Sioux City Crash Survivors Return to Face Their Fears

Denny Fitch’s first glimpse of the Sioux Gateway Airport was from the cockpit of a crippled DC-10 which he and other crew members were struggling to control before it cartwheeled and burst into flames on impact.

He flew back as a passenger this week in far less dramatic fashion, but he climbed into the cockpit jump seat before landing.

“I wanted to see what a normal approach into Sioux City looks like,” said Fitch, a captain for United Air Lines.

Dianne Schemmel also felt compelled to come here, although she was at work in Denver at that ill-fated moment exactly a year ago Thursday. She needed to walk the runway, see the cornfield where the tumbling chunks of fuselage finally stopped, sense the horror and pain that her husband, Jerry, who was on board, had experienced and amazingly survived.

“When you get married, you become one,” she sobbed. “I want to be a part of it, to know what he went through and what he felt.”

The pilots, the flight attendants, the rescuers, the survivors, the widowed, the orphaned, the families and the just curious were drawn here Thursday to commemorate the first anniversary of the tragic yet miraculous crash of United Flight 232. Tragic, because 112 on board died that day. Miraculous, because 184 did not, thanks in large measure to the valiant efforts of a skilled and daring airline crew and the preparation and charity of a heartland community with a huge heart.

As the plane headed over Iowa en route from Denver to Chicago that afternoon, the titanium fan disk on its rear engine suddenly broke apart. Pieces of shrapnel shot through the tail area and severed the hydraulic lines, making it virtually impossible to steer the plane.

But, through sheer grit and ingenuity, Capt. Al Haynes, his cockpit crew and Fitch, who happened to be on board, managed to keep the 168-ton jumbo jet aloft for 45 minutes as they edged precariously to the tip of the Sioux City runway, only to lose control at the moment of touchdown.

The plane broke apart and burned, but large sections remained intact and some passengers walked away unscathed. Hundreds of rescue workers, alerted to Flight 232’s predicament and meticulously drilled in a comprehensive disaster plan, swooped down on the scene within seconds and saved dozens of injured who might otherwise have died if care had been delayed.

Residents opened their homes and their schools to survivors and their families. Within hours of the tragedy and without ever being asked, hundreds of the 120,000 residents of a metropolitan region that spans parts of Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota had lined up at area blood banks and gave more than four times the amount of blood that was needed.

In all, 104 survivors of that crash--92 passengers and 12 crew members--made the pilgrimage to the scene of what surely was the most harrowing experience of their lives. They were joined by hundreds of relatives and local residents in a day of memorials that organizers said was an important stage of the emotional healing process for all who were affected by the crash both on the ground and in the air.

“People were in shock last year when they were here,” Bob Sheehan, a psychologist with a local social service agency, explained. “This is a chance for them to come back and get a sense of closure . . . . They’ll walk the runway and see where it was that their loved ones died and put them to rest once and for all.”

That recovery process has affected people in a wide variety of ways. Many were able to put the trauma behind them and quickly resume their careers and lives. Three of the four cockpit members were back in the air within months. Other survivors are still struggling to cope. Some have suffered recurrent nightmares, quit their jobs or lost their spouses.

One flight attendant is still recovering from a broken back. Another who is still off the job, Kathy Shen, said she is just not ready to go back to work. “I do not remember anything about that crash, and the reason I have not come back is because I do not remember,” Shen said as tears welled in her eyes.

Sheehan said many people are haunted by the smell of fuel oil. Still others say they are disgusted by the thought of eating corn because they ended up in the middle of the corn field that flanked the runway.

But the crash produced some positives. The Sioux City disaster relief plan has become a model for more than 100 communities around the country.

The Federal Aviation Administration has devised new inspection procedures and ordered modifications to DC-10s in an effort to prevent the kind of hydraulic failure that caused the crash. But the National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the incident and has yet to issue a final determination of the origins of the incident.

Some who survived have joined a crusade to pressure the FAA to require that infants and toddlers who fly be strapped into their own seats rather than held by their parents. At least one baby on Flight 232 was thrown from her mother’s arms on impact and was found by another passenger several feet away in a luggage rack.

Jan Brown, a flight attendant who returned to the air last October, said she was “appalled” by the FAA’s foot-dragging on the matter. “My greatest fear in getting on an airplane now is seeing parents hold their children in their laps,” Brown said. “. . . I can’t understand why any agency that’s supposed to mandate safety has to be dragged kicking and screaming to these issues.”

United allowed its pilots and flight attendants to participate in Thursday’s ceremonies and discuss their feelings with reporters. However, the airline barred its employees from answering any questions about the NTSB investigation or speculating about the causes of the accident.

On a day of accolades, the loudest were reserved for Haynes and his crew. Over and over, they were approached by survivors who wanted to thank them for their actions. But Haynes, 59, accepted his hero celebrity with the kind of “aw, shucks” modesty of a Gary Cooper.

“If we are serving in some kind of a function and helping somebody in any way by being called that, then so be it,” he said at a news conference. “We don’t see it that way. We have our heroes, and they were the ones who were on board (the passengers and flight attendants) and who helped us, so it works both ways.”

Later, Haynes was greeted by a standing ovation as he rose to speak at an airport memorial service in a hangar only a few hundred feet from where his plane had scattered itself across the ground a year earlier.

“Today has been an emotional roller coaster for all of us,” he said. “I have seen a strength and courage and loving concern that I didn’t know humans possessed. But it is for all of us a very important part of the healing process that we all must go through.”

In calling for a moment of silence to respect the memories of the dead, Haynes urged the several thousand people who had gathered here to let go of the dead and get on with their lives. “We must find some way to take these (memories) away from the present and make them a part of our past,” he said.

Researcher Tracy Shryer in Chicago contributed to this story.