Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (8 page)

Dvorak recalled that as the plane approached Sioux City, “Al told me to run the throttles.” Dvorak’s seat swung around in tracks so that the second officer could operate the throttles on takeoff. Fitch relinquished the throttles to him for a time and sat in the jump seat behind Haynes. “I was all in the seat, strapped in and running the throttles,” Dvorak said, “and Denny was over my shoulder saying, Do this, do that, and I finally decided that he’s been doing it and he knows what it takes, it’s not the right time for me to learn what the differences are.” Haynes, Records, Dvorak, and Fitch all had 296 lives in their hands at one point or another during the flight, but Fitch handled the throttles longer than anyone else. He brought the plane in as safely as anyone considered possible, given the dire circumstances. Yet the crew wound up resenting his outgoing public persona.

Rosa Fitch, Denny’s widow, said, “
My husband was a hero
, not only in what he did on July 19, 1989, but in the way he lived his life every day.”

Tammy Randa, Dave Randa’s wife, said this about Fitch: “
The first time Dave mentioned
Denny Fitch to me he [referred to] him as the ‘man who saved my life.’ We also attended his memorial service in May of 2012, and when Dave introduced himself to Denny’s daughter, she immediately started to cry. I could tell that her childhood was also deeply affected by the crash. I also spoke to Denny a couple of times . . . and got the impression that he was very friendly and thoughtful. Sounds like some may have felt he was a little arrogant, but nonetheless, I have a wonderful husband (and in-laws) and two amazing children thanks to him and the other pilots that day.”

Brad Griffin had shoulder-length hair and a handlebar mustache. He wore jeans and—apart from the sandals—looked as if he would be at home among the cowboys in Colorado where he lived. Now he watched Dudley Dvorak “sprint” back through the cabin. He later said, “I mean, he’s
running
to the back of the plane.”

“I wasn’t running,” Dvorak countered. “I might have walked fast. You don’t do anything like that on an airplane, because that can cause panic.” On the other hand, numerous passengers told of being alarmed at how fast the flight engineer was moving down the aisle.

Griffin was on his way to Battle Creek, Michigan, to play golf with his brother. “I’ve got my golf clubs,” he recounted. “I’m excited. My brother and I are best friends. This’ll be the first time I’ve done this with him. I’m looking forward to seeing my family, which is from Michigan.”

In the boarding lounge in Denver, Griffin had given his ticket to Susan White. He boarded the plane and was greeted by Jan Murray in first class. After takeoff and lunch, he decided to get up from his aisle seat in the second row on the starboard side. He wanted to stretch his legs and look out the window. He was traveling in a luxury craft on the Nile of the sky. Life didn’t get much better. “I’m standing looking out the emergency exit window, and then all of a sudden, the plane just shook and I was knocked to my knees.” He hurried to his seat and fastened his seat belt. Over the next few minutes, he and Michael Kielbassa, thirty-eight, beside him in the window seat, discussed the fact that the plane wasn’t flying right. “Now there’s starting to be tension with the crew, and my thought comes and goes: you know, you can die on this plane.” He decided that he had better start meditating, a practice that he had undertaken in 1972 and had continued daily for seventeen years.

“So, the dialogue before I go into meditation on the plane went like this,” he recalled. “In a conversation with myself: You can die on this plane. I would like to see my children grow up.” He had heard people talk about praying to Jesus, and he thought, “
You
had better pray to Jesus. I am with Maharaji this lifetime.
You
had better pray. I have something better than prayer. And then I go into meditation.”

He told me, “Within every human being—every human being—there is a place inside where there is no fear. And so I touched that place.” He closed his eyes and went into a meditative trance. When he came out of it a few minutes later, “There’s no fear for me. You hear what’s going on, you understand what’s going on,” he said. All the passengers in first class were adults, but from the coach cabin, Griffin could hear young mothers wailing, “What should I do with my baby?”

“It was the worst part of the flight,” he said. “And the answer is: Put them between your feet. Because you can’t hang onto them. And you feel that you can’t do anything to help them. That’s a terrible feeling. But at the same time, there’s no anxiety for me. There’s no adrenaline for me. But I was very aware of what was going on. And I knew I could die on that plane.”

When Griffin saw Dvorak rush past him, he turned and watched him go. He lost sight of him as the pilot faded down the aisle into B-Zone. Dvorak passed Garry Priest, who was trying to comfort Linda Pierce across the aisle. When the engine blew, the plane had not only lost a third of its thrust but also produced an instant wind brake from the drag of the dead engine. That’s why the tail dropped so sharply. And that’s why Priest, whose seat belt was loose, “ended up almost tucked under the seat in front of me where your carry-on little bag is supposed to go. Seat belt up around my armpits as I slid forward in my seat.”

Dvorak passed Sister Mary Viannea Karpinski, the Felician nun who had been brought aboard in a wheelchair ahead of the other passengers.
She was feeding her red rosary beads
through her fingers, praying rapidly, softly, in both English and Polish. He passed Clif Marshall, production manager for a company in the livestock industry. With the help of Ron Sheldon, two seats to his left, Marshall would save eight lives: Terri Hardman and her two teenagers, Sheli and Ryan; Gitte Skaanes, an exchange student on her way home to Norway; Lawrence Hjermstad and his two children, Alisa, eight, and Eric, eleven; and Aki Muto, nineteen, the tall Japanese girl with the pale and beautiful features of a doll.

Dvorak rushed away into C-Zone past Jerry Schemmel and an ex-Navy fighter pilot named Charles Martz, who sat with an eighty-year-old ex-Navy nurse, Luella Neubacher. Dvorak passed Jay Ramsdell on his left and Tony Feeney on his right, then a handsome young man in his twenties, who would require an electroencephalogram to determine if he was dead or alive, and twenty-two-year-old Elaine Asay.
Her tattoo of a bunny
would assist the forensic team in identifying her.

Dvorak came into view of Yisroel Brownstein and Richard Howard Sudlow and stopped short of the 4-Right exit, the last door in the tail of the plane. For years afterward, he would have dreams in which all those people around him would rise up before him. In his dreams, they were all his friends. Dvorak looked outside. He “
had to hold onto the seats
. . . to steady himself against the movements of the aircraft,” according to testimony by an investigator. He saw the damage to the elevator and the horizontal stabilizer. Susan White saw him and called to him and pointed out the damage on the other side. Dvorak took her arm, pulled her close, and looked deep into her eyes. She felt that he was saying his last good-bye. Then he hurried back to the cockpit.

CHAPTER FOUR

G
eneral Electric made the engines
for the DC-10. They were known as Model CF6-6 high-bypass turbofans. If you go out to the airport and look at one, you will see a metal fan more than seven feet in diameter at the front. Behind that number one fan are a stage two fan, compressor wheels, a combustion chamber, and turbine wheels. All of those rotating parts make the airplane go.

The words
ejaculate
and
jet
derive from the Latin verb
jacere
, meaning to throw. A flying machine must throw a fluid—usually air—in order to move itself in accordance with Newton’s laws, one of which says that any action results in an equal and opposite reaction. A wing produces lift only when it’s moving through the air. To achieve that forward motion, the machine has to push a mass of fluid in the opposite direction. (To an engineer, air is a fluid because it flows.) In the CF6 engines the so-called working fluid is 99 percent air, with a little exhaust mixed in from the fuel that the engine burns.

Each of the
CF6 engines that powered November 1819 Uniform
on that July day in 1989 was capable of producing on the order of
thirty-nine thousand pounds of thrust
. GE makes an engine today that produces more than a hundred thousand pounds of thrust. Either way, such engines produce a great deal of energy, and those who make and use them want to be careful where all that energy goes. For example, the number one fan on the CF6-6 engine has thirty-eight fan blades, each of which is twenty-eight inches long and weighs ten pounds. Those blades are mounted in dovetail slots in the rim of a wheel known as the number one fan disk. Without the blades, the fan disk weighs 370 pounds and has a diameter of thirty-two inches.
Spinning at about thirty-five hundred
revolutions a minute in cruise flight, the centrifugal force that those blades exert on the fan disk amounts to nearly four million pounds.

A generic turbofan engine is pictured here. Arrows show the path of the air. Direction of travel of the aircraft is to the left. The fan and compressor blades blow air backward, compressing it before directing it into the combustion chamber, where it is mixed with fuel. The exhaust from the burning fuel turns the turbine blades at the rear, thus creating the power that rotates concentric driveshafts, which in turn spin the fans and compressors at the front.
Courtesy Richard Wheeler

Turbofan engines perform their work based on principles that say, in effect, that temperature, pressure, and volume are all interrelated and interdependent. If you force a gas into a smaller space (reducing volume), you will increase temperature and pressure. If you increase the temperature of a gas in a fixed space, you increase the pressure (but not the volume). Conversely, if you increase the volume of a flowing gas, the pressure goes down and the gas moves faster. A gas turbine engine such as the CF6 does all of those things at various points in its operating sequence. The number one fan on the front pushes a large volume of air backward, about thirteen hundred pounds of it every second. That air takes two paths. The innermost path leads to the compressor wheels. The combustion chamber receives the compressed air, accounting for a small amount of the total. The greatest share of the air flows around the whole working assembly, providing thrust while cooling and quieting the engine.

The compressor is a series of fans that alternate with sets of stationary fins. The fans are wheels that are fitted with blades. They work much the way propeller blades work, pushing air backward. The stationary fins, called stator vanes, redirect the air to keep it moving in a nearly longitudinal direction. Each set of compressor blades and stator vanes increases the pressure and temperature of the air while reducing its volume. The
air goes through four low-pressure stages
, then through sixteen high-pressure stages, until the air achieves an incandescent heat. All this takes place before the air has combined with any fuel.
*

We think we know air, but most of us really don’t. Unless you’ve been in a hurricane or a tornado, you know only one possible state of air, the gentle and forgiving state we find all around us for most of our lives. I once went to an Air Force base to watch the testing of a jet engine for a fighter plane. I was with a group of engineers and pilots in a concrete underground bunker about the size of a small motel room. The engine was on a stand and was being run by a man behind a glass wall that appeared to be two feet thick. We each wore several layers of protection for our ears, lest we emerge stone deaf, so we had trouble communicating. One of the engineers wanted to warn me not to walk in front of the bleed air. This was not the jet of working fluid that propelled a plane. Bleed air was air that had to escape while the engine was spooling up to speed, so that the compressor blades didn’t choke and shatter from being fed too much air all at once. He put his hand into the column of bleed air to show me:
don’t walk here
. I put my hand into the column of air, and it felt as if someone had thrown a broomstick end-on into my hand. By virtue of its speed alone, its mass and momentum, the air had set like concrete. It was a startling revelation, and I never again wondered how a tornado could drive a soda straw through an oak tree. If I had inadvertently stepped into the exhaust of that engine, it would have slammed me into the concrete flume that led up to the surface of the earth to dissipate the exhaust, and it might well have killed me. All this force came from those blades, delicate as tuning forks, spinning at thousands of revolutions a minute. Some of the blades have needle-fine holes drilled in them so that air can pass through and cool them as they spin. In some cases, the tips of the blades break the sound barrier.

As the compressor pushes the air back and back into smaller and smaller spaces, building the pressure and heat, it eventually must meet fuel in the combustion chamber, where that air will be given the extra kick it needs to make the whole operation go. The fuel will require a flame in order to burn. And flame cannot live in a wind. The air is moving at hundreds of miles an hour when it reaches the combustor. This does not sound like a recipe for success. That a turbine engine works at all seems something of a miracle. The highest speeds that the plane can achieve require the lowest speeds of the air flowing through the engine. In the middle of this immense, dynamic mass of whirling parts, the air has to come to a near standstill.