Thursday, August 17, 2017

The Crack of Doom

“It’s about luck, communications, preparation, execution, and cooperation.”


A billion to one. According to aviation experts, those are odds against what happened to Flight 232 on July 19, 1989. On that lovely, sunny day, this United Airlines McDonnell Douglas DC-10 was bound from Denver to Chicago with 296 passengers and crew on board. At 37,000 feet flying at a groundspeed of 560 miles per hour, passengers felt and heard what seemed like an explosion in the tail. Then they felt a sinking feeling as the DC-10 lost altitude.
Soon the confident voice of Flight Engineer Dudley Dvorak told passengers the aircraft had “lost” its number two engine. They would continue to on to Chicago, he said,  but at a lower altitude and a slower speed.
A DC-10 has three seven-foot diameter General Electric turbofan engines; one is mounted under each wing, and the third (the number two engine) is in the tail. A fan blade in the tail engine had shattered, hurling shrapnel that severed all of the DC-10’s stainless-steel hydraulic control lines.

Fall Out of the Sky

To their horror, Haynes and First Officer William Reynolds watched the hydraulic fluid gauges show lower and lower levels and before falling to zero. Just as cars use pressurized hydraulic fluid to ease braking and steering, aircraft use hydraulic systems, as well—elevators move a plane’s nose up or down and ailerons and rudders enable it to turn. Without such aids, the aircraft was crippled and should have been un-flyable.
 “Al, I can’t control the airplane,” said Reynolds. The DC-10 started to fall out of the sky. It wanted to roll to the right even though Reynolds was trying to get it to do the opposite—climb and turn left.
Within minutes, Dennis Fitch, a United DC-10 flight instructor who had been sitting as a passenger entered the flight deck, joining Haynes, Reynolds, Dvorak, and Jerry Lee Kennedy, a new pilot who was aboard to observe the flight.
To Fitch, what he saw on the flight deck was “unbelievable. Both the pilots were in short-sleeved shirts, the tendons being raised in their forearms, their knuckles were white.”
 “We have almost no controllability,” Haynes told air traffic control. “Very little elevator, and almost no ailerons. We’re controlling the turns by power…We can only turn right. We can’t turn left.” A moment later he added, “I have serious doubts about making the airport.”

“An Extension of Me”

Having completely lost control of the aircraft, they kept it aloft by applying asymmetric thrust, increasing the thrust of one engine while lowering the other’s thrust and alternating the process to keep the DC-10 from rolling over.
“It just became like the airplane was an extension of me,” Haynes said. “I could feel these stimuli coming at me before I actually felt them or saw them. It struck me like a thunderclap—Dear God, I have 296 lives literally in my two hands.”
The pilots swiftly communicated with United’s Systems Aircraft Maintenance office, home to its best engineers. They could not believe what the pilots were telling them. Over and over they asked Haynes to confirm what had happened because it was impossible for all hydraulic systems to fail, and even if that had happened, it would be impossible to fly the DC-10. The engineers had no advice. What was happening could not be happening.


Ground controllers diverted the flight to Sioux City, Iowa. Amazingly, 285 members of the Iowa Air National Guard and rescue personnel had gathered there that day for a training exercise.

Breaking the Tension

For 45 minutes, the white-knuckle struggle to keep the jet flying continued. As it entered its final approach, the air traffic controller said, “United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind’s currently three-six-zero at one-one. Three-sixty at 11. You’re cleared to land on any runway.”
Breaking the tension, Haynes joked, “You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?”
As the DC-10 neared the airport, it looked as though it would make a normal landing but at a high speed—250 miles per hour—and that alone was dangerous. The pilots no longer had use of the plane’s hydraulically-powered brakes.
A few seconds before landing 100 feet above the ground, with the runway dead ahead, Fitch and Haynes, struggling with the controls, applied more thrust. The DC-10’s right wing dipped 20 degrees (either due to the added thrust, the plane’s instability, or both), and the wingtip caught the runway. The DC-10 cartwheeled, pirouetted onto its nose, toppled over, exploded into a fireball, ripping apart.
Of the 296 passengers and crew onboard, 185 survived, including all of the flight crew. Haynes suffered a concussion and required 92 stitches in his scalp and surgery to have his left ear, which had been 90 percent torn off, reattached. He resumed flying three months later.

Under Terrific Pressure

 Investigators later found that the titanium alloy fan blade shattered because it had been made of contaminated metal which, nonetheless, had passed multiple factory inspections. The impurities had caused a pit to form on the surface of the 10-pound, 28-inch-long blade. Every time the engine ran during its 18-year history, the defect grew larger and larger. No one ever noticed it during regular inspections.
At the time of the accident, the tiny cavity measured only three-hundredths of an inch in circumference (0.030) and fifteen hundredths of an inch deep (0.015). Fatigue cracks had begun to radiate from around it, and they caused the blade to shatter while rotating under terrific pressure—3,500 times a minute.
To recover from the trauma of the experience, Haynes gave more than 1,500 speeches, recounting what had happened. “I tell people it’s about luck, communications, preparation, execution, and cooperation. You can apply that to any business and your life....
            “I feel guilty about 232. [I] didn’t do the job to company paid [me] to do—to get from Point A to Point B…The captain gets all the credit, like a quarterback on a football team who won the big game. But it’s a team effort—that’s what I stress.”


MORAL: Steer any way you can.


Buy the book "Courage 101: True Tales of Grit & Glory" at Amazon!


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