TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/073189/07318900.032

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.9 KB | 252 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 12

Brace! Brace! Brace!


Thanks to a heroic pilot, 186 survive the tenth worst U.S. air
crash

By Ed Magnuson


    What if a less skilled captain had been at the controls of
that jumbo jet, struggling under emergency conditions that no
pilot had ever faced? Or if an off-duty airline pilot, who
happened to be on board, had not rushed to the cockpit to assist
him? Or if the 181-ft.-long aircraft had ripped apart in even
a slightly different way? Or if that Sioux City cornfield had
been drought baked and hard instead of rain soaked and soft?

    It took a unique combination of fate and circumstance last
week to produce a near miracle of survival in the midst of a
horrible tragedy. When a stricken United Airlines DC-10 failed
by seconds to achieve a level emergency landing and plowed into
the earth only yards short of a runway at Sioux Gateway Airport,
110 passengers and crew members died, the tenth highest airplane
toll in U.S. history. But, astonishingly, 186 lived through the
crash and its fiery aftermath. Some even walked away. Never
before had selecting a seat been such a fateful decision. Almost
every passenger in the plane's 32-seat first-class compartment
was killed. Virtually all the 117 travelers in an economy-class
section behind them survived.

    Nothing seemed amiss when Captain Alfred Haynes, 59, a
33-year United Airlines veteran, lifted the three-engine DC-10
into sunny skies over Denver for a two-hour flight to Chicago.
The airliner, configured to hold 287 passengers, had only five
vacant seats. Since United had designated July as "picnic
month," the eight flight attendants served mini-baskets of
chicken sticks, crackers and cheese.

    But at 3:16 p.m. (central daylight time), as the DC-10
cruised at 33,000 ft. above the tiny town of Alta, Iowa (pop.
1,720), it was jolted. Passengers heard an explosion at the
plane's rear, then felt the huge craft shake and pitch downward.
In Row 11 of the economy section in front of the wings, Lori
Michaelson was traveling with her husband and three children.
"I could see the stewardesses looked kind of panicky," she
recalled later. That was understandable. One of them had been
knocked to the floor.

    Then came a calming voice from the flight deck. "We have
lost the No. 2 engine," it announced. "We will be a little late
arriving in Chicago." Engine No. 2 sits high on the tail and is
identical to the two turbofan jets under the wings. Any one of
the three engines is capable of powering the plane in an
emergency. As the aircraft seemed to steady, passengers relaxed,
turning back to their books or drinks.

    In the cockpit, however, Haynes was describing a far more
dangerous situation to regional air-traffic controllers at the
Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. One minute after the explosion,
he radioed that his craft had developed "complete hydraulic
failure." That meant the crew could no longer control the
rudder, elevators, wing flaps and ailerons that steer the jet.
Too massive to be manually manipulated, these control surfaces
are normally powered by fluid pumped by pressure from the jet
engines through a series of stainless-steel tubes that snake
throughout the aircraft. Since each of the plane's three
redundant hydraulic systems is powered by a separate engine, the
loss of power from the No. 2 engine should have left two of them
intact. No complete failure had ever been reported.

    Responding to Haynes' distress call, air controllers
directed the plane to continue eastward for an emergency landing
at Dubuque, Iowa, 240 miles away. The pilot sensed a momentary
regaining of some control. But then he lost it again. At 3:20
he declared that he faced an "emergency" and had to find the
nearest landing spot. Controllers suggested he turn back to the
west to reach Sioux City, a Missouri River town where one of the
airport's runways is 9,000 ft. long. That could easily handle
a DC-10. But Sioux City was 70 miles away.

    Back in the passenger areas, the mood remained relaxed.
Some travelers noticed the wide turn to the southwest and heard
the thrust in the two wing engines change, alternately
increasing and decreasing. Haynes was apparently relying on a
technique that pilots call "porpoising," adjusting the thrust
of his two remaining engines in a desperate effort to control
the plane. Passenger Kathleen Batson joked that the engine
problem would get them priority-landing rights in Chicago. "We
won't be circling O'Hare," she quipped.

    But far below, near Alta, 60 miles from Sioux City, workers
in a seed-corn company's research field returned from a lunch
break to a startling discovery. In the midst of the corn stood
a cone-shaped piece of wreckage, 12 ft. long and 8 ft. high. On
one scrap, an inscription clearly read ENG. 2. Some five miles
away, other pieces, including sections of the multiple blades
of a turbofan engine, were found.

    Something unprecedented had happened. Not only had the
plane's tail engine lost its cone, but its fan had literally
shattered. The disintegrating engine somehow flung shrapnel-like
chunks of hot metal past the chamber designed to contain any
such breakup. The pieces apparently ripped into all three
hydraulic lines that converge at the tail, killing or at least
vastly reducing hydraulic pressure.

    As the aircraft rolled drunkenly from side to side,
off-duty United Captain Dennis Fitch rushed to the cockpit to
help Haynes and First Officer William Records, getting down on
his knees to gingerly manipulate the throttles. Second Officer
Dudley Dvorak walked to the back of the plane, trying to assess
the damage. Haynes told controllers he could only make wide
turns to the right and was worried about whether he could reach
the airport. Alerted to the emergency, the tower at Sioux City
informed local police and rescue units to prepare for either a
crash landing on the runway or one on nearby Highway 20.

    Rescue agencies in Sioux City and surrounding Woodbury
County had run through a drill two years ago in which a large
plane was assumed to have crashed at the airport and 150
survivors needed immediate help. Even before Flight 232 was in
sight, Dr. David Greco, heading the medical disaster teams, was
hovering in a helicopter. A dozen ambulances and four other
choppers were ready to speed survivors to the two local
hospitals, and police, fire and National Guard units were
rushing to assist.

    By then Haynes had managed to guide his disabled craft
toward Sioux City in a wide descending spiral of right turns.
"We're going to make an emergency landing in Sioux City," he
warned passengers over the intercom. "It's going to be rough."
He paused. "As a matter of fact, it's going to be more than
rough."

    While passengers studied emergency landing cards, flight
attendants demonstrated the emergency "brace" position: heads
down, hands grasping ankles. Some passengers sought diversion
from the gathering tension. Steve Willuweit, 46, seated in Row
16, went back to reading an Arthur C. Clarke science-fiction
novel: "I didn't want to think about anything except getting up
and walking off the plane." Lori Michaelson was instructed to
place her year-old baby Sabrina on the floor near her seat.

    Haynes radioed the tower that he thought he could reach the
airport. But he was unable to line up the plane for a landing
on Runway 31 (on a northwest bearing of 310 degrees), where most
of the emergency crews were waiting. He told the tower that he
would aim instead for Runway 22 (southwest at 220 degrees),
which was 6,880 ft. long -- just enough to handle a DC-10 under
normal circumstances. When the jet appeared headed toward Runway
22 on a surprisingly level and steady approach, anxious ground
observers were elated. Haynes radioed the tower, "I think I'm
going to make it."

    At 3:53 p.m. the voice on the intercom shouted, "Brace!
Brace! Brace!" Four minutes later, some ten seconds short of the
runway, the DC-10's right wing dipped, slicing into the dirt to
the left of the asphalt. The plane plowed into the ground and
flipped over twice before finally landing on its back. In a
cloud of dirt, smoke and flying metal, the plane broke into ever
smaller pieces as parts of its fuselage hurtled across the
runway and into a cornfield.

    Only three sections came to rest intact enough to be
recognizable: the nose and flight deck; a passenger area,
containing Rows 9 to 19, that had been attached to the now
severed wings; the tail, including a few rear seats. As rescue
crews swung into action, they were startled by the sight of
passengers emerging from the smoking rubble and walking away
from the wreck into the field of 7-ft.-tall corn.

    The survivors could scarcely contain their stunned
amazement at being alive. "The plane bounced twice, flipped into
the air, and we wound up sitting there upside down as the cabin
began to fill with smoke," recalled Cliff Marshall, of
Ostrander, Ohio. "God opened a hole, and I pushed a little girl
out." Sister Viannea, a Felician nun, said the crash "was like
a cyclone. Everything was flying all over the plane. I could
feel people walking over me to get out. Finally, three men
dragged me out."

    The smoke and fire were heavy at one end of this
upside-down cabin section, but the breakup opened a wide escape
avenue at the other end. "I looked for where the emergency exit
used to be," said David Landsberger, a New Jersey businessman
who had been in Seat 13B. "But it wasn't there. Then I looked
toward the front of the plane, and I saw daylight. Then I saw
green stuff beyond the mud, and- when I got out I found myself
in a cornfield."

    Two rows ahead of Landsberger, Mark Michaelson and his wife
Lori unbuckled their seat belts and dropped to what is normally
the ceiling of the DC-10. Separately, they hustled two of their
three children out of the wreckage. But each thought the other
had baby Sabrina. The father ran back to the fuselage. "I could
hear her crying, but I couldn't see her." There was too much
smoke, then flames. But passenger Jerry Schemmel had heard the
cries first. He plunged into the fiery fuselage, found the baby
in an upside-down overhead bin, ran into the cornfield and
thrust the infant into a woman's arms. That is where the
overjoyed Michaelsons found their daughter.

    Rescuers marveled at finding two rows of three seats each
that had been flung from the aircraft. A woman in the middle of
one row was barely bruised. Her husband, seated beside her, and
two passengers in the row behind her were dead. Along with most
passengers in the rows near the wing, a handful of those at the
rear were also alive. The three-man cockpit crew had to be cut
free of the tangled and wrecked flight deck, but all survived.
Of the eight attendants, only one died.

    Safety experts attributed the high survival rate most of
all to the heroics of Captain Haynes in leveling off the DC-10
until the final seconds. "He belongs in the pilots' hall of
fame," declared Joe Sullivan, a retired flight engineer for
American Airlines. The landing gear, dropped by gravity because
of the hydraulics failure, helped support the part of the cabin
where most survivors had been seated. The dampness of the
cornfield from recent rains cushioned the crash impact.
Fire-resistant seat upholstery installed at the insistence of
the National Transportation Safety Board was also credited. So
too were the rescue and medical efforts of the Sioux City area.
So many doctors responded that there were two on hand for each
hospitalized passenger. Local volunteers lined up for more than
a block to donate 300 pints of blood, far more than was needed.

    It will be months before the NTSB reports on the cause of
the crash. Two questions undoubtedly will be deeply probed. Why
did the turbofan engine, built by General Electric and used on
DC-10s, break up in flight? Were all three hydraulic systems
knocked out, and if so, can they be better protected?

    During the 1970s, DC-10s were involved in two major crashes
in which the hydraulic lines were implicated. The world's worst
single-plane accident occurred in 1974, when a Turkish Airlines
DC-10 lost an improperly secured cargo door as the plane left
Paris. The resulting pressure change buckled the cabin floor
and broke the hydraulic tubes passing under it. All 346
occupants died. In a 1979 crash in Chicago, 279 were killed
after an improperly installed wing engine on an American
Airlines DC-10 tore away on takeoff, ripping hydraulic lines and
causing the pilot to lose control.

    For the past ten years, the DC-10 has had a safety record
that compares favorably with those of other wide-bodied jets.
That is cold comfort to the families of the 110 passengers and
crew who did not share in the miracle in that Iowa cornfield.


-- Lee Griggs/Chicago and Elizabeth Taylor/ Sioux City