and melted down in about ninety seconds.

The fire was everywhere now. It was so intense that the oxygen bottles and the fire extinguishers had begun to explode, sharp concussions and blossoms of white smoke. Brown’s training asserted itself once more. The instructors had always told her, “Where the water’s too deep, the fire’s too hot, or the smoke is too thick, get out, get out!” And Brown knew the first rule of rescue operations as well: don’t create more victims. “So I had to leave.” As she began moving away, she saw Sylvia Tsao coming toward her. “Before she said anything, I just blocked her.”

“I have to go back,” Sylvia said. “My son’s in there.”

“There are men that’ll get him,” Brown said without much conviction.

“You told me to put him on the floor and it would be all right,” Sylvia cried bitterly. “And now he’s gone!”

“It was the best thing to do,” Brown told her. “It was all we had.” But as Brown looked at the bereaved young mother, she thought, as she later said, “I’m going to live with that for the rest of my life.”

Lieutenant Colonel Harrington was trained for disaster preparedness in nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare. He had been in his office when he heard the All Call put out by the base commander, Dennis Swanstrom. As Harrington rushed toward the scene, he began passing the destruction on Runway 17-35. “There’d be like three people in a seat, one would be dead and two alive.” He saw Swanstrom driving out and intercepted him. Swanstrom told Harrington to round up as many survivors as he could and bring them to the mess hall so that they could get water and make phone calls. Harrington returned to his office and began the monumental task of coordinating everything that would have to be done, from requisitioning buses for the transport of survivors to securing a supply of paper cups for water. Within the first hour, the walking wounded and the uninjured survivors congregated in the mess hall. Workers from restaurants in town began arriving with truckloads of food and drink. No one had to ask for it. The local television news anchor asked for donations of blood, and the people of Siouxland formed a line out the door and around the block at the blood bank. At the next commercial break, the same anchor had to ask people to stop donating blood.

The
most urgent job Harrington had before him
was to begin coordinating with Gene Herbek. As Harrington watched the people swarming the mess hall, he picked up the phone and called the Iowa State medical examiner’s office in Des Moines. He was told that a full-body X-ray machine would be needed. One of the reasons why Swanstrom valued Harrington so highly was that he knew how to get things done.
Harrington now recalled that a C-130
heavy transport plane, rigged as an air ambulance, happened to be parked on his ramp that day. It had stopped in Sioux City for the night. Its crew had been staying in a downtown motel, watching TV, as 1819 Uniform approached. Seeing the emergency developing on the news, they had rushed to the airport to re-rig the plane for litters in case it was needed to transport patients. Harrington asked the crew if they would fly down to Offutt Air Force Base south of Omaha to pick up a full-body X-ray machine for the morgue. Harrington also called someone who knew a lawyer who knew someone in the Nebraska coroner’s office, who knew a dentist who had a portable dental X-ray machine.
Moments later the phone rang
in the Omaha office of Robert Sorenson, a legendary dentist who was self-taught in the discipline of forensics and was also a chain-smoking deputy sheriff. A very short man, he made an impression wherever he went, which was often to the scene of a crime in the company of a whole lot of police.

Then Harrington began calling various organizations to acquire enough gurneys for a mass casualty. “You never want to set a body on the floor,” he explained later. “Because the juices run into the floor, and the only way you can get that smell out is to tear the floor out. So we wanted to make sure all the bodies were set on gurneys and not on the concrete floor.” He had to canvass mortuaries from the entire region to secure enough gurneys for the job. Despite his effort, the morgue came up short.