Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (43 page)

After the dead had been removed from the field, Ed Porter, a photographer for the
Sioux City Journal
, was allowed to photograph the wreckage. When MacIntosh and Lopatkiewicz led him to the tail before it had been moved to a hangar, Porter could see what had happened. He described it in an article that appeared in the paper on Saturday, July 22.

The duct work for that engine shows scars
where the engine rotar [
sic
] blades apparently sliced through it. And the horizontal stabilizer, located near where the engine should be, is riddled with holes from blade fragments.

Inside the horizontal stabilizer, you can see hydraulic lines that looked like they had been severed while the plane was still in the air. Other lines were bent like straw, preventing anything from being able to flow through.

Porter wasn’t alone in drawing those conclusions. The day after the crash, the
Omaha World-Herald
newspaper said, “
FAA officials said
the hydraulic failure in the spectacular crash Wednesday may have been triggered by an uncontained failure in the tail-section engine of the three-engine plane.” Although the NTSB wouldn’t release its own conclusions for more than fifteen months, Porter had accurately summed up what happened: Engine blew up. Shrapnel flew out and cut the hydraulic lines. The plane was left with no steering. End of story, it would seem.

But it wasn’t the end of the story. Important questions remained. For example, did the investigators know with absolute certainty that fragments of the missing fan disk or its blades had cut the hydraulics? Wildey knew of a way to prove that. A
metallurgist in his group, Joe Epperson
, prepared specimens from the bent and twisted stainless-steel tubes. To begin with, Epperson could see with unaided eyes the areas he was most interested in viewing in the scanning electron microscope. Those areas showed the smears of a different color from the base metal—the 300-type stainless steel that the tubes were made of. It was Epperson’s job to identify what caused the smears, which were the result of what’s known as adiabatic heating. One part is moving so fast, with so much energy, that when it hits something, the parts heat up enough to become soft. One part leaves a smear on the other.

Epperson cut the areas of interest from the tubes with a saw and mounted the pieces for viewing in the electron microscope. One of the tubes was bent, and when he unbent it to examine it, it broke. He bombarded the smears with a high-powered beam of electrons, probing down to the inner electron shells of whatever atoms were there. In the darkened room, in the bluish white glow of the screen, various signature energy levels of X-rays came back showing the iron and chromium and nickel of the stainless steel. But above them all, shooting almost off the chart, came another tall spike of energy that was unmistakable: titanium.

Now they could fully understand one of the deep flaws in the design of the DC-10. To begin with, when the titanium fan disk exploded, it blew off its own hydraulic pumps, eliminating the number two hydraulic system. Then parts made of titanium scattered outward, cutting through the stainless-steel lines for hydraulic systems one and three. The screaming pumps on engines one and three, which Jan Murray described hearing, then poured all of the hydraulic fluid overboard, leaving the plane with no steering. That’s what Captain D. B. Robinson of the Air Line Pilots Association meant when he wrote, “
This accident was never supposed to
have happened.” He said the fact that a DC-10 could not fly without hydraulic fluid or that the hydraulic systems were not adequately protected constituted “a design flaw.” And “the accident history demonstrates that hydraulic system integrity cannot be assured.” In the 1970s a number of airline captains stepped down from flying the DC-10 and took pay cuts for this very reason.

By the time John Transue reached the Air National Guard mess hall, he found himself with a young German man in his twenties, babbling and laughing maniacally. “We were so happy to be alive and so high on adrenaline that we were laughing and chatting and just giddy.” He had never felt so good in his life, Transue said.

A psychologist who had been called in to counsel survivors approached the pair and said, “You know, you’re not going to feel like this later.”

“And the German and I just looked at each other like we were Superman and this guy was crazy,” Transue later said.

After a time, Transue was taken to the hospital. A doctor stapled his scalp closed where a flying object had knocked him senseless. The nurses cleaned up the cuts on his hands. They treated the minor burn on his leg where the fireball had burned through his woolen sock. During the hours since the crash, he had noticed that his back was hurting more and more, but an X-ray revealed nothing broken. He boarded the late-night flight to Chicago with Martha Conant, Rod Vetter, John Hatch, and others. When he reached his hotel in the early hours of the morning, he called his brother, who was a therapist at a hospital in Alaska. “I was so happy to be alive that I was laughing on the phone and joking around with him.”

His brother listened for a while and then said, “You’re having an adrenaline rush now. But within twenty-four hours, it’s probably going to wear off.”

Transue said, “Maybe, but I feel great right now.”

He was at last reunited with his family at his parents’ home outside of Milwaukee, but the press wouldn’t leave him alone. Neither could he sleep. He told his wife Jacqueline, “Let’s get the hell out of here and drive back to Colorado.” Once they were on the road, peace descended at last. They drove west into the setting sun and watched it burn low on the horizon. Jacqueline was at the wheel. John sat in the front seat beside her. Their two little girls, Michelle and Lindsey, were snug in the back. As the family passed the Sioux City exit on the highway, Transue felt chills at the thought of the people, both living and dead, who remained there from the crash. Jacqueline drove late into the night, and Transue dozed at last, as the miles reeled out beneath the singing tires. Then something changed. “It was probably eleven or twelve at night,” he said. “And that’s when the adrenaline wore off. I woke up screaming.” Transue had walked through Armageddon to become a berserker for fifty-six hours. And now he’d come back to earth at last. “I was having a nightmare that I was flying through the darkness and that my chest had been ripped open and I was going to hit a wall, and I woke up screaming. That’s when the nightmares, the flashbacks, and all the bad stuff started happening.”

He tried to get on with his life. He had to travel for work, yet when he boarded an airplane, he would look at the other passengers and see corpses, “sometimes decomposing corpses. I’d look out the window and see corpses down on the ground.” He began taking tranquilizers when he had to fly, and that afforded him some relief. “But then I’d be driving around town, and I’d stop at a red light, and my car would fill up with fire. I’d have to sit there and say, ‘You’re not on fire. You’re not back in the crash.’ ”

In those early days at home in Colorado, he would drive his car as fast as he could up the switchback mountain roads, getting closer and closer to the edge. Like Tony Feeney and Yisroel Brownstein, he was trying to re-create that euphoric adrenaline high that he experienced immediately after the crash. He took his motorcycle up in the hills and rode it in the same death-defying way, but he could never recapture that feeling. Gradually the pain in his back drove him inside himself. Between the nightmares, the flashbacks, and the constant pain, “I thought about the crash constantly. And I thought about suicide all the time too.”

Although his flashbacks and nightmares stopped after about two years (a fairly normal outcome for post-traumatic stress) the pain from his injured back only grew worse. The chronic pain almost ruined his marriage and set back the development of his relationship with his children, he said. “I just came home from work, and I lay on a heating pad all night.” He had been an avid skier. He missed riding his motorcycle. “I gave up my backpacking friends and my cross-country skiing friends.” He liked bow hunting, and he lost contact with the hunters he had known. The pain isolated him from society and made it difficult for him to concentrate at work. He suffered through the untreated pain for eight years before admitting to his doctor that he was seriously considering killing himself.

“I said I really didn’t want to kill myself with my mother being alive and my kids little, but I wasn’t going to live like this. I’m at the end.” His doctor relented and prescribed him a powerful opiate called OxyContin. At last Transue was able to experience relief for about ten hours a day. “And that’s when I finally stopped thinking about it constantly,” he said. “That was a pretty awful eight years.” More than two decades after the crash, I asked him what his life was like now. “I’d say it’s terrible.”

One day at the airport he ran into Jan Brown coming off of a flight. She asked how he was doing, and he told her that he couldn’t fly on DC-10s. If he even looked at one, it precipitated an attack of anxiety. Brown led Transue to a gate and told the agent at the podium that she and Transue had been on Flight 232. The agent nodded. Jan punched her security code into the locked door. She took Transue down a deserted Jetway. As they entered the cabin, he smelled the familiar smells and saw the familiar sights and realized that he was in a DC-10.

“See?” she said. “Easy.”

Years later Brown said, “I just thought that this would have some meaning, even if he never flew on a DC-10 again. It might bring some healing.”

They went to the seat where Transue had sat on United Flight 232, next to Rod Vetter and Margo Crain, not far from Jan Brown’s jump seat at the 2-Left exit. They stood talking softly for a time. When the crew came on board for the next flight, Brown and Transue quietly left the plane.

On one other occasion, Transue saw Brown coming out of a Jetway with five or six flight attendants. Brown had been telling her crew about how Transue rescued her. And as if she had conjured him, he appeared. She took his arm and introduced him, beaming and saying, “This is my savior. This is the guy who saved my life.” Brown believes that if Transue hadn’t unbuckled her harness, she most likely would have died.

For Brown, the most difficult part of coming home after the crash was the knowledge that “the other Jan Brown” and her daughter Kimberly were dead and might have lived if only she had moved them to row 9. Of course, she had no way of knowing where the safest place in the cabin would be during the crash, but she felt guilty nonetheless. She had a few dreams about the crash. In one, she found herself once again in “the darkness that I woke up to” when the plane came to rest. “Every morning when I woke up, I cried.” She dreamed of Janice standing beside her in a white sun dress with appliqués on it. And for a moment she could be happy again. Then she would wake and remember that Janice and Kimberly were dead. Jackhammers on the street sent her into flashbacks. “Initially, you think, well, this’ll be over in six months and we’ll get back to normal. And then at six months it was like: Well, maybe a year. And then you get to a year. And it was never over at work.”

Brown gave her work an honest try. “Three months after the crash, I went back to work,” she said. She continued to fly, but the crash had taken its toll. Her privacy was gone because everyone wanted to hear the story of United Flight 232. And because of what she now knew about small children on airliners, she began to have trouble with parents who brought babies on board without proper protection. On more than one occasion, she tried to get a parent to put a child in a seatbelt rather than hold him. And on more than one occasion, parents took offense, as if Brown had questioned their competence. Some lodged complaints against her. “It was unpleasant when I’m wanting to help make a child safe, which is my job, and they’re taking it as criticism of their mothering.” Brown gradually realized that she had been given an impossible job: to keep all passengers safe. Yet she could never protect one class of passengers: babies. In 1998 she retired earlier than she might otherwise have done and began to devote her energies to establishing a requirement that children be given equal protection under the law. As she departed United Airlines, she had nothing but praise for her colleagues. “I could never say enough to acknowledge the goodness and support of my peers. My flying partners really tried to help me. My superiors were wonderful.” Yet at the time of this writing, despite her efforts, the law has not been changed. In response to repeated pleas from the NTSB to protect babies, J. Randolph Babbitt, the administrator of the FAA at the time, wrote,

The FAA believes that requiring the use of CRS [child restraint seats]
, which would require all families traveling with children under 2 years of age to purchase tickets for those children, would significantly raise the net price of travel for those families. As a result, such price increases would divert some family travel from the air transportation system to the highway system. Consequently, entire families would be subject to far higher fatality rates, which would produce a net increase in overall transportation fatalities. . . . I believe the FAA has effectively addressed this recommendation and I consider our actions complete.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

T
he harvest in Buena Vista County began on an overcast day in September when the wind made the temperature feel like 38 degrees at eight o’clock in the morning. The sun broke through around noon, but then clouds moved in once again, and the temperature climbed to nearly 60 degrees by late afternoon. At that time of year the sun didn’t go down until almost eight o’clock in the evening, so the work could proceed apace, even with the occasional drizzling rain that blew across the fields in shifting layers of spectral mist. And yet by the end of the month, despite losing half an hour of daylight, the temperature soared to almost 83 degrees at midday under a cloudless sky. On those days, the sky was so blue that it reminded many people of the day in July when 1819 Uniform came plunging to earth and changed so many lives.