Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (31 page)

Once at the mess hall, Crain sought out a quiet corner and sat on the floor by herself. She had been driven through a field of dead bodies and was in shock. She had lost track of Rod Vetter, the only person with whom she had any acquaintance. Now she sat with her knees ricked up and her arms clasped around them, watching the people circle aimlessly. Garry Priest, the young executive she had admired in the boarding lounge in Denver, approached. She had followed him down the Jetway, remarking to herself how handsome he was. She was not quite ten years older than Priest, but he looked young to her. He had a black eye and a burst blood vessel that caused the white of his eye to turn a shocking crimson. He looked like a wounded warrior, stoic and brave. Now he squatted down beside her in his tight jeans and asked if she was all right.

“I guess,” she told him. “As well as can be expected.” Priest sat beside her on the floor. To Priest, Crain seemed a much older, if exotic, woman. She looked at him and said, “Actually, no. I’m not. I don’t think any of us are really all right, are we?” The two sat staring at each other, and in that moment Margo Crain and Garry Priest were fused as if they’d been welded in the fires of the crash.

“It’s amazing,” Crain later observed, “how in one instant you are complete strangers and the next instant you are bonded for life due to a life-changing split second. Your body chemistry and outlook on life are forever altered.”

A guardsman announced that phones had been set up. Crain and Priest took their places in line to make calls. When her turn came, Crain couldn’t remember any phone numbers, but in time she found her sister Babette’s number.

“Babette,” she said. “It’s me and I’m all right!”

“What do you mean? What happened? Where are you?”

“Have you been watching television?”

“No.”

“Our plane crashed. I’m in Iowa.”

“What!”

“Yeah, I’m sure it’s all over the news by now. Don’t worry though, I’m fine. I walked off without a scratch. So if you’re watching TV, there’s coverage, and I just wanted you to know I’m all right. I’m in one piece.”

Babette tuned in the news and gasped as she watched the plane break up and explode and burst into flames. Crain reassured her that she was not injured and asked her to call the family. Her mother-in-law was taking care of her children.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Babette asked again.

“Yes, I’m fine. There are a lot of people here helping us. I love you. I’ll see you soon. I’ll call you again when I have a chance.”

Crain wanted to be with Priest. But they were separated at St. Luke’s Hospital. Priest was taken to one doctor and Crain to another. Then Crain found herself in an ambulance with several other uninjured people. She did not know where Priest had gone. The ambulance wound its way up into the hills around Sioux City to a
stately edifice on a bluff
surrounded by pine trees and with a view of the city below, as if she flew in an airliner once again. While she watched out the window, she felt a deep sense of disorientation. The other passengers were chatting in that nervous, manic way, saying, “How do you feel?” and “Where were you?” or “What did you see?” One passenger, a woman Crain called Chatty Cathy, could not seem to stop herself from rambling on and on about the crash and the inconvenience and how she was supposed to be at home by now. “And I just wanted her to shut up.”

Once in the dormitory at Briar Cliff, where Aki Muto was making string figures with Eric and Alisa Hjermstad, Crain was calm but also in such a state of shock that everything seemed surreal. She said she had sudden powerful surges of emotion in which she felt invincible and capable of anything. The room was like a nun’s cell in a convent with drab white curtains, a boxy rectangular shelf on the wall for school books, a narrow desk at which to do homework. Two single beds and a napkin’s worth of floor space. A volunteer from the Red Cross had given Margo Crain and her roommate Ruth Pearlstein soap and shampoo. Crain also received a pink sweat suit two sizes too big and tennis shoes that were far too large for her feet. Her own clothes were covered in mud and blood and smelled like burning flesh and kerosene. She didn’t know what time it was. “My eyes burned like I was still inside the burning plane. Everything was blurry and it hurt to keep them open.” Yet she was afraid to take out her contact lenses, because then she would be unable to see at all. “I needed some form of vision to make sure that things were real and not just a dream.” The night was hot and humid, and the dorm was not air-conditioned.

At last she went to the communal shower and took off her reeking clothes. While she stood under the cascading water, the adrenaline high faded, and the feeling of invincibility drained from her, leaving behind the reality of what had happened. She gave in to uncontrollable sobbing, as the carnage came rushing back, along with the realization of how close she had come to dying on that ordinary Wednesday afternoon.

Richard Swetnam, thirty-seven, was on vacation on his farm across the line in Nebraska. He had recently visited his family in Kansas City and attended his twentieth high school reunion there. Now he was spending a pleasant, if sweltering, day spreading gravel on his driveway. Late in the afternoon, Swetnam dumped one last load and returned to the house. His kids were watching cartoons on the TV. He stood behind them and saw Charles Kuralt interrupt the program with a news bulletin: a DC-10 had crashed at the Sioux City airport. Swetnam’s heart kicked into a canter. He thought the reporters were mixing up Sioux City and Sioux Falls. Then the phone rang. It was a friend calling to ask if he knew anything about the crash. Swetnam looked out the window and saw his neighbor’s truck coming up the drive. Like Swetnam, Brad Risinger was an air traffic controller. Swetnam put the phone down and hurried outside. When he approached the truck, Risinger said, “They’re going to need your help.”

“Lemme just get out of these filthy clothes,” Swetnam said, and ran back into the house. He kissed his kids good-bye and within a few minutes was seated in Risinger’s truck bouncing along the new gravel and out onto the narrow country road. Risinger had been an air traffic controller in the Army before he went to work for the FAA. He’d had experience with fatal accidents. Now he tried to give Swetnam an idea of what to expect. One thing was certain: the controllers who witnessed the crash would have to be relieved as soon as possible. As they headed north on Main Street and then northeast along 170th Street to U.S. Highway 20, Risinger snapped on the radio, and they heard the first rumors that someone may have survived the crash. The two air traffic controllers exchanged a skeptical look.

They reached the control tower at about 5:00. “You climb the stairs, you know,” Swetnam said to me, “and then as you round the corner on the stairs, you know, y-you look to the north and—” Air traffic controllers do not—must not—stutter. They speak clearly and precisely, and they talk fast. But when Swetnam told his tale, he was reduced to a barely coherent stammer, as he was thrust back into that deeply shaken state. “And, uh—and the, you know, there was still smoke—and there was just—just . . .” Words failed him, and he fell silent. “You know. Debris everywhere. And I-I, the one thing I-I remember—uh—was, ah, just. . . . You know, there was a little bit of a breeze, and there was just—ye—it’s amazing from one airplane how, how—much, ah, ah—it seemed to be tape or something. It just, it just, they were, it, they kinda shined in the sun, it was blowing. And-and-and it just it, it was, it was weird, you know, a-a-and it just, it was everywhere. You know and there was paper blowing and stuff like that, but I-I-I remember the—the tape.”

Swetnam took over the approach control position that Kevin Bachman had been working. Risinger took over local control for aircraft that were landing. Everything had been deathly quiet for a long time, “and then it got busy,” Swetnam said. “Helicopters were coming in from everywhere.” Even though the airport was closed, the emergency flights were allowed to operate. In addition, Swetnam’s position, covering the thirty or forty miles out from the airport, was flooded with requests from the news people who had rented all manner of aircraft. “Everybody in the world was flying in,” Swetnam said. “And everybody wanted to take pictures of the crash site before they landed.” The airspace was closed up to five thousand feet, but Swetnam couldn’t stop planes from flying over the field above that altitude. To avoid the possibility of another crash, he put the aircraft in holding patterns from five thousand feet up, with one thousand feet between the aircraft.

As the news organizations finished their work of documenting the scene from above, they began requesting that Swetnam direct them to airfields where they could land, “which was another problem, because some of the bigger planes required runways that we didn’t have. The other two airports around Sioux City are just for small airplanes.” Sioux City had runways that were long enough, but the airfield was closed. Handling a dozen aircraft at any one time, Swetnam began sending the smallest airplanes to nearby Martin Field, an airport for light planes. He had to send the larger planes thirty miles northeast to Le Mars or thirty miles northwest to Vermillion, South Dakota, where the runways were longer. Once he sat down to work, Swetnam recalled, “you forgot that an airplane just crashed here.” He handled one aircraft after another for an hour and a half, and then he rolled his chair back and took a breath. He looked around, “and all of a sudden, reality hit again, and you realize, Aw, yeah, we just had a crash here.”

The press planes were gone long before dark. That evening and into the night, only three planes arrived. One was the 727 that brought in the Go Team from United. It would later carry Charles Martz, Martha Conant, Rod Vetter, John Hatch, and other survivors who wanted to fly to Chicago. The Lear jet carrying the Go Team from General Electric landed around 9:30. The Go Team from the NTSB would arrive in the early morning hours.

By 10:00 that night, Swetnam said, “Everybody else was gone. I was the only one there.” After the departure of the United 727 the scene fell silent. Swetnam sat staring out the window at the grim vigil under the nearly full moon, the arc lights, as the sheriff’s police and Air National Guard stood watch over the scene. Swetnam had been too busy to feel or think until then, but now there was no escaping it. “They set up all these big floodlights to keep the place illuminated. And you know, you just have time to—to really think about things and-and-and that—yeah,” he said with a sigh. “And then, and then, you know that they didn’t move any of the bodies. So you know that there’s a-ah lot of dead people out there. And ah, and so, yeah, that-that was probably the first time for me that it affected me. You could see, you know, sheets out there, and you knew, you knew that the sheets were covering people.” It was probably two in the morning by his estimate before the Gulfstream carrying NTSB Go Team landed on Runway 31. And that was the end of Swetnam’s turn as the lone controller for Sioux City that night. A controller named Rod Hensel arrived to relieve him.

John Bates said of Hensel, “He was a good friend to every single one of us there at Sioux City.” The fact that everyone loved him made it doubly painful when, five days before the crash, Hensel’s four-year-old daughter had died suddenly of a fast-moving infection. He had been on funeral leave. Sioux City, however, is a small town, and the tower ran out of controllers. Hensel was called to duty. Bates said, “What happened to him was a crime. You can imagine what sitting there with [all those] bodies on the field was like.”

Bates had gone off duty from the control tower some time after nine o’clock. The temperature had fallen to 73 degrees, but the air was still humid as he crossed the parking lot toward his car. When he arrived home, all of his neighbors were out in the street with six packs of beer, waiting to greet him. As Bates spoke of this twenty-three years after the crash, he choked up and his voice cracked as he said, “It was one of the kindest things I ever saw.” Bates, though, gently urged his neighbors to go home, then he went inside, “and told my wife everything.
Everything
.” They stayed up late together, talking, and then Kevin Bachman called, weeping and saying it was all his fault. Bates spent the better part of two hours on the phone, trying to convince him that he had performed bravely and professionally. Neither Bates nor Bachman slept much that night. “All I could see in my head was the friggin’ plane crashing over and over again,” Bates said.

While Bates was replaying the crash for his wife,
Mark Zielezinski, still in the control tower
, “had to continue moving the traffic.” He was not relieved because he was technically management and not a controller on duty during the crash. Late that night, with Swetnam on duty, Zielezinski was able to go home at last. “The adrenaline was flowing so high,” Zielezinski recalled, “that when I got home, it was probably eleven o’clock that evening and at that point I finally came to the realization of what had happened.” And then he let go, and as Bachman and Bates and so many others had done, he wept.

Leo Miller, the Sheriff of Woodbury County
, faced the daunting task of securing the scene for the night. The plane crashed in an inherently secure area, the surface of an airport. By late afternoon, the DCI—the Department of Criminal Investigation—had strung a bunting of yellow ribbon, emblazoned with the words
Crime Scene
, around everything, as if to cordon off heaven and hell alike. In addition, Miller decided to place a ring of protection around the crash site. He was concerned not only about people who might try to get into the crash site—reporters, looters, morbid curiosity seekers—but also about animals who might come to prey on the dead. “We also put a security net around the inside, around the wreckage itself,” he said. “It was quite difficult for two reasons. One, the amount of distance which it covered.” The debris was spread over more than thirty-five hundred feet of ground. Another difficulty was that bodies and parts of bodies, as well as pieces of the airplane, lay obscured in the corn. The sheriff ordered a combine brought in to cut a wide swath around the wrecked fuselage so that no person or animal could creep up on it without being seen.