The Crash of United Airlines Flight 232 - July 19, 1989 - Al Haynes

so [Music] coming in lost number two engines have a hard time controlling the aircraft right now he's at a 29 000 right now and descending to sioux city right now he's he's your vor but he wants the equipment standing by right now uh radar contact okay so you know we have almost no controllability uh very little elevator and almost no aileron we're controlling the turns by power i don't think we can turn right i think we can only make left turns well we start a little bit of a left turn right now we can only turn right we can't turn left united 232 heavy uh understand sir you can only make right turns [Music] 2403 ogden suit gateway runway 3-1 2403 ogden two gateway runway three one have a dc-10 four to five miles east it's lost one engine 10-4 engine three engine three stand four answering a 300 block of south floyd engine 3 answering from 300 south floyd engine 5 18 10 all right united 232 heavy safe souls on board and fuel remaining we have thirty seven six two one count in the filter united two thirty two heavy we have no hydraulic fluid which means we have no elevator control uh almost none and very little aileron control i have serious doubts about making the airport have you got some place near there uh that we might be able to ditch unless you get control of this airplane we're gonna put it down wherever it happens to be united 232 heavy roger uh standby one united 232 heavy uh again there's the airport to us now i'm spending down here united 232 i have the sioux city airport's about 12 o'clock and three six months okay we're trying to go straight we're not having much luck patience enroute to the airport be advised this is now an alert three i repeat it's an alert three they're advising that the dc-10 is five miles south they won't be able to make the runway 1534. united 232 have you understand you're going to try to make it into sioux city there's no uh airports out that way that can accommodate you sir okay we'll head to city we got a little bit of control back though only the runway united 232 heavy the airport uh the runway is uh nine thousand feet long 150 foot wide thank united 232 heavy did you get the souls on board count nearby hey right now we don't even have time to let go to call the gal project uh 292. roger thank you the aircraft is now 32 miles northeast headed in toward the runway still defending 292 people on board 10 4. 7-18 the engine 3 and engine 5. [Applause] the aircraft is now coming in from the north so uh assistant chief would like you to return to the interstate around the airport area [Applause] car 19 the red dog won you hit that one yeah jim i'm going onto the highway at northeast and i'll keep you alert [Applause] thank you turn 18 to car 19 19 go ahead i'm gonna come down that way somewhere and help you well we're going down on the highway now but uh don't have to try because if she can't make it we don't know where she's going to go in at okay 10 4 i'll hit that ricks and try to help you out all right get all the companies back in the house if you can 10 for 18 stations plan all companies that are inspecting everything back to the station immediately 10 10 united 232 heavy do you think you'll be able to hold about a 240 heading yeah we're trying to turn through it right now uh when you get turned to that uh 240 heading sir the airport will be about oh 12 o'clock and 38 miles okay uh we're trying to control it just by power alone now we have no hydraulics at all so we're doing our best here roger and we've notified the equipment out in that area too sir the equipment's here on the airport standing by and they're sending them out to that area engine 3 car 19 [Applause] car 19 go ahead all the way standing by at uh south otterbelt and interstate 29. 10-4 is uh we just don't know where they're going to come in at so we're trying to keep the advice therefore thank you yeah 232 uh we're gonna have to continue one more right turn we've got the elevators pretty much under control within three or four hundred feet but we still can't do much disappearing united 232 heavy rog i understand you do have the elevators uh possibly under control we built the whole altitude negative we don't have it we are better that's all right united 232 heavy there's a small airport at 12 o'clock and uh seven miles the runway is four thousand feet long there hey uh i'm controlling it myself right now it's just captain gets back on he'll give me a hand here he's talking on va okay united 232 we're starting left turn back to the airport uh we since we have no hydraulics braking is going to really be a problem i would suggest the equipment be towards the far end of the runway and uh i think under the circumstances regardless of the condition of the airplane when we stop we're going to evacuate so you might notify the ground crew we're going to need it united 232 heavy uh wilco cern if you can continue that left turn to about a 220 heading sir that'll take you right to the airport 48.29 for 18 and car 19 the county emergency vehicles have been notified mac one is on standby we've got one ambulance running out highway 20 east boundary 10 foreign ahead red dog uh did you receive that last transmission on this aircraft coming in negative okay he's coming in uh no brakes he reports all the emergency vehicles position herself on the northwest side of the runway because he's not sure he's going to be able to stop does he think he can make the runway now we're not sure about either you know 232 heavy you have to widen out just slightly to your left sir to make the turn to final and also i'll take you away from the city whatever you do keep us away from the city all right [Applause] i have a command poll set up at the city maintenance drives at the airport any emergency vehicle that's requested will report to the maintenance check united 232 have you been advised there is a four-lane highway up in that area sir if you can pick that up okay let's see what we can do here we've already put the gear down and we're going to have to be able to put on something solid if we can united 232 heavy roger can you pick up a road or something up there we're trying it's still uh anywhere from 2000 feet up to 1500 down now in waves all right united 232 heavy can you hold that headache sir yeah we're on it now for a little while united 232 heavy roger that heading will put you all currently 15 miles northeast the airport if you can hold that it'll put you on about three mile final united 232 heavy roger the airport's currently at your one o'clock position one zero miles and united 232 heavy if you can't make the airports or there is an interstate that runs uh north to south to the east side of the airport it's a four-lane interstate we're just passing it right now we're going to credit your united 232 happy roger and advising at the airport inside the runway in sight we'll be with you very shortly thanks a lot for your help united 232 heavy the wind's currently three six zero at one one three sixty at eleven you're cleared to land on any runway you wanna be particular make it a runway huh see the wind one more time zero one zero at one one and there is a runway uh that's closed sir that could uh probably work too the south it runs uh northeast to southwest pretty well lined up on this one i think we will be all right united 232 heavy uh roger that's a close runway that'll work sir we're getting the equipment off the runway and they'll line up for that one how long is it sixty six hundred feet six thousand six hundred and the equipment's coming off at the end of the runway it's just a wide open field so sir so the length won't be a problem at 19 he's coming down real fast down the south end okay [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] a lot of additional assistance out there it sounds like [Music] emergency hospitals [Music] thank you before i start two corrections the aircraft did not weigh that much that's the maximum weight of a dc-10 and we didn't have that much fuel that's the maximum fuel that ec-10 would carry and in 15 years i haven't been able to correct that so i guess we're not going to get it fixed anyway what i want to do this afternoon is tell your story the story about five factors that affect our life every day in one form or another how they came together in a really unique way to allow us to have 184 survivors from what you saw was a totally expected to be a totally non-survivable crash now those five categories are luck communications preparation execution and cooperation now you have all have your own personal beliefs and convictions and so as not to intrude upon those i label this first category luck you may call it whatever you wish okay but the part that i think luck played the dc-10 is the first step of our new generation of aircraft fly-by-wire now the pilots in the room just excuse me just bear with me on all these pilot things because a lot of people aren't i have some up here thank you anyway the conventional airfare after flown by control cables that run from the cockpit to the control surfaces and the wing and the tail and when you move the control wheel through a series of pulleys and cables you're moving the controls yourself as they got larger and harder to move we had a hydraulic boosting just like power steering in a car but today's generation of aircraft are flowing like everything else is done today it's done by computer crew gets in they signal a computer it signals another computer and things are accomplished in that manner so there are no more control cables as such but since we are one of the first steps in this process we do have cables but they're not hooked to the controls they're only hooked to hydraulic servos so what we do in the cockpit is reposition the servo hydraulic pressure and fluid moves that control for us so we have to have that pressure fluid or we have no control over any movable surface of the aircraft now we have a lot of redundancies a lot of backup systems we have three completely independent hydraulic systems any one of which is capable of flying aircraft and our engineers assured us this guarantees us against the loss of all hydraulics to 10 to the minus ninth power while the odds of you losing your hydraulics in dc-10 are a billion to one but on july 19th murphy's law caught up with us first please and we lost all three what happened is go ahead the number two engine the one in the tail suffers what is called an uncontained catastrophic failure there's a three foot diameter titanium disc to which the fan blades are mounted that forms the main power stage of this engine that disc was manufactured with a flaw so minute it was undetectable at the time of manufacturing i was told it was about the size of a grain of sand in time it became a crack at this particular time and place a foot-and-a-half pie shaped wedge of that disc broke out the resulting vibration was so severe that less than one revolution of the engine the entire fan section about six feet in diameter tore itself loose and out through the right side of the engine housing taking with it the number two accessory section and the number two hydraulics and then some 70 pieces of shrapnel from this disintegrating engine and housing and so forth penetrated the width of the horizontal stabilizer and in a random fashion one of them cut the number one hydraulic line one of them cut the number three hydraulic line and we had no hydraulics at all the wheeler wants to bank the aircraft no rudders to turn it no elevators to control the pitcher out through the aircraft no spoilers no way to trim any of our control surfaces they're all done hydraulically no leading edge trailing edge wing flaps it would lower to help us reduce our speed for landing and if we got the airplane on the runway we had no way to steer to keep it on the runway that we had no brakes what we had was a landing gear when you put the handle down into dc10 you manually unlock the doors and gravity locks the gear in place and we had the engine the left wing the number one engine the one in the right wing the number three engine the only way we had to control that aircraft was by adjusting the power on those two engines now that's something that's never going to happen it's not going to train for it's something completely foreign to us and we had other problems that developed in that 45 minutes we're in the air so getting this thing as close as we did to a landing in sioux city i feel has to go in the luck category and that's because immediately following our crash they put 12 dc crews in flight simulators gave them a hydraulic failure and i was told they didn't even come close to the airport once the national transportation safety board determined what our airplane was doing and how it was performing they programmed to do to do that as best they could some 45 crews had attempted to land the aircraft and none were successful so wise we did better than 57 equally trained equally qualified crews in many cases doing exactly the same thing we did not label what you will but i say for discussion purposes i think it has to go in the luck category but i do think luck played a very important part in many other ways first of all our location rather than halfway to honolulu out of the pacific or just taking off from some large metropolitan city we were in level flight over the relatively flat lands of the midwest now you heard me say on the tape i had serious doubts about making the airport there were times when we all did but the tension in the cockpit was relieved by just where we were because we all felt if we could just keep this thing under control we got to the ground even if we didn't make the airport the odds are we'd be an open field somewhere and maybe most if not everybody can get away from that time of day another lucky factor for us first of all it was daylight so we in the cockpit had the natural light to try to find a way to fly this aircraft to find the airport to line up with the runway we're talking about survivors the part the daylight played there was in the rescue operation i don't know if you recall with the main portion of this aircraft and upside down in a cornfield and that corn was eight feet high i don't believe there's any way the emergency responders could have affected the rescue operation in the time frame that they did had it been dark there's a term in the medical profession called the golden hour if you get your seriously critically injured people to the hospital with an hour of their injuries their survival chances go way up ice were there within 48 minutes of the crash and i don't think it could have been so if it had to set up lights or try to find everybody in the dark another very fortunate thing about the time was the actual time on the clock because it happened to be shift change time on the ground and the two hospitals there were able to keep their morning shift on bring on their afternoon shift and be completely double shifted with their own personnel by the time the first name is pulled up to the hospital and there are two hospitals in sioux city one is a regional burn center the other regional trauma center equipped to handle large numbers injuries just as we had and the last thing i'll credit to look at this particular time other than the fact that we did give the emergency responders about a 25 to 30 minute notice that we're coming so they had a chance to kind of set up and be waiting for us and not have to suddenly respond to this crash is the sioux gateway airport is a home of two national guard units and there are 250 trained national guardsmen standing on the tarmac waiting to assist in the rescue operation so when you start putting all those things together and how they kind of fell into place i think you see what i mean by the term block of course for one of our flight attendants and 111 of our passengers there wasn't any luck at all because they didn't survive but i think it played a very important part in 180 for us who did second thing this afternoon let's talk a little bit about communication so with all the communications high-tech equipment we have you think it would be a breeze we find of course that is not always the case now i thought we were getting pretty fortunate i thought it went pretty well all the way down the line not that we didn't make our mistakes we made plenty of those but basically i thought it went pretty well we're dealing with minneapolis air traffic control center where the engine failed bill records the co-pilot he was flying he declared an emergency and asked for the nearest suitable airport anyone with a runway long enough to accommodate a dc-10 that turned out to be sioux city so they turned us over to gateway tower five men operating at the tower that day four of whom most people have never heard of and that's too bad because they were given communications responsibilities and they carried them out perfectly their first job get everything out of our way and off our frequency we're 75 miles northeast of the airport when the engine failed on one of the main east-west airways of the country so a lot of commercial jets in the air six military jets in here out of sioux city a lot of private aircraft in the air because the weather was so nice if you ever hear the full air traffic control tapes after about four or five minutes there's no one on the frequency but us in the tower because those four men had transferred all the business to other frequencies so we'd have a clear channel with which to operate we found out later of course an awful lot of people were listening to what was going on but nobody was saying anything they also secured the airspace between us and the airport for miles around making sure people were vectored way around us so we could fly any heading any altitude we had to fly and not worry about running in anyway they scared the airport got the emergency position where it wanted to be on the airport and we said we may not make it they notified the juris department they put their communications network into effect and went out and blocked all the interests of the freeway that surrounded the airport so in case we did end up on the freeway there'd be no cars there and that job was complicated by the fact about 25 minutes before we arrived local radio and television and even cnn international was transmitting live this large jet aircraft was headed for sioux city and may not make it of course that brought out the spectators in droves still through a good communications network they kept those exits clear so it really was a tremendous job by those four men but that fifth man in a tower that's the one whose voice you heard on the tape who kept referring to us as united 232 heavy in a stressful or critical situation have you ever heard a more calm controlled professional voice whenever that young man get excited nobody raised his voice and you heard what happened at the end of the tape when the responders thought we're going to land safely and suddenly crashed they started to shout and once you start shouting you've lost it because if you shout the next person is going to shout pretty soon everybody's shouting to each other no one you're getting excited you're getting nervous and nothing is getting accomplished i don't care how bad it is how serious it is you absolutely must remain calm kevin bachman our controller did that so much so that i think he set the groundwork for the rest of us since he never showed a sign of panic in his voice we in the cockpit didn't panic because we didn't fly it instead and because they didn't the passengers did everybody stayed remarkably calm this entire 45 minutes and there's no question in my mind that kevin is the one directly responsible for that it was about two years after the crash that i really had a chance to sit down and talk to kevin for the first time and i said kevin when i hear this tape not only do i hear no panic in your voice i said i didn't hear a great deal of concern about our situation you're you're talking it's a routine vector to the airport and he said al i really didn't think you're going to make it and when i tell him what i just told you said well you want to hear something ironic he said i just transferred to sioux city because i found my previous duty station too stressful so we we took care of that for him in one felt swoop but a tremendous job by all five of those guys and they deserve a lot of recognition for it too and i thought we did pretty well in the cockpit now most of the groups that i talk to and i don't know how it is here with all of you in various occupations here but they work with the same people most of the time and when you do that and you get to know the people you're working with generally communications is a lot easier and i think that's the way it is with us well it's not at all unusual to walk into dispatch today and see three pilots who have never seen each other before in their life and they're going to spend the next four days flying around the country or the world and a confines of a cockpit and these people say well if you've never met you never even worked together how do you communicate just on a day-to-day basis much less when something critically goes wrong we do that to two things that united teach us in our training center and insist that we follow a day-to-day operation two things that anyone in any organization any department can use one united steel refers to as command leadership resource management i'll cover that later the other is very simply on united airlines you will follow standard operating procedures okay who you work or where you what you do everyone has a basic standard operating plan and the pilots in this room i'm sure will back me when i say we as pilots don't always care for standard operating procedures right we've been find this airplane for three or four years the books things have changed since the book was written so today we're going to do it this way that is not the way it's done on united airlines everyone follows the same set of procedures to the letter if you can if you find you have to deviate okay but if you'll follow that set of procedures or a checklist if you want to call it that you can take care of most anything that goes wrong in flight and as large as the dc-10 is there's only about three things that can happen in flight that's bad enough for the company to call an emergency that's where the crew must react from memory for one or two items and then you go to this published set of procedures everything else that can go wrong with the serious airplane and fight including an engine failure the company refers to as an irregular procedure and when an irregular procedure occurs you stop you don't do anything you just sit there for a minute while the second officer reaches into his flight bag pulls out a book turns to that page for that problem and then you can take care of the situation now i don't care how long you've been flying the airplane maybe you didn't know that problem could exist it doesn't matter because if the pilot not flying in the second house you're going to list step by step when you get to the bottom of the page in almost every case you've isolated your situation and can go with the flight it was about the second day i was in the hospital if i spent a flying for united came in everybody said you know there's two things unique to what happened on 232. first of all it's absolutely impossible it cannot happen and secondly and i thought well if number one is true we don't really need a second dewey and he said well in your case there is an exception and that it should it occur there's no known way to fly the aircraft it cannot be flown therefore we have no procedure for it and i recall very early in the situation i turned to the second off said dudley what's the procedure for a total hydraulic figure he's flipping through the book he says i can't find it there's not one in here but there is a procedure should we lose two of those three hydraulic systems well we get the bottom of that page rather than having our problem isolated and well on our way to chicago we're still 35 000 feet in the air without a clue as to how we're supposed to fly this airplane so we say well if you don't have a procedure for your problem what good is standard operating procedures no we didn't have one for that particular problem but we had a procedure that got us started and we get to the bottom of the page and realize this isn't going to work guys we're going to have to make this up as we go along here at least we're all three at the same point communicating with each other trying to solve the problem had we gone off in different directions by time we had come back together there's a pretty good chance we lost control of the airplane because we almost lost it three times and that's when we're communicating so if you've got a problem to solve you have a new procedure you want to do get your group together if you have time it's okay now this is what we're going to do and how we're going to do it and you write it down this is your step by step procedure to follow and then you follow it because if you don't do that you really aren't communicating and if you're not communicating that you may not have a chance to get together if something else pops up it's very very important i thought we had pretty good communications with our flight attendants too and when that engine failed there was no question on anyone's mind aboard that airplane that we had a problem because the explosion of that engine was so loud they heard on the ground well rather than rush out and pound on the cockpit door i seen your flight attendant waited for us to call her as soon as we could i called jan to the cockpit we briefed her and we felt the situation was serious enough that she should now return to the cabin and prepare yet and our pastors for an emergency landing and a possible evacuation we had nine flight attendants on the flight that day and they arranged in years of service from 22 years to poor tim owens first month on the airline as a flight attendant but all that time not one of them had ever had to actually prepare a cabin for an emergency landing i've been doing these talks for whole 17 years now almost and i think i've met most of our survivors off of 232. but should i meet one for the first time the first question i ask is how did you find the communications in the back and they've all said the same thing the flight attendants did a superb job of communicating with us and with themselves but they've never done it before how could they do such a good job they followed standard operating procedures jan sat down a jump seat opener of emergencies and the other flight attendants standing in the aisle and just like us in the cockpit she's going down this step by step you communicate by following your set procedures and this other program which i'll follow with which brings us to the key of everything we do home life business life whatever and that is preparation and i think it's been driven home to us very well the past couple years that we are not as prepared as we think we are businesses schools communities not as prepared as we think we are when something goes wrong now when something like this goes wrong there's four groups specifically that need to be prepared the emergency response group on the ground and all its related agencies the cockpit crew and all the company agencies the cabin crew and the least prepared group of all passengers because i'm sure you've noticed when you fly commercially no one pays any attention at all to what they're being told safety wise when they get about an airplane now of course because of your jobs you're obviously exceptions to that rule but just in case i'll hit it in a minute let's start with on the ground in 1988 two gateway airport and the surrounding community had this live drill that all communities are required to have at least once every three years by the federal government and for this particular drill the director of emergency service for the county gary brown invited you to the airport jim hathaway out of the city bob hamilton and their committee says let's go out to the airport and simulate a worst case disaster plane crash they go out to gateway and they simulate a narrow body 727 crashing with 150 survivors now you all go back to recurrent training for pilot training emergency equipment you have training and training and training and training and you train so much that pretty soon as well i got to stop i got to go back to wherever it is and go through this procedure again just to fill the squares to satisfy the government and i don't need to because i'm familiar with all this stuff we go through it so much it's all in our mind anyway so you have to go you don't take it very seriously you do just enough to get by and get over it so you can go back home and go to work that's not what a training session is for the training session is for you to put everything you possibly can into that to work with the people you're with to learn how to do things so look the changes that come out and keep yourself really up to date two or three years ago doesn't matter it's what happened yesterday the changes that came in yesterday that you have to have so any drill any training you have you have to take it very seriously treat it like the real thing and not just go walk through it and when i saw the kind of drill that sioux city had i couldn't help but see one of these let's not take it too seriously drills and i asked gary how did you get your people to take it seriously because first of all nothing as big as the 727 goes into sioux city so obviously that larger airplane isn't going to crash second when you had your drill you want to use the closed portion of the airport so you wouldn't interfere any more necessary with a day-to-day operation at the airport and third not even two airplanes going into sioux city carried that many people so it's a very unrealistic scenario we never told me how he did it but he said he convinced his people to take this drill seriously really learn from it should there ever be a crash at the airport it's bound to be a lot less severe than they trained for and they're that much more ahead just over a year after their drill we put a wide body aircraft on the very same runway that they used for their grill and we gave them 200 survivors to start with so there's really no such thing as a worst case scenario several years ago you asked people on homestead florida you ever think a hurricane had wiped out a whole city and now they're never that bad or new orleans or a tsunami that takes out 250 000 no those they just don't happen well they do they could happen anywhere anytime and we need to be prepared i think sioux city was prepared because they took that drill seriously because they learned from it i can't think of an airport in the country any better prepared to receive us that day than sioux city iowa i think 184 survivors of 232 are extremely fortunate that's where that airplane ended up in the air i said there's three groups that need to be prepared let me start with first of what i think is the most misunderstood group of professional people in the world and that's commercial airline flight attendants now i know how much you fly commercially but they're not aboard that airplane you see that you've got to drink a sandwich a peanut or whatever they are mandated by law to be aboard the aircraft for one reason only the passenger safety that is the only reason that flight attendants are on commercial airplanes now they don't have that much to do safety wise so most of the time they're providing service to compete with other airlines but safety is why they're there our safety our flight attendants go back to the training center once a year they're for two days the evacuation simulators they can go through doors they have various access of aircraft they fly they practice their cpr they're now learning to use defibrillators because they can put award aircraft and they review the one thing that they do most safety-wise aboard an airplane and that said briefing they give the passengers as the taxi away from the gate several years ago i was talking to 128 serious executives down in dallas and i said how many of you fly frequently everyone raise their hand i said how many of you every time you get aboard an airplane you stop talking you put down your newspaper and you at least follow along as a fight against doing their briefing well after a few minutes i got a three hands to go up to new york telling the truth but they put them up anyway so i asked the guy in the first row why don't you he said because we fly all the time and we know well i didn't buy it then it sold to me how wrong he was a couple of months later i'm on the way down to san francisco talking to the gentleman next to me the subject of safety came up the minute we started to talk safety he stopped looked around the airplane so by the way what kind of airplane are we on and i thought if you don't know what kind of airplane you're on how do you know how to get out if something goes wrong you're gonna follow those lights on the floor that everybody talks about so much that's a good idea if they work or get upside down or full of smoke the first thing you want to know when you find your seat on any airplane is how many rows after my seat is at emergency exit or how many rows forward what type of an exit is it bc tens for example have eight exits and they're all doors and for some reason they put six of those handles in one spot and two of them somewhere else so if you're suddenly having to find yourself in a darker smoke-filled airplane which way are you going to get out how many rows you're going to count before you find an exit where are you going to reach for the handle when you get there see these are things i think you need to know anything that you take yourself into what's a train a plane a bus a restaurant a hotel or anything it's your own personal responsibility to know how to get out when something goes wrong most of the groups i talk to say we don't care how you train in pilots because we can't use pilot training in our business anyone anywhere in any job can use the training at the airlines in fact all almost all aviation units that i know have used now we're very very standard in our training you just modify it to fit whatever your particular situation is two forms of training that we didn't have when i was hired in 1956. one is command leadership resource program i'll follow with that and the other is one that we call line orientated flight training so everybody says well see we can't use that well that's nothing but a name prior to that being introduced in the airline industry whenever we would go back to our training center which we did in denver once a year for three days any time we got into the simulator to save time the instructor would push a button and start all three engines at the same time he'd crank a knob and put us up at 37 000 feet you can't do that of course but it gave us a lot more time for air work so that when one of us made a mistake the instructor could stop back the simulator up to where he made the mistake and we could go through the problem again well one day one of the safety experts from northwest up at minneapolis is you know it's kind of hard to back an airplane up in flight especially where you made the mistake so why don't we have some form of training like the crew flies every day let's call flying the line so they name this thing line orientated flight training or the loft program the way it works we still go back to denver like we always did but they put us in the simulator for two hours of actual time from point a to point b oops doesn't work we can't start over just if we went out here to the airport we're gonna take a two hour flight somewhere and the simulator is programmed to run us through a series of problems get that thing on the ground safely once it's airborne it doesn't have to be your destination it's back on the ground program's over we go upstairs we sit down in front of a tv set and they videotape everything we do and we start talking about what we did downstairs what we did right what we did wrong what might have worked better if we had done that and we do this all the time routine cross-country flights or dinner layovers we'll read about a problem to somebody ahead not necessarily an aviation problem but maybe it is a crew had a problem i don't know and how it was dealt with and then we will come up with a scenario for us let's suppose we're flying along and this happens to us how would we deal with it and that's what you can do you don't need a flight simulator all you need are three or four people the same office same department same building whatever and you sit down once in a while and talk about things that might go wrong wherever you are and how you would deal with them and you can call your program anything you want to call it let's let's call it what if that's the name of your program i have an example for a what if program that happened at the world trade center prior to 9 11. but i just said every so often five security guards from the world center trade center would sit down and talk about things that could go wrong at the building and how they deal with it and one morning one of them said well this scenario let's assume somebody sets a bomb off in the parking garage at 16 minutes afternoon what do you think we'd have have you got these five people coming up with different things you might have what would go wrong what would work what wouldn't work how you'd evacuate the people all related to the world trade center because that's their focus well they talked about that one thing or not just maybe when that bomb did go off in the basement 16 minutes afternoon they were a little better prepared to react because when something goes wrong you have to stop think react and boy you may have to do it that quickly i've been going back to united's training center for 33 years when this happened the first officer the second officer and the captain who came up to assist us about 25 years of peace and none of us recall anything even approximately serious to this but when the time came we reacted not because we're so good because that's the way we're trained it works i've got letters back from people no way what's so associated with aviation they said we encourage our employees to do this because they can focus on where they are they're building whatever and we think it helps them be prepared to react the other program united still calls command leadership resource management most organizations are aviation groups have changed to crm career cockpit resource management businesses have developed a program and they call it total quality leadership you can call this program anything you want to call it it boils down to just one word and that is teamwork today we solve our problems as a team the things have become so complicated that the day of i solving a problem is over it has to be we will solve the problem now prior to this program in the airline industry the captain was law whatever the captain said that's what you didn't want your advice do you need your advice he made all the decisions he just went along with it of course they weren't all that critical but some were every airline in the world had some captains who took it literally they were so obnoxious so overbearing so impossible to fly with that you wouldn't dare say anything once in a great while one of these captains would make a mistake and since no one would speak up the airplane crashed and united said this is absurd we have all this knowledge all this resource available this crew must teach them how to work together to solve whatever that problem is so in 1980 following a similar type situation on united they brought into the airline industry command leadership resource management command someone's in charge i don't care who we are where we work what we do someone has to be in charge but what did the program teach this captain that he or she does not know everything there is to know about finest airplanes and the more engineers high-tech our equipment the less likely it is that any one person is going to know so it says you go anywhere you can to get the answer to your problem inside the cockpit or outside the cockpit inside your group are officer department outside time permitting go find an answer now in united outside our cockpit is our maintenance base in san francisco and they have a department there called system aircraft maintenance control acronym sam is made up of system experts for every system aboard every aircraft that united flies and they're 24 hours a day one of the reasons for being there is to assist the crew in flight if they have a problem we had a problem our second officer very quickly got on the radio and called sam he had a hard time convincing that problem because that's something that's not supposed to ever happen but when he finally did they called their entire crisis crew into the room they call it a crisis center chicago dispatch our crisis center chicago executive officers they actually picked up the phone and called mcdonald douglas the aircraft manufacturer general electric the engine manufacturer is anybody out there anywhere have a knowledge of resource the way this crew can fly this airplane well there's no known way to do it so they couldn't help us it must have been frustrating for them and it frustrated us because they couldn't help us i know very late in the problem i turned to dudley's at dudley uh or you get anything out of sam he said no i said forget it turn around here well i must have said forget it because when you read the transcript it says expletive deleted i'm not sure what that means but anyway and they heard it but they've been very forgiving about the whole thing but it must have been terrible for him we talked about it later on the four of us all these people on the ground trying so hard to help us find a way to find the aircraft and they just couldn't do it well we went there because that's what we're supposed to do that's what we're trained to do this down though it just didn't work but where this program has done the most good for anyone that adopted the program it taught the other two members of the crew of the team the unit i don't care how junior you are and i don't care how senior you are i don't care how long you've been with this job in that seat in this airplane or what your rank is when something goes wrong everyone there has a right to speak up everyone there has a right to be heard and if you're the so-called leader of this group you better listen to what they have to say if you think you know the answer they just might have a better one or if you can talk it over for a minute or two you might even come up with a better one than that we had that day in the cockpit between the four of us a total flying experience of 103 years not one minute of which was flying an aircraft that way we were trying to fly that way so why would i know any more how to do it than the other three and that's what the program called me you know how to do this swallow your pride swell your ego let's see if we can't find some way to work together to get this thing on the ground if you ever read the cockpit voice recorded transcript of what took place that day you will not read an order from anyone up there what you read is how about if we try this let's give this a shot oh is this a word all four asking questions and all for answering questions because that's what the program is all about as for the resource management portion come up with what you think might work we don't care who made the suggestion we hope it's this team that you're with that okay now this is what we're going to do and then you do it it may not work but you've given your absolute best shot to work and you're prepared as you can possibly be to execute whatever in your case you're trying to execute higher execution get this thing on the ground safely thirty seven thousand feet in the air bill records at the controls it's his turn to fly we rotate the flying every leg of the flight well i said he's at the controls the pilots know that's not quite true auto pod and auto throttles are flying the airplane we're just sitting there watching it's his turn to fly no warning whatsoever no light flicker no engine sputtered this explosion followed this vibration and the first thing i saw on the corner of my eye was bill grab the control wheel now most of the groups that i talked to they take that as an assumed that's why we're sitting there so we should be flying the airplane right but we all know we have cases and all forms of aviation including commercial where all the crew got involved in the problem so much that they forgot about the aircraft and the aircraft crashed but no matter what your business is when something goes wrong first somebody has to mine the store after that take care of the problem bill's got the airplane so it's up to delhi tonight to shut the aircraft down i called determined the number two engine has failed i call for the shutdown checklist he opens that book of irregularities with that sop and the first thing he says to me next one please is close the throttles we have three throttles on dc-10 the center throttle that's the one that failed now the first thing in a checklist is close the throttle get out of your way it's not doing any good now you have free access to the other two i started flying jets for united in 1968. i had never had a jet engine fail in flight the only time i ever wanted anyone that ever failed was in the simulator and when you pull the throttle back it would come back so i kind of figured that's what happened today we could not move that throttle it would not bust frozen solid so he goes quickly to the second thing on the list is shut off the fuel you push that button right there fuel just slides right off not today couldn't get it to go either so now we know we have a problem in the back other than just had an engine failure but we don't know what it is we go ahead with our checklist we do get the fuel shut off but we never can move that throttle and that comes back to haunt us for the rest of the flight we don't want i know we don't know how soon we realized our problem because you're all familiar with the cockpit voice recorder right okay the dc-10 it's a microphone mod right over ahead records everything we say also ain't going out going radio transmissions but it's only 30 minutes long and it records over itself well since our episode took 45 we lost the first 15 so we don't know how soon we realized how serious this was but we called very early nelly called my attention to his hydraulic panel and the next slot i'll show you what i saw when i faced a hydraulic panel i saw three hydraulic pressure gauges and they all read zero and they're supposed to read thirty seven hundred pounds and then i glance down here there's quantity gauges and they are at zero now frankly that's his panel that sits behind me exactly what they're supposed to read i don't know but i do recall the school telling me that he should read more than zero right but here's red zero now this is the number one hydraulic system of the dc-10 you can't see this right here there's a warning light that says pressure low so in the number one system we have the gauges saying no and the light saying no and the number three system we have the gauges say no and the light say no and the number two system the gauges say no but the lights aren't on well we could have pressure in that system even though that's the one that failed with all our backups but they should agree we found out later that the transmitter that turns those lights on was in the accessory section it was torn out of the airplane now to turn the lights on or they'd have been on it so as we're looking here kind of side bloody not trying to do or do we not have hydraulics bills who's at the controls says what he calls the attention getting statement of the day he said al i can't control the airplane i look back forward and i see something that any pilot knows you cannot possibly see in the air he has a control wheel 90 degrees to the left up against the stops as far as he'll go and the control column all the way back in slap as far as it'll go the only place you can do that is on the ground and there's nothing we do in a dc-10 that requires more than maybe 10 degrees of movement at wheel never ever 90 and certainly you wouldn't have 10 degrees at that altitude but here he is 37 000 feet calling for a maximum climbing left turn all the aircraft in the descending right turn it's increasing its bank like it's going over its back we didn't know it at the time but we got up to 39 degrees of bank now we're not allowed to exceed 30 under extreme emergency conditions and even at 37 000 feet you would never be at 30 degrees of bank but we're now at 39 degrees the bank about to roll over at this point i said what i consider to be the dumbest thing that i ever said in my entire life i grabbed the control wheels i got a bill and i found out he was he was absolutely right the airplane was not responding at all to the inputs now why we did it i don't know but we slammed the left throttle closed and shoved the right throttle up reaction of some sort and the wings started coming back to a level flight bill and i looked at ourselves now what's going on here do we have hydraulics or go back to very basic aerodynamics if you reduce the thrust on the left engine that reduces lift in that wing if you increase the thrust in this engine that increases lift in that wing maybe that's what leveled it so we're going to fly by the control here like we always did just in case and use the throttles necessary to try and keep this thing in the sky now we run into those other problems we talked about you can fly a dc10 with one hand anywhere anytime if you have hydraulics if you don't have hydraulics it takes four hands i said the next time you're driving your power assisted car and you're in the middle of a turn and your power drive your engine dies take what it takes to complete that turn with no power steering stop it with no power brakes multiply that by a factor of about four and you've got it trying to move the wheel on a dc-10 without any hydraulics so it took belnie both on the control wheel okay now what are we going to do about the throttles well obviously you want to put one hand on both throttles if you've been aboard anything it's got an engine on both sides you know you have to keep the two power sources together to try and go straight if you want to try and turn you have to put more power on one side than the other and we needed both throttles to try and control the altitude we couldn't put one hand on both throttles because the number two throttle was frozen so it's one throttle in the other and we keep turning right all the time i'll show you later why we're turning right but the third time we almost rolled over we determined when it went to roll and that was any time we let the two power sources get together with the same output of power so we'd start carrying more power on the right side than the left side to help hold that wing up well now we have the throttles displaced by about 15 percent we couldn't put one hand over throttles if we wanted to then we come to the problem of our altitude how are we going to control the altitude of this aircraft i'm sure the pilots are very aware but maybe the rest of you aren't that all aircraft are built inherently stable you tram an airplane up to fly at a certain speed and you leave it alone it'll stay there you change something it's going to change itself well we lost an engine so we started to slow down there's an autobot to hold the nose up that's hydraulically operated there's no elevator to hold the nose up that's hydraulic operating so by design to keep the airplane from stalling the nose goes down begins to pick that speed back up to where it was and to prevent the airplane from tucking under it's just goes back up again and these fugoids as i call term i never heard of before in my life you heard bill say we're 2000 feet of it up to 1500 feet a minute down but they're so gentle the people in the back aren't even where they're going on there any pitching motions just very slowly up very slowly down very hard for us to tell we're going to oxidize while the airplane's going up and down well the only way we could stop that was whenever the nose went down we'd have to shove both throttles up at the same time so that the sudden increase in thrust would pitch the nose up as soon as the nose started up we had to close both throttles so it'd go back down again and one of the problems was every time the nose went down so the right wing so even if we did push the two throttles up at exactly the same time even displaced the tendency to go over on their back well we've been up there about 20 minutes trying to figure out how to keep this right this thing right side up and one of our flight attendants returned to the cabin with what has been described as a worried look on her face one of our passengers saw this look and stopped her now she recognized him to be a pilot he was in a street clothes he won his uniform and she pulled him he pulled her over one side is on don't worry as soon as we get down to the heavier air we can go onto chicago because the airplane is designed to fly on two engines very well in fact even final one it just can't do it at 37 000 feet well she told him the captain told me we've lost all our hydraulics she was happily talking to captain denny fitch then he's only a dc-10 captain but he's what we call a training czech airman he teaches the dc-10 he's authorized by the faa to rate pilots in the dc-10 and one of his functions as a training check airman is know the system of the dc-10 inside out so he knows two absolutes about the hydraulic system the dc-10 one you cannot lose them all the same time that you do you haven't always fly the airplane he knows that for a fact we've been flying it for 20 minutes he said there must be something else wrong she must have misunderstood so he calls on this clr training that we have and so would you please advise the captain that i'm back here i said he calls all that training because prior to that training his only thought would have been sit down shut up steal that cockpit because that comes he's going to yell at you he's got his hands full but now he says maybe i can be of some assistance maybe i can help so he sent word that he was back there of course as soon as she walked on the flight they can say oh by the way we have a dc10 training check there airmen back here the three of us on hallelujah what better resource could we ask for we have an instructor back there and since they're always more knowledgeable than we are get them up here right now then he walked up to the cockpit very confidently took one look at the panel there and that was into his resource he had no idea how we're gonna fly the airplane either but now we have a next set of hands in the cockpit and after what all we were going through up there and to this day we're not sure how it came about but somewhere along the line he took the throttles and i think we finally decided was he asked can i how can i help and we were so busy with the yolk and everything else we did we said take the throttles well he's so now he stands between bell and myself he can put one hand on each throttle he can keep that differential thrust necessary to keep the airplane from rolling and he begins to experiment on what we need for power to give us a wing up of the nose down or whatever we never flew the airplane straight and level for one minute but we did slow down the fugoids and he was a little better able to hold heading because that's his full concentration now we head back for sioux city he's got to sit down of course he can't stand up for landing sometimes you take the jump seat behind me strap yourself in nice and tight and if we been up there much longer i think jane green would sit in that's how tight we had those things tight but he took the seat dudley who sits sideways here on his table he can rotate his seat around lock it into place and with all his harnesses nice and tight he can put one hand on his throttle we can't from our seat but he can the only problem is he's been so busy back here and he can't see how much power it takes to give us what we need because danny is positioned between he and the throttle of quadrant because he begins to move the throttles and request whatever we ask for not knowing how much it takes we'd have to correct him or don't put him back so far put a little more on the right side after about four movements of the throttles he looks out the window we're getting pretty close to the ground now and he uses what i call the ultimate command leadership resource training he looked up at captain pitch and said i think you better take this seat back i call that the ultimate because it's very hard to imagine a pilot getting up out of his seat in a crisis like this and giving it to someone else but dudley said he came to the very quick conclusion he didn't have time to figure out what denny had figured out what we'd figured out to keep this thing in the sky so he thought the best thing he could possibly do is put his what is now the world's most experienced man flying airplanes by throttles alone captain back in that seat after all he's like 19 minutes doing this no one else in the world has that much time then he gets back in the seat deadly straps himself in the jump seat and we go into sioux city think about the video you saw as it came into view the nose was going down at 300 feet we began the down fugoid the nose lowered the airspeed bin to build the radio descent began to build and the right wing started down we added power just like we've done in the air but our flight data recorder tells us later that we're only four seconds from impact when we added power and it wasn't enough time for the airplane to fully respond to that power input but it did do something that no one to this day can explain when we added power that last four seconds the left engine screwed up faster than the right engine and lifted the left wing that caused the airplane to strike the ground in a banking of 20 degrees rather than level flight in the investigation the ntsb determined that because we hit that angle it broke the airplane apart because it broke apart it gave our passes egress and this burning fuselage that they would not have otherwise had so their conclusion is we had more survivors than what ahead if we landed flat why once in 45 minutes the wind come up that's just one of those things let's go to the next one here i'm not sure which one we got here now oh why are we returning you can't see it but at the top of the hole there's a piece of metal at the bottom of the hole is a piece of metal and they're acting like a displaced rudder and they're pushing the tail to the left also the throat the thrust from this engine although it's gone there's still air coming in that would normally go out the back giving us forward thrust is coming out through that hole getting ram thrust and it's pushing the tail to them so as it pushes the tail to the left of course it makes the wing want to drop and the airplane roll a lot of my groups have thought well there's no way just an inline engine like this could turn an airplane that size we get so used to looking at the fuselage of these airplanes we forget about how big the engines are the next slide is an airplane you may be familiar with i hope anyway it's a dc-3 it carried two pilots 20 passengers and a flight attendant or hosted so they were called in those days if you have one around here somewhere go out stand under the nose of this airplane and determine just how big a dc-3 is because the next slide is a true comparison between a dc-10 and a dc-3 it's about the size of the housing for the engine they are very large engines and i'm sure the pilots in this room know this but if you're flying anything else and you see a seven triple a triple seven 777 get the hell away from that airplane because the intake of that engine is about 10 feet in diameter and it creates a great deal of thrust and it's going to turn anything that's behind it or anywhere near it our next slide is of the how we actually lost the hydraulics now this is the right horizontal stabilizer and it was written in the press that all three hydraulic systems came together in the tail and one piece of metal they had a picture cutting through and douglas was criticized as a stupid way to build an airplane of course it is that's why we don't build them that way we have three three hydraulic units in the tail yes any one system can fly the airplane two of our major controls are in the tail so they have to be back there but we lost the number two system when that accessory section was trying on the airplane but we have a rear front spar protecting some lines we have a rear spark protecting some lines all the lines in the horizontal stabilizer are covered by material heavier than the lines themselves to protect them but you see the red marks up there that's where the shrapnel went tearing through the airplane and you put that much shrapnel through the tail of the airplane and you do what happened to 12 of our fighters and does your storm operation you knock out the hydraulics in the tail and you shoot the airplane down so what happened to 232 we just got shot down but we got shot down by our own exploding engine our next flight i think of the radar tracking yeah this is the radar tracking we flew going into sioux city with some of the right turns taken out for clarification i kind of equate it to a possum today's approach normal approach into o'hare airport but anyway we're on a radar vector being vectored behind traffic to get to go to chicago the engine fails we're trying to keep the airplane right side up and the reason for the right turns is we didn't think we could turn left the airplane just wanted to go right so if we drift it off the heading which we did often we just do a 360 and catch it on the way back you notice at the top of the screen we did make a left turn and again to this day the four of us cannot remember why we made that left turn if we turned right we were probably going to crash we don't know what we're going to hit tower thunderstorm but we don't remember so we said okay let's try to go left if we crash going left at least we're trying to get out of this mess so we closed the left throttle push the right throttle up and made the left turn unfortunately without the left throttle to help us control our fugoids we went back in to the deeper fugoids again so we started fighting those all over again as we came out and rolled onto this heading up here we picked up the airport picked up the runway and from all the time an altitude we'd had in the behind us but it looked like was ahead of us we thought we could make it to the airport whatever the onsite is commander sitting on the ground did the same thing because he was about to send half the equipment out to meet us and had they done that by the time they could have returned and responded to the crash i'm afraid our fertility rate would be a lot higher so very fortunate in that respect too our next slide is of the airport this is runway 31 across here that's the one they want us to land on two minutes before arriving we're perfectly lined up with this runway we're out of time we're out out we couldn't go anywhere but right straight ahead so we changed runways on just two minutes before we arrived two reasons we shouldn't use that runway eight years prior to that the faa had closed that runway they've been abandoned for eight years without asking their permission we reopened it and i haven't heard about it yet so i guess we got away with that but they also had equipment sitting on that runway and they very quickly got them cleared they gave us a clear runway we missed it by 75 feet instead of landing in the middle of that 150 foot wide runway we hit on the left hand side because of the angle of bank the nose wheel the right main gear and the right wing have all struck the ground at the same time the impact was so severe it sheared the right wing that was that big ball of fire you saw that fluctuate the eruption fuel tank and it sheared the right main landing gear and then the media said we cartwheeled down the runway this aircraft never caught well anywhere we went from that bank angle back to the ground and because the smoke was so heavy we think that's where the entire tail broke broke off and then we set about 1500 feet more or less on our side down the runway and right about here at the end of the big black mark there and we don't know why to this day the left wing started to fly and without the tail of the aircraft to hold it aircraft down we went up on our nose bounced three times on the nose as he went diagonally across the runway and we had a lot of cameras to record our arrival but they were over here and they couldn't see us because of these two buildings but that one cameron picked us up right here what the airplane actually did was go up on its nose get airborne roll over on its back and come back down again broke into three more pieces going to the right tail section went straight on down the runway our next slide is of the point of impact why did that shear that's 12 inches of reinforced concrete and the hole is 18 inches deep you normally land the dc-10 at this weight at 120 knots we're doing 215 knots with a 10 knot tailwind we're ready to send a touchdown for a nice smooth landing as you know is one to 300 feet a minute we're doing 1854 feet from anyway at the ground so that's what broke the airplane about and we had no way to control any of that our next slide is of the wreckage itself and i show them to you for two reasons one is how well i think our aircraft are made because from every major portion of this aircraft we had survivors and secondly if you're ever involved in a rescue operation you have to look everywhere you can because you're not sure where they're going to be this is all that's left of the first class section of the aircraft unfortunately it took the brunt of the crash when we came back down so only six of those 26 people in first class survived our next slide is at the tail section the only part that's not upside down because the number two housing kept it from being so we had two rows of seats with passengers strapped in them most of whom survived and the two flattened sitting at each door on the next slide people say we thought you made it to the airport we're out in the middle of a corn field somewhere very common in the midwest to grow crops between the runways but normally soybeans are wheat this year they tried this corn it turned out to be eight feet high so we are on the airport between the runways and since we're upside down that's actually the left wing here is where the first class is supposed to be here's where the cockpit is supposed to be and here's where the tail is supposed to be most of our survivors came from this area right here now our next slide when jim allen and his national guard people saw this piece of junk it was hitting about 30 yards across another runway all by itself and all they could see were the cables and pulleys and wires and their assumption was this is the avionics compartment there's nothing in there so we won't get over there 30 minutes after the crash they heard something and got close enough to figure out yes this is here avionics but down here is the cockpit with the four of us still inside of it now it's normally 30 feet high from here down to here the aircraft is double decked at that particular point and we ended up being about waist high this gentleman down here is talking to bill records this gentleman was talking to us on the other side and it appeared bill was more injured than the rest of him more seriously so and they want to get him out first but jim call for the jaws of life and the object was to lift bill's side of the cockpit and get him out lift our side of the cockpit and get us out but unfortunately as he started to open the jaws of life it pushed this side of the cockpit down on top of the three of us and they're nice enough not to tell us what we said or who said it but one of us recommended they quit doing that right away so they stopped went over their side did the same thing to bill so now jim doesn't know what to do so he used his own pharmaclr he asked his rescue team does anyone here have any suggestions as to how we get this crew out of this cockpit well somebody had been aboard an aircraft carrier and watched a crane so they called for a crane in a forklift now they're just making this up as they go along too because they have no idea what they're going to do they use the forklift on the next slide i don't have they took these very heavy cables here but the next one placed him and they put the forklift right here and they ran four cables down and hooked them to whatever they could find and then because of what happened to us before they put a spotter on each one of us and they lifted six inches and the stock masks were okay took another six inches and stopped them if we're okay they kept going six inches at a time until they get to the next slide which is what the cockpit looked like after they got us out now if you were to walk up on that one that was all folded down like theta is there anything at all to indicate to you that's an occupied portion of the airplane sorry at me and once you determine it to be the cockpit and how big a dc-10 cockpit is i wouldn't hurt you getting anybody out of that either well all four did survive we all four went back to flying in fact the entire crew went back to flying at one time right now there's three flight attendants still flying the rest of us have since retired but we did all go back to one time the last slide i have for you is one i'd like you to look at and think about we see these after every major disaster of any kind this was flashed around the world with something like national guard hero pose boy from burning airplane and takes him to triage it is colonel danielson the air national guard and yes vince bailey one of our pastors but the colonel says when you do your talks please tell them when this was really taken he came upon the crash site as a national guard's woman had already pulled spencer from the fire he didn't pull up the fire at all take him just a few yards when another guardsman says i'll take him colonel and took him to triage so according this all i did was carry the boy 15 yards and they're making this big deal about this picture well it is a big deal if you look at it the way you really should you see two people in the picture right that's not what we have sioux city in 232 see at all instead of the one man standing there we see at least a thousand people who drilled and trained and responded worked very hard to make this thing come out as good as it did and spencer we don't see spencer in his arms at all we see all 296 of us because that's who they were working for well next time one of these pops up on your screen or newspaper just stop and ask yourself now what do you think it took to make this picture how much luck how much communications how much preparation how much execution and finally how much cooperation now you saw on the bottom of the screen all the emergency response groups have answered the call disregarding mutual aid completely just the heck with that they just came from as far as ways they could thinking they could help just way too many of them to mention but i have to take a moment or two to talk about three specific groups one is the people of sioux city zoolanders they're called when they heard on the radio that they were coming and may crash they said they're gonna need blood before we ever got there a lion had formed outside the blood bank and over 450 people lined up to give blood where are they going to house everybody well they said let's call sister margaret wicks up at briarcliff college and see if she can handle any survivors if there are any and she said sure send them up well the first report but there were no survivors and then suddenly there were ten then there were twenty there were thirty as that list grew and it got announced over the radio the zoolander said there's no way she can handle that many people on such a short notice so i have any idea what help they can be they load their car with food we close the blankets and head for the college so by the time the first bus pulled up there's a whole line of cars waiting to help in any way they could i had a tremendous outpouring by the entire community there a second group i want to talk about one that i'll stand in all for the rest of my life are our passengers for 45 minutes aboard that flight when that engine blew then we had a problem and for the last 15 minutes it would be a serious problem because i got on the public address system and told them it's going to be bad but the whole time they're in the air no panic no worry about themselves what do we do to help each other how do we assist the flight attendants and after that terrible ride on the ground hanging upside down their seat belts their first thoughts again were of each other john transy and greg caldwell are walking off the airplane with the fire building right behind them they come up on two flight attention hung up on their shoulder harnesses upside down they stopped took the time to help them out of their harnesses and off the airplane gary priest going through a hole inside the fuselage right in the escape path there's a woman that appears to be so seriously injured afraid to touch her but he knows people are behind it so rather than just step himself around this airplane this woman and take him away from this burning airplane that might explode any minute he turned around and faced the aircraft and directed people around her so they wouldn't step on it and jerry shummel young man going out what was the tail of the airplane he finally gets out of the smoke where he can breathe he's about to walk off he hears a baby crying back on the airplane he knew he shouldn't do it but he couldn't help himself he took a big bite of fresh air and back in he went he couldn't see her but he followed her cries in the smoke and found her one of the overhead bins where she'd been tossed took her out and gave her to a woman who gave her to her mother father and two brothers who survived the crash but had to leave sabrina behind because they couldn't find her and the more i meet and talk to our passengers the more i find out how they conducted themselves i said just i stand in all of their behavior and the last group i talk about is you friends neighbors family members co-workers of someone who has had something traumatic happen to them in their life nothing traumatic had ever happened to me i had a very smooth very almost blessed life everything going just the kind of way i wanted and i heard this term i think was following the korean war called post-traumatic stress disorder no way you weren't going to sell that to me you know things bad things happen tough good things happen lucky you so forth because nothing traumatic had ever happened well now having been through what i consider a rather traumatic event i know how wrong i was if anyone ever tells you there's really no such thing as post-traumatic stress disorder they don't know what they're talking about it is a very big deal and when i first really began to understand post-traumatic stress what i what surprised me most is how many people are affected by a single event it's not just a passenger's crew of 232 and their families who suffered post-traumatic stress it's the faa somebody's responders people in the hospital people who live in sioux city all kinds of people are affected and as you know the whole free world suffered some degree after 9 11. so it's a very widespread thing and it has to be accepted and dealt with well what do you do about post-traumatic stress well let's see there's some support group meetings you can go to another one that's kind of silly you stand up front a group of people who went through the same thing you did they know how you feel well i found out after my first meeting that i will never look anyone in the eye and say i know how you feel because i don't know what you went through i don't care what they went through same thing it doesn't matter everybody's affected differently so you don't know how they feel you can sympathize with them you can't understand how they feel but you really don't know so but support group meetings are a tremendous advantage they're very good things to have and i encourage anybody who has something going on if it's got a support group meaning go to it it's a very big deal how about nightmares and flashback do they really take place well when the aircraft hit the ground i was knocked out have absolutely no recollection of the crash at all in fact the third day when the ntsb finally got through interviewing me i allowed them to turn the tv on and just like there's a switch they turned it on and there's the crash and my wife was standing right beside the bed and i said oh who was that and she said that was you i said no no so we didn't do that because no one survived that so i don't have any of that to flash back on a terrible ride and all that sort of stuff but everybody else does and i've talked to gary brown the director of emergency services who's merely a witness said 17 years later he still has one recurring dream about that crash so they do come back so somebody tells you well i had post-traumatic stress during the war so it was all gone now it's really just sitting down here waiting to be recalled by a sound or smell unless they have learned to deal with it but so basically there is no cure for post-traumatic stress so how do you learn to deal with it you do that by allowing the individual to talk about what they have been through but unfortunately for most of us after we've heard the story the third or fourth time we don't hear it again do we oh god there he goes again why don't you forget about it get all this life well they're trying to get on with their life but they mustn't forget that incident because there's a very good chance that has caused them to alter the rest of their life so they must learn to deal with it and accept it the only way they can do it is talk about it okay who do you talk to well of course there's doctors and psychiatrists that you can go to for professional guidance but a lot of professions air traffic controllers firemen policemen pilots they don't want it on their record that they had to go to a psychiatrist i've never dreamed of going to a psychiatrist myself but i woke up in the hospital guys holding my hand he's a staff psychologist the next day the company's psychiatrist came in and between those two doctors i had 25 hours of professional psychiatric therapy while i was in the hospital and how do you talk about it it's called critical incident stress management at the time of my accident it was called critical energy stress debriefing but they start you talking about the crash i did not want to talk about that crash i just killed 112 people i did not want to discuss it but they made me discuss it and later we go to the peer group that's another thing that critical instance stress management is now it's peers because a lot of people won't go to psychiatrists so fire departments police departments air traffic controllers pilot groups they have formed go teams of people who are your peers trained to get you to talk about what's going on their family members who go to family members because they're affected too it's been very very effective it's something you just need to do you need to talk about it every emergency response group i have talked to in the past five years has a mandatory cis meeting after a major disaster if you don't go any more in that you don't have to and if you have to go to the side characters and doctor go it's no big deal i left that hospital five days later mentally ready to go back to work because of what those two men did for me and all the peers that came into my room and to this day 17 years after this crash if my friends my neighbors if i feel i have to talk about 232 my friends my family my neighbors they're all willing to listen because they know how important it is that i'd be allowed to talk and i listened to them because they were affected by some degree of what happened to me it's a two-way street my family and i have learned so much about how you must talk about a situation that we've had three tragedies so to speak in our family since that accident seven years ago 37 year old son was killed in a motorcycle crash five years ago my wife died suddenly from a very short illness this past april my daughter just passed the second year of a successful what could have been fatal bone marrow transplant so we've had these things to go and we talk about them and the one thing that you must allow in someone to talk about is if you've never been through it you will never understand how bad it is and that is the guilt of survival if you have never survived something with somebody that they you survived they didn't i could stand here all day and you never believe how serious that is it's an insidious thing and you have to learn to deal with it and you do it by talking about it so you've got somebody you know somebody who's had a problem going through a serious situation encourage them to talk but the main thing is be there when they want to talk now i'm about to close this thing off but before i do i'm going to ask i have a statement i want to leave with today any questions i can ask for you before i go right anything at all no i'll be here for a while afterwards because my flight doesn't leave for what another two hours so uh so connect if you're gonna come up on one and one we have to talk about it no questions at all yes sir did they change the routing well you can't they did a little bit but what they did do was forward of the tail in the number three hydraulic system they put a bypass valve and that's hooked to the to the quantity gauge if the quantity gauge drops below a certain level that valve's closed so nothing goes to the tail and since that's the only place all three systems go you're going to have the number three system you will not have a rudder but who needs a rudder at a high speed jet but you will have elevator trim because the trim motor is forward of the of the tail and you'll have some whatever the number three system drives you'll have some ailerons some rudders i mean some everything else enough to fly the airplane but that's when that's added on after the crash yeah yeah from a pilot's perspective are you ever up there thinking is it ever did it ever cross your mind we're going to crash or is it the ego or the train it says well he said he said i ever think we're going to crash none of us really thought we're going to crash now what is ego or uh hope or you know self-survival i don't know but we really never felt we're going to crash we may not make the airport but we didn't expect we just go in and crash certainly we didn't expect to have what happened here i kind of figured if we the best we could hope for was the my best scenario was getting on the runway at the airport and running off the end of the runway because we couldn't steer it but i was so afraid that that's not what's going to happen but none of us really thought we're going to crash out in the field somewhere now yeah okay let me go back to one of those five things we talked about and how close with that and that is preparation as i said it's been driven home to us in the last couple years that we are never prepared for what's really a major really major disaster we have our training we have our drills on offer at work but how about when we're not at work how about if we're out somewhere we can't get back to work how about if you know you just you're stuck there are you and your family and your friends and your neighbors around you prepared to take care of yourself until help can come because if you don't take care of yourself and you're waiting for help to come you're adding to the problem so you need to get together get your own little disaster plan and how you're going to survive until help comes and then i encourage everybody here go meet your disaster crew find out who they are when they operate when they have their drills get involved with them see how you can help them because i don't care where you live you don't have a large enough emergency response group excuse me to handle a major disaster they have to have your help a community has to get involved when things go wrong on july 19th in 1989 112 of the passengers crew of type 232 did not survive and i'm doing everything i possibly can to see that we don't forget them but 184s did survive and i honestly believe that one of the reasons that we had so many survivors was affected through gateway airport the surrounding community and the people in those communities were prepared to respond to a well-organized excuse me to a well-organized up-to-date comprehensive disaster plan so i hope you'll take the time now go back to your community wherever it is see what you have in the way of disaster plan and ask yourself this question when that major disaster befalls our community will we be as prepared as you city was and the more important question is if not why not thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: paladinjme

Views: 95,689

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Id: ovkgV2_t9uc

Length: 74min 5sec (4445 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021