“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.
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