Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (36 page)

Henry followed the gurney with his clipboard in hand and watched in growing horror, as an attendant wheeled Jane into the forensic dental area. With quick strokes of a scalpel, a dentist cut back Jane’s lips and sliced through her gums to reveal the bones of her face. He had to cut down to the bone, because the Stryker saw he was about to use could not cut flesh. “It looks like it’s rotating,” said Randall, “but it’s not. It’s just vibrating back and forth. It’s the same one that people use to take casts off of you. You can actually put it onto skin, and it won’t cut the skin.”

While a cameraman from the DCI videotaped the procedure, the dentist used the screaming Stryker saw to cut out Jane’s upper and lower jaws and remove them as if they were a set of dentures. The procedure is called a Le Fort osteotomy. An assistant then brushed Jane’s bloody teeth with a toothbrush, and the dentist put her jaws into a ziplock bag with a numbered tag and put the bag on a table made of plywood and sawhorses. He placed the bag in a row with many other similar bags containing the jaws of other people, each bag clipped to a printed sheet headed “Record of Dental Examination at Autopsy.”

E. Steven Smith, the forensic dentist from Northwestern University, had suggested that identifying everyone by dental X-rays would be the fastest and most foolproof approach. Herbek, Bennett, and Randall agreed. Once the dentists had cut out someone’s jaws, technicians would make an X-ray. As the families sent the ante-mortem dental X-rays to Sioux City, they would be logged into the computer, and records would be made. The real test, however, came when a dentist laid one piece of film over the other and looked at them against a light. Fillings, crowns, and other restorations would match perfectly. Anyone who had gone to the dentist regularly was immediately identifiable. And most people who can afford to fly can afford to see a dentist.

By the middle of that first afternoon, in the chaos of the morgue, someone had realized how young and inexperienced Jason Henry was—a mere boy thrust into this gruesome duty. He’d served as a tracker for just one body, but he was released. He didn’t remember much about the bus ride back to the municipal swimming pool. He was in shock and recalled sitting in the bath house with his friend, Brian Massey, “crying a bit and just staring ahead.” He began having nightmares about being in plane crashes after that. He had trouble sleeping. He travels for his work with Dow Corning now, “and there isn’t a time that goes by when I get on a plane that I don’t think about that.” He has seen with his own eyes the consequences of carelessness in the serious matter of powered flight. Yet he said, “If the same situation came up and I had to do it over again, I would. I don’t regret doing it at all.”
*

*
Numerous other lifeguards worked in the morgue as well.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

M
acIntosh and Benzon and Wizniak
, along with William Thompson of GE, quickly developed an idea of what might have happened to 1819 Uniform. They were not sure yet and would not publicize the idea, but they would talk about it among themselves. More than anything, this idea seemed the only possible explanation for the events that they knew had occurred: a big bang as fan disk 00385 departed, followed by a complete loss of hydraulics less than two minutes later. By the Friday after the crash, if not sooner, the investigators were contemplating this scenario: United Flight 232 had been cruising blandly along on autopilot at thirty-seven thousand feet when something made that disk burst. The seven-foot number one fan broke into two big pieces, as Wizniak had seen from the witness marks on the containment ring. In addition to the two big pieces, that explosion also unleashed a sleeting storm of other metal parts. Given that the disk had burst above and behind the heads of Martha Conant, Yisroel Brownstein, Dave Randa, and John Hatch, they and the other passengers seated in the tail were lucky they weren’t hit by flying debris—or worse.
In November of 1973
, the number three engine on the right wing of another DC-10 had exploded at cruise altitude. A fragment hit a window and broke it. The passenger seated next to that window was sucked out as the aircraft depressurized. He was never seen again.

When the DC-10 was being designed
, McDonnell Douglas assured the FAA that the possibility of an engine exploding and disabling the flight controls was, in the words of FAA Advisory Circular 25.1309-1, “extremely improbable.” As Gilbert Thompson of the FAA explained it, that means “
a failure condition
that is not expected to occur over the entire life of an airplane type, total number of airplanes.” The FAA and the industry even put a number on it:
one in a billion
. And indeed, modern jet airliners are reliable, yet it
was already known at that time
that some jet engines would inevitably explode.

In the hours and days after the crash, as Wizniak studied the number two engine lying sadly on the ground with its front fan missing, he was aware that smaller disks made of titanium, compressor disks, had failed catastrophically in the past. General Electric must therefore have known that it was likely that the big disk on the front of the engine might fail one day. In any event, the federal regulation known as 14 CFR 25.901 states, “No single failure [of a power plant] or malfunction or probable combination of failures will jeopardize the safe operation of the airplane.” The CF6 engine known by serial number 451-243 missed adhering to that rule by a fairly wide margin. On the other hand, it was not the engine that ultimately led to the crash. The DC-10 itself, not its power plants, had to have a deeper flaw to bring down the whole craft. In spelling out “special conditions” for granting McDonnell Douglas certification for the DC-10, the FAA wrote, “
Probable malfunctions must have only
minor effects on control system operation and must be capable of being readily counteracted by the pilot.”

Captain D. B. Robinson of the Air Line Pilots Association
would later write to the NTSB, “This accident was never supposed to have happened.” The accident, he said, “contradicts the design philosophy under which the DC-10, B-747, and L-1011 were predicated and certificated by the FAA.”
In addition, the FAA had recommended shielding hydraulic lines
specifically because rotating parts were known to burst. MacIntosh, Benzon, Wizniak, and others now suspected that some of the parts that were liberated when the disk burst had gone through the tail and had cut the hydraulic lines. It would take a team effort and more than a year to prove that idea.

Now some two hundred people from various agencies
were supporting that team effort, scattering all over Siouxland to accomplish the tasks that would ultimately contribute to the final report about the accident. Some were at the hospital interviewing passengers and members of the crew. Others had gone to the dormitory at Briar Cliff College to interview survivors there. Yet others had gone to Jan Brown’s hotel room to interview her. Some of the investigators had begun to review the tape recordings of transmissions to and from the control tower, while others searched through the maintenance records kept by United Airlines. In addition to the NTSB, the FAA had numerous people working the crash, along with many other organizations already mentioned.

Some of them were walking up and down the airfield along the path of destruction and were beginning to find pieces of hydraulic tubing that might provide evidence concerning the hunch that Wizniak and others had. The stainless-steel lines appeared to have been sliced, but the investigators needed harder evidence. Since they were investigating a Crowd Killer, it wasn’t good enough to stand out in a cornfield eye-balling the part and venture a guess.

Benzon told me that the NTSB wasn’t in the business of proving what had happened. “Probable cause is our goal,” he said. And yet the Board’s meticulous work would look like proof to most people. MacIntosh, in his role as investigator in charge, felt personally responsible for amassing mountains of evidence. John C. Clark, an investigator who would play a vital role on the team, said, “I was impressed with MacIntosh. He knew how to run a good investigation and knew a lot about all of the disciplines. He would keep the various groups integrated and keep the parties in line.”

Looking over the wreckage on Thursday and Friday, then, MacIntosh hit upon one step he could take in the process of clearly demonstrating the cause of this crash. He decided that he and his team would find all the parts they needed and then reassemble the tail. “There was a great reluctance,” he said. “Not too many people were really interested in putting the tail section up.” They thought they could determine all the trajectories using mathematics. But, said MacIntosh, “I was Mr. Nasty and said, Hey, we’ve got enough stuff here that we ought to be able to reconstruct that.” United supported him, since that company viewed itself as the victim. “GE and Douglas were a little more reluctant to do that,” he said, since it was their engine and airplane that had failed. United enlisted its Heavy Maintenance Group from San Francisco. MacIntosh arranged with Lawrence Harrington to acquire cranes to lift the tail. The team removed all the pieces of the tail from the airfield to a hangar and began putting the puzzle together to see what it showed.

MacIntosh, Benzon, Wizniak, Gregory Phillips, the chairman of the Systems Group, and others were hoping that this would answer the question of how the plane had lost all of its hydraulic fluid. However, the biggest concern gnawing at John Moehring of GE, as well as the NTSB investigators, was how and why that fan disk came apart in the first place. A piece of the plane could have broken off to be sucked into the engine. A mechanic could have left a tool inside the engine. Or a quirk of the titanium metal itself may have betrayed them all. To know the answer, they had to find the disk, which lay in pieces somewhere in the sea of corn and soybeans that is the state of Iowa. There had to be some way to reduce that area to a reasonable size for a concerted search to be conducted.

While Jan Murray, the first class flight attendant, hung upside down in the burning wreckage, trying to pry the harness latch from underneath her ribs, her father Don was fishing with a friend on a lake in South Carolina. As his friend watched in alarm, Don Murray turned white and said, “We’ve got to go home. Something’s wrong with Jan.” He put away his fishing gear and hurried to shore. When he arrived home, he saw a crowd of people at his house. His heart sank. He rushed inside.

“I just heard from Jan,” said his wife Jane. “Everything’s okay. There’s been a plane crash, and she was on it.” They knew their daughter was alive, but they did not yet know her condition.

Jan Murray, too, had had a premonition. The night before the crash, she had been flying to Philadelphia and was seized by an overwhelming sense of loss and separation from her family. She couldn’t explain it. She loved her job and her traveling way of life, but that night she felt so desperately homesick that she called her aunt and uncle when she reached her hotel room. During the next day’s flight, she was behind the bulkhead working with the equipment to start the in-flight movie, when she broke down weeping for no apparent reason. “It was just this lonely separation, and it was from my mother, and it was a feeling that I’m not going to see her again. I just broke down in tears. I gathered myself together before I came from behind the partition, but that was so unlike me.”

Now in the hospital, she understood her premonition. She also learned that she had broken her arm and several ribs. Wearing a cast, she stayed in a hotel that night with Donna McGrady as her roommate. She wandered aimlessly through the hotel, unable to sleep. She stumbled into the conference room where Jan Brown had seen the chart with “the other Jan Brown’s” name on it. “Even though I was in shock and nothing was really going in or out,” said Murray, “I remember that being very upsetting.”

In fact, she was in a state of shock for a long time after returning home. “I talked about it constantly, relived it constantly. You think about it constantly and you talk-talk-talk, and you probably wear your friends and family out about it. It’s all you—it-it-it—it took over my thoughts. I just remember reliving, I guess, the acute part of the crash a lot, reliving the impact.” She tried to return to her life, but “everything was exaggerated. It’s like, things that we go through life, day in and day out, and sort of take for granted were just all huge.” Her voice broke as she said, “It was like, just, you know, a tree was
beautiful
.” And then she laughed and cried at the same time, overwhelmed by the vision she had, as if a gauze curtain had always hung between her and the world, and the crash had ripped it away. “It was like everything was so, so
saturated
, and . . .” And she trailed off to nothing. She found herself going through the motions, almost robotically, “for a good year,” she said. “I wanted my life back as it was—I thought. I wanted to be innocent Jan Murray again, and I wanted to go back, because I loved my job—I loved it! And I loved the lifestyle. And I wanted it back. Like it was.”

She went to therapy, and after about eighteen months, she returned to work. One of her best friends joined her on her first flight. “I was apprehensive, but I was determined.” Yet she quickly discovered that any mechanical trouble with an airplane, any trivial hitch in her routine, would throw her into a panic. The last straw came in Newark, New Jersey, when she was about to fly on a Boeing 727. Although it was a terrific plane with flight controls that could revert to manual operation if the hydraulic systems failed, it had an engine through the tail, and for Murray that was reminiscent of the DC-10. As the catering crew brought the meals on board, one of them mentioned that there appeared to be fan blades missing from the number two engine, the one that was mounted through the tail. The flight was delayed while mechanics examined the power plant. United switched planes, “but that was the end of my career,” Murray said. “That was the day that it was clear to me that I was not going to fly anymore. I wasn’t the same person.” She went back to school to renew her certification as a registered nurse. “I knew that I was going to have to make a different path in life.”