Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (34 page)

Out on the field at about 10:30 on Thursday morning, the DCI crime scene technicians finished the linear reference system, and Herbek directed his three teams to begin removing the dead. Each team was given a handful of tags to use. When they ran out, they had to come to Herbek for more. “We took pictures of the individuals as they lay,” Herbek explained, “and also had scribes writing all the descriptive things that we thought were important besides taking the measurements from our coordinates.” Staff from the Air National Guard, the DCI, and the medical examiner’s office, along with many others, took hundreds of photographs of the scene and of the dead.
Once a body was ready to be moved
, someone would drive a numbered stake into the ground or spray-paint the tag number on the concrete to note its place. The operation ultimately required three cases of spray paint.

After the body had been recorded in that fashion, the Air National Guard took over to remove it. Each body was placed in a body bag. The number from the tag was spray-painted onto the bag. The
first person, given the number
1
, was twelve-year-old James Matthew Bohn, born May 7, 1977. He would have been a bit older than Dave Randa and Yisroel Brownstein. He had been seated in 35-J beside Lena Ann Blaha, who alerted Jan Brown to the damage on the tail.

The worst part, Jim Walker said, was removing bodies from the fuselage. In a report on the operation, Robert Monserrate and Dennis Chapman of the DCI wrote, “
Two cranes were connected to the remaining landing gear
to lift the plane while railroad ties were stacked to support the wings. The 47 bodies located in the fuselage were tagged, photographed in position and then removed. Some of the victims were still strapped into their seats. Because of tight quarters and a partially collapsed cabin, it was necessary to cut out and remove those seats from the plane before the victims could be removed from their seats. This process took five hours.”

Drew Baier, a young Sergeant who worked for Gary Brown at the WCDES, was called to the field along with Dave Kaplan. Baier conceived the plan for removing the bodies that lay trapped in the aircraft. “Early morning, the day after the crash,” recalled Kaplan, “we had a truckload of plywood sheets delivered that we could lay down on the sharp exposed aluminum of what was the inside top of the aircraft but was now what we were crawling on. Most of the bodies were still strapped in their seats with the heads touching the now crushed ceiling. Drew and I started early, as it was July and we knew it was going to get very warm. In full bunker gear and self-contained breathing apparatus, to protect ourselves both from sharp objects and smells, we crawled into the wreckage and using the Amkus rescue cutters (jaws of life) we would cut a row of seats out with the bodies still strapped in. Then we would wrestle the entire thing out where the remains, still in their seats, were photographed, and anything to further identify the remains was also photographed.” Gene Herbek’s mortuary teams then tagged the bodies, put them in body bags, and removed them to the refrigerated trucks.

Walker gave me his impression of the burned-out fuselage. “It had just been charred. There were some horrific scenes in there, people that were sticking maybe waist high above the burned debris and looked like something out of the Pacific World War II theater. Just burned, charred.” He told of a young woman who was working on the team. Walker said she “was very, very businesslike in processing the people. I remember being in awe that she could do this, because I just couldn’t handle it.” That Thursday, Walker found himself working side by side with her. “And somehow in the midst of all that debris, they found an infant who was untouched. Of course, dead. And that same female coroner who was so stone cold picked up that baby and cradled it, and she just lost it. I mean, she was crying, sobbing, right out at the wreck.”

As with pallbearers in a funeral, it took six Air National Guard men and women to move one intact adult human body, and the young men and women who volunteered to deal with that carnage carried people and body parts one after another to the middle of the main north-south runway and laid them out in neat rows to be picked up and transported in trucks.

The trucks took the dead across the field to the refrigerated semitrailers that had been parked with their cargo doors facing the open door of Hangar 252. The bodies were placed in the first truck, to await processing. By noon on Thursday, the teams had removed fifty-three bodies from the crash site. The forensic dental team headed by Edwin Steven Smith had arrived. Randall said, “He had all the equipment, the computers, he was all ready to go. So it was almost a turn-key operation.” In 1989, computers were a fairly new addition to the practice of forensic dentistry. As one forensic dentist said of Steven Smith’s operation, “It was revolutionary.”

*
Many questioned why the families were not brought in to identify the dead in cases where the victims were not disfigured, but for reasons that were never made completely clear, only Jasumati J. Patel was identified visually.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

O
n February 24, 1989, United Airlines had enjoyed
more than ten years without an accident. That day, Flight 811, a Boeing 747 jumbo jet bound from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Auckland, New Zealand, with 355 people on board, ended the streak of good luck. As the ship climbed out of twenty-two thousand feet, a forward cargo door on the starboard side of the plane blew off, ripping upward as it departed and tearing a hole the size of a garage door in the passenger compartment. The explosive decompression sucked nine passengers out. Within half an hour the Coast Guard cutter
Cape Corwin
was under way to the area to look for the passengers and debris, and more than a thousand people participated in the search during the next two days. The Coast Guard found two intact seats and assorted debris floating in the water, but those nine people were never found.

The last time United Airlines had lost a plane before that accident was on December 28, 1978.
United Flight 173
, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 scheduled to fly from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to Portland, Oregon, crashed into a wooded suburb six miles from the airport. The plane had a malfunction of the landing gear on approach. The captain began circling the area to make sure that the gear were down. Preoccupied with that, Captain Malburn “Buddy” A. McBroom, fifty-two, ignored his crew’s warnings that fuel was running low. When the engines began quitting, McBroom understood his mistake. The plane came down at the intersection of Northeast 157th Avenue and East Burnside Street, killing 10 people and seriously injuring 23 of the 189 passengers.

Those at United Airlines and the NTSB believed that the military backgrounds of most airline pilots at the time contributed to the crash. The captain of the ship was supreme, and the other members of the crew were expected to defer to him and keep their mouths shut. It was a maritime and military tradition going back hundreds if not thousands of years. This crash had a direct bearing on the fate of United Flight 232, because after the crash of United Flight 173, the NTSB recommended retraining flight crews in what came to be known as cockpit (or crew) resource management (CRM). United Airlines pioneered the training, in which captains were taught to listen to their crews, and the members of their crews were taught to be assertive if they thought that a hazardous condition was developing. United earned a reputation as one of the safest airlines and the company even trained the crews of other airlines. The CRM training was credited with helping the crew of Flight 811 out of Honolulu to return safely and with allowing the crew of Flight 232 to reach Sioux City, saving many lives. United Airlines helped to change the culture of the cockpit.

United also had another lasting influence on the industry. Before 1989, airlines were extremely averse to sharing information. When a plane crashed, airline employees were sent out to
obscure the logos on the wrecked aircraft
. (
Some airlines still do this
.) The airlines never talked to the NTSB, which was viewed as the enemy. And they certainly didn’t like to talk to the press.

When Flight 232 crashed, Rob Doughty, thirty-six, who was manager of external communications at United, was in London, helping to open up that territory to the company’s scheduled flights. British Airways gave him a courtesy flight home on the Concorde, the supersonic jetliner, and he was in Sioux City the next day. Doughty joined the United Go Team, and as he put it, he and James M. Guyette, a vice president at United, were “joined at the hip” for the next ten days. Guyette was the most senior person on the United Go Team. Some time before Flight 232, he “became concerned,” Doughty told me, “because we hadn’t had an accident in ten years, and the world had changed. Most notably, CNN would carry live footage of an accident almost as soon as it happened.” The days of painting out the logos and clamming up were over. “It was very different from the last time we’d had an accident,” said Doughty. Guyette realized that the Crisis Communications Plan for United Airlines was seriously out of date. He charged Doughty with revamping the company’s plan for how to respond when a plane crashed.

When Doughty was devising the plan, he sought help from the Air Force, which had a wealth of experience in dealing with crashes, and he consulted the chemical industry, which routinely dealt with fatal accidents. “But none of the other airlines would talk to me about it,” he said. In addition, at that time, executives from the airlines had no understanding of the NTSB and its work. At Guyette’s urging, Doughty broke ranks with the airline industry and called the public information officer at the NTSB. As a result of that conversation, Doughty wrote a white paper on how an airline ought to behave after a crash.

“It was very important,” Doughty said, “because it allowed us to anticipate things in a much more strategic fashion.” For example, it was widely known in the news business that the NTSB held a press conference every evening at six o’clock during an active investigation. In February of 1989 in Hawaii, when the new United Airlines Crisis Communications Plan was implemented for the first time, Doughty became the first public relations executive from an airline to attend one of those briefings.

“Previous to the Hawaii accident,” said Doughty, “the relationship between the NTSB and the airlines and the unions was very adversarial. Everybody was blaming everybody else and pointing the finger and so forth.” When responding to a crash, the NTSB, the pilots’ union, and the airline traditionally set up their headquarters as far away from one another as possible. But 1989 ushered in a new era. “Our communication strategy was to prove that, despite having an accident, we were still a safe airline.” The airline needed to be open about what was being learned that could prevent future accidents. In Hawaii, United set up its operations in the same hotel as the NTSB. “And we talked to them,” Doughty said, “which had never happened before,”

Until the 1980s, United had no concrete idea of what it wished to get across in its public communications. During its period of developing a new plan leading up to 1989, “I decided,” said Doughty, “why not do it the way you’d write a marketing plan or a communications plan, which starts with an objective. What is it you want to accomplish at the end of the day? And so I decided that our objective was to show that we are a safe airline and to reassure our passengers that we are safe to fly on.”

It worked. After the two accidents in 1989, United conducted market research and found that the public perception of the accidents was overwhelmingly the same: “It’s surprising it was United, they’re such a safe airline,” as Doughty put it. In fact, after the crash of United Flight 232, for the first time in history, bookings did not decline. While the ultimate taboo in the airline business had been any discussion of safety, United not only talked about it but also began promoting it. When Barbara Walters wanted to film a segment for the show
20/20
about the training of airline pilots, no one would talk to her. United agreed to cooperate, and the show became, in Doughty’s words, “a twenty-minute commercial for United Airlines.” In the end, United Airlines, especially in its response to the crash of 1819 Uniform, changed not only the way airlines dealt with accidents, but also the way in which they marketed their services. The most important change of all, though, was the training that Haynes and his crew had received in cockpit resource management. Without their concerted cooperation during the crisis, there might have been no survivors.

When Yisroel Brownstein was in the third grade, he was not doing so well in school. He now believes that he had a form of dyslexia. Whatever the cause of his poor grades, his father told him that if he improved his scores, he could fly to Philadelphia to visit his best friend, who had moved there. Yisroel worked hard, and his father redeemed some frequent-flyer miles and gave his nine-year-old son a ticket as promised. Yisroel’s parents saw him off with hugs and kisses in the boarding lounge in Denver, where they lived at the time. His father, an ultra-orthodox rabbi, gave him a prayer to say on the plane. It was a special prayer for travelers, meant to protect the boy. Yisroel entered the plane at exit 2-Left, stepping past Upton Rehnberg’s feet. He crossed over to the starboard aisle and paralleled Martha Conant’s path all the way back to the last row, where he took the aisle seat. Richard Howard Sudlow sat at the window. Sudlow was a marketing executive for a company in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and was on his way home from a business trip.

Yisroel had originally been assigned a seat in the front row of the coach cabin, but at the last minute, the Brownstein family was told that the boy had to sit in the last row. His father threw a fit at the gate, then his parents “got into a huge fight over whether or not they should change the seat,” Yisroel said. Their fighting made the already nervous child even more anxious. When he reached his seat at last, he was eager to say his traveling prayer so that he could be protected. He had rehearsed it with his father. He knew that he was supposed to wait until the plane had climbed above the clouds before saying it. Yisroel had been on an airplane once before, but he had been an infant at the time and had no recollection of it. He turned to Sudlow, whom he described as “a really sweet businessman,” and explained his predicament: he had a prayer to say and had no idea how to tell if the plane was above the clouds. Sudlow expressed a great interest in the prayer and even put his work down and took the time to learn the words of response from the nine-year-old boy in the yarmulke. After the plane took off and flew through a layer of clouds, the businessman and the child bowed their heads and recited the prayer together. Then they ate their lunch.