#flight 232

So I’ve really become very interested in aviation and this purchase through the Kindle-Amazon store was after I had seen a documentary on this exact flight on the television show “Air Disasters”, which is on Smithsonian, Sunday’s at eight (if anyone is interested). I wanted to go more in depth into what actually happened on July 19th, 1989 and what the ramifications of the crash actually were.

It’s amazing how much a tiny little crack can do in the grand scheme of things.

On July 19th, 1989, a United Airlines DC-10 took off from Denver with the intended destination of Philadelphia. They were going to have a stop-over at O’Hare but they experienced an uncontained engine failure in the number two engine (on a DC-10 that has three engines, the number two is the engine on the tail), which caused catastrophic damage in the tail. The shrapnel from the fan blade--which physically left the engine and actually fell into a corn field--severed the hydraulic lines and United 232 suffered total hydraulic loss. In the simplest terms, it means that the airplane was, essentially, un-flyable. In the words of Captain Al Haynes, “We weren’t flying the plane, we were keeping it in the air, basically.”

The crew of four (which also included passenger Denny Fitch who was a DC-10 check pilot who was catching a ride on this particular flight) was among the first to try to land a jet that had lost all hydraulic capabilities and they had done what no one else had been able to do up to that time--get back to a runway. However, upon the landing attempt, their right wing dipped and it clipped the runway and they cartwheeled over the runway.

Out of the 296 people aboard that plane, 111 people died. However, considering how bad the crash was, it was a miracle that people survived at all. 

Among the survivors were all four pilots, miraculously, although Denny Fitch had broken his back and had a punctured lung, Al Haynes nearly had one of his ears sliced off, and Dudley Dvorak and Bill Records both had broken bones.

This book was an intimate look at what happened on this flight, the construction and the manufacturing of the DC-10, and what happened to the passengers after the flight. It was amazing to hear the survivors’ testimonies and how badly it affected them later in life. It was also very interesting to see transcripts from the cockpit and the controversy that came of this crash. The controversy being that when United 232 called their maintenance and engineering department to ask for any help whatsoever, they refused to believe that United 232 had lost all hydraulics because it was virtually impossible. They even said that United 232 had not made their emergency clear, even though the transcripts show that Dvorak had repeatedly said that they had lost all hydraulics. 

The crash was caused by a crack in the fan disk that had begun during fabrication and caused by tainted titanium. With every take-off and landing, it grew and grew until it simply broke apart. Although GE and other manufacturers improved how they built the fan disk and other components, the airline manufacturers could not guarantee that this could not happen again, so DC-10 was eventually discontinued in light of this accident.

Twenty-five years before the Malaysia Airlines mystery, one of the most dramatic events in aviation unfolded in the skies over Iowa as heroic pilots battled to land a crippled DC-10.