The Engine Explosion That Changed Aviation Forever | Mayday: Air Disaster

ruticker 02.03.2025 12:34:29

Recognized text from YouScriptor channel Mayday: Air Disaster

Recognized from a YouTube video by YouScriptor.com, For more details, follow the link The Engine Explosion That Changed Aviation Forever | Mayday: Air Disaster

**High above the cornfields of Iowa, United Airlines Flight 232 is in serious trouble.** One of the DC-10's three engines has exploded, and the plane is out of control. With the throttles, the crew's best hope at landing happens to be in the cabin. Denny Fitch knows more about flying a DC-10 than almost anyone on Earth. > "That's how I transition from a passenger to a crew member. You want to go forward out, then I come back and lead it away." But nothing in his vast experience has prepared him for what he finds: **lost all three hydraulic systems.** > "I took it all in. The immediate fast conclusion is, Denny, today is the day you're going to die." United Airlines Flight 232 is halfway through its journey from Denver, Colorado, to Chicago. The DC-10 is cruising at 37,000 ft. The clear weather makes this a relatively easy flight for the captain and his first officer, both former fighter pilots. > "Well, looks like we're in M Chicago on time. The airplane was trimmed up, we enjoyed a cup of coffee, and the weather was good. There was absolutely no reason why we shouldn't have a pretty normal flight that day." Today is **Children's Day** at United Airlines; a child's ticket costs only a penny. Of the 285 passengers on the flight, 52 are children. > "Thanks for the cookies, Jan. Now how about some more coffee?" Denny Fitch is a United Airlines pilot and a flight instructor for the DC-10. The flight was normal in all respects. > "We had climbed altitude, the lunch had been served, the tray was being moved, and I asked the flight attendant if I may have a cup of coffee." Heading home for a few days, Jerry Shaml is a basketball executive on his way through Chicago for a draft of college players. > "It was a very smooth flight. In fact, we were told when we got on the plane that there wasn't any expected turbulence at all. Should be a real smooth ride for two hours to Chicago." And then, all of a sudden, with a bang, it's just like being thrown into a great big tornado of activity. First Officer Bill Records immediately shuts off the autopilot and takes manual control. > "What was that? There were no alarms at all, no bells, no whistles, no lights flashing, just this big explosion, and that was it." The first thing I thought when I heard it, and then I could feel it kind of rip through the cabin, was that a bomb has gone off. I thought, that's it for everybody. The conscious thought hit me that people don't survive bombs going off in planes. Denny Fitch pays close attention to the DC-10's every move. > "The coffee cup no longer had coffee in it; it was all over the table linens. My fanny was no longer in the middle of the seat; it was now up against the left armrest. That was followed by 10 seconds of quite pronounced violent airframe shuddering." I got control. Check the gates. The pilots can barely control the plane. Captain Al Haynes tries to figure out why the airplane was shaking so bad. > "You couldn't read the instruments, and you had to lean way up near the panel to read it. We lost the number two engine." The DC-10 has three engines; the number two engine is mounted on the tail. It's the one that suffered a catastrophic failure. > "The people in my area were calm, but you could tell they were very nervous. They were anticipating, like I was, what might happen, and we knew that what might happen wasn't going to be very positive." Records is not able to level the plane. > "We're losing hydraulics. Let's shut number two down." The reason you shut down an engine when it fails is you don't know what the damage is to the engine. If it kept turning, it could tear itself apart. > "Okay, that's got it." But Denny Fitch suspects there may be more to worry about than the loss of an engine. > "I was looking out the window for clues, and one of the clues that first appeared to me and it was an abnormality was the fact that the right wing of this aircraft was dropping. It doesn't make sense; the number two engine can't cause these wing behaviors. In other words, its loss doesn't have anything to do with what I'm seeing." Bill said, "Al, I can't control the airplane," and that's a real attention getter. So I look forward to see what the plane controls were doing. The damaged engine has been shut down, but the plane is not responding to the first officer's commands. It's banking further and further to the right. > "It's a very sickening feeling to have the controls all the way over and have them all the way back as far as you can go, and the airplane was in fact going the opposite direction." I've got it. If the pilots can't find a way to level the plane, it will soon be upside down. > "We had the control wheel as far as I could go to the left and as far back in your lap as it could go. You can't do that in flight, so there's something drastically wrong there." But the airplane was starting to roll over on its back, and we had to stop that. > "This isn't working. The plane has become impossible to steer. It's a dire situation, and it can't be explained by the loss of one engine." Dudley, check the gauges. What's going on back there? > "We have no hydraulic fluid left. All systems are down to zero. All three." That's impossible. A complex hydraulic system carries the commands from the pilot's control column to the aircraft's control surfaces, such as the elevators, rudder, and ailerons. Without fluid in the system, there is no way to move these crucial flight controls. > "Hydraulics are the lifeblood of the airplane. They provide the muscle to move the flight controls, to retract and lower the landing gear, to move the flap. A lot of the things that move on the airplane are done hydraulically. If you do not have hydraulics, you have absolutely no control. You might as well just take the control column out and throw it out the window." Even though the control columns have no effect on the movement of the plane, both pilots instinctively use them as though they did. > "It's like driving a car; if you're sliding on ice, nobody lets go of the steering wheel, even though the steering wheel is not effective. This is the same way; you're holding on to the controls, hoping, I guess, that maybe there's some hydraulic fluid in there someplace." What's it say in the book? The DC-10 has three separate hydraulic systems. If one fails, the other two act as backup. But all three systems are now empty of fluid. > "There's nothing in here for anything like this. A billion to one with the odds that this would happen. You're never trained for that. You never drilled for it. You never trained for it because technically it can never happen." No hydraulics means no flight controls. The plane could spiral to the ground at any moment. > "Let's use the engines." Yeah, why not? > "Well, we kind of made it up as we went along. Everybody realized that this was something that we didn't have a procedure for, so you just kind of grab for whatever's working." The left and right engines are still running. The pilots decide to use them to their advantage. > "I'm going to pull back number one about 10%. You go up on number three 10%. Nice and slow." By adjusting the power to the two remaining engines, they may be able to level the aircraft and make it fly straight. > "Easy does it." The engines are at cruising speed. The slightest miscalculation could be catastrophic. The plane begins to level off. > "Okay, that's got it." The improvised method of control seems to be working, but with no hydraulics, the crew and all their passengers are still in grave danger. > "We're about 400 miles flying to Chicago with only two engines. It may be possible, but without flight controls, the pilots have no idea if they'll be able to make a landing." How are we going to land this thing? None of the parts used to control the plane can be moved. No pilot has ever safely landed a DC-10 without hydraulics. > "296 people will soon die unless the pilots can find a way to do it." Now the nose is going down. What's going on here? United Airlines Flight 232 has begun to accelerate downwards. Normally, pulling back on the control column would raise the elevators and lift the nose of the plane. > "We have no elevators, but with no hydraulics, that control is gone. Normally, you just pull back and add a little power and pull the nose up, but we didn't have the controls." Okay, let's ease them up, see what happens. The only things working on the plane are the two forward engines. > "Let's try 10%. Watch the gauges." Easy. By increasing power to the engines, the pilots hope they can create enough lift under the wings to raise the nose. > "This is what you have to do because the power creates the lift, and that's what you need." The maneuver works; the plane pulls out of the dive. > "Okay, it's got it. Easy, easy. We just dropped 1,000 ft." Okay, we got to land this thing. Find out where the hell we are and get us to the nearest airport. > "Since the engine failure, the plane has been drifting to the right. There is no way Flight 232 can make it to Chicago without flight controls. The pilots need to find a safe place to land as soon as possible." This is United 232; we are declaring an emergency and requesting a vector to the nearest airport. > "What's going on?" Last hydraulics. We have to make an emergency landing. > "United 232, you're heading towards Sioux City. Would you like to go there?" We'll take Sioux City. Affirmative. Start getting the cabin ready. > "Okay, now we're climbing." The plane suddenly begins to climb. As it does, airspeed drops; the wings begin to lose lift. If the climb continues, the plane will stall and fall from the sky. > "What the hell's going on here? Watch the right side." I got it. To lower the nose, Captain Haynes must reduce engine power while struggling to maintain level flight. > "Okay, that's got it. I built the plane to start to drop, and I'm just trying to think, all right, what the heck is going on with this aircraft? We're dropping again." > "Use it up. Gently, gently. Okay, 275." Jesus, the plane has dropped another 1,500 ft. How far is Sioux City? > "About 55 miles in 30 minutes. The plane will hit the ground." Jan, don't worry about this. This airplane will fly fine on two engines. > "When I told her that, she replied to me, 'Oh no, Denny, I just came from the cockpit.' Both the pilots are trying to fly the aircraft. The captain has told us we've lost all our hydraulics." Bingo! That means no landing gear, no slats, no flaps, no flight controls. > "Okay, tell the captain you've got a DC-10 training check airman back here. If there's anything I can do to help, I'm happy to do so." United 232, understand you're requesting an emergency landing? > "This affirmative. We've lost all hydraulic control, requesting a vector to the airport." United 232, radar contact. Turn left heading 255. > "I don't think turning left is something we want to try." I wouldn't want to risk it. Agreed. The heading to Sioux City requires a left turn, but for some reason, the damaged plane only wants to turn right. Forcing it to turn left could be disastrous. > "Okay, we're in a right turn right now. That's about the only way we can go." The tower gave us a heading to fly. We try to fly, and if we would drift off to the right, we would lose it somewhere in the manipulation of the throttles. Rather than try and turn left, we would just do a 360. > "Unit 232 heavy, roger. Right turn heading 255." The pilots must execute a precise right turn without the use of the plane's ailerons. They carefully alternate power between the two engines to turn the crippled plane around. As they begin to turn, the nose suddenly falls again, and the plane accelerates downward. > "We're trying to keep the airplane straight and level, but as the airplane wanted to turn to the right, every time that they would turn to the right, the nose would go down, and the tendency was to go on your back. We had to avoid that." They managed to complete the turn, but they've dropped another 3,000 ft. Sioux City is still 64 km away. > "I don't think we're going to make the airport, fellas." There's a DC-10 instructor on board who's offering assistance. > "Having a trainer or an instructor on board the airplane was a relief to us because we thought he could give us inputs that we didn't have. Maybe he could help, and he volunteered to come up, and we were very happy to have him come up." > "Okay, let him come up." Could you come with me? And so that's how I transition from a passenger to a crew member. I remember their forearms and their tendons being tense. I remember their knuckles being white. They both were on the flight control wheels, their respective wheels, trying to fly the airplane together. > "Now that's an anomaly because the airplane will fly quite nicely with one person and two fingertips. That's just the nature of the beast when it's normal. This is clearly not normal." You want to go forward, Al? Now go forward. Let it come back and lead it away. > "Lost all three hydraulic systems. When I took it all in, the immediate fast conclusion is, Denny, today is the day you're gonna die." Tell me what you want; I'll help you. > "Take the throttles, 'cause he can stand between Bill and myself now, and he can operate the alternating thrust a lot easier than we can." Okay, pull back, pull back. Start it down. Fitch must ease back on the throttles to stop the plane from climbing. > "It didn't take long before I started to sense the airplane's behavior." No, no, no, no, not yet! Wait a minute till it levels off. The flight attendants are discreetly preparing for an emergency landing. > "Doesn't look good. I watched the flight attendant, I think like a lot of people did very closely, just to kind of get a feel for what they might be thinking, what they might know, what they might be feeling. For several minutes, they just spent time clearing the cabin." Denny Fitch keeps his eyes on the control column to figure out what the pilots want him to do. > "Is this Sioux City down to the... that's Sioux City!" Finally, their destination is in sight. Normally, the pilots would begin reducing their speed on approach to the airport, but with no flight controls, that's something they can't do. > "Because of the loss of hydraulics, they were not able to configure the wings for the normal landing, so they had to come in much, much faster to maintain the necessary lift. We had absolutely no way to control the speed. That was the biggest concern of us all was how fast we were going and to try to slow down, and there was just nothing we can do about it." If they can line up with the runway at all, they'll be hitting it at a very high speed. There's no telling what the impact will do to the plane. > "What was going to happen when we touchdown was a great concern because we couldn't bring the nose up for landing attitude, and when we hit the ground, what's going to happen is was a question in my mind. And where are we going to actually make the runway?" A little more right. Fitch continues to keep the plane level and on course by alternating power to the two engines. > "Intuitively, I started to sense the airplane, and I felt that it was becoming one with me. If that makes sense, I felt that the airplane was sending me signals that it was going to do something before it did." I'm Al Haynes. > "I'm Denny Fitch." No records. > "I'll tell you what, we'll have a beer when this is all done." Well, I don't drink, but I'll sure as hell have one. > "We were facing death; all of us were, and our passengers." United 232 is less than 10 minutes from a nearly impossible landing. No one is expected to survive. Emergency workers prepare for the worst as the pilots approach the airport. Captain Haynes decides it's time to tell the passengers precisely what they are facing. > "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Al Haynes speaking. As you must be aware by now, we're having some control difficulties with the plane. We're attempting an emergency landing in Sioux City. We'll be landing in approximately 8 minutes. We've got about as much control over the plane as we can get, but I need you to understand this is going to be a crash landing. Please review your emergency procedures. This is going to be worse than anything you've ever been through before, and you need to be ready. We will do everything in our power to get everyone to the ground, but we need your cooperation." I think Captain Haynes wanted to be as honest as he could with us. He didn't want to sugarcoat anything; he wanted to let us know that we are in a very dire circumstance. > "I was convinced I wasn't going to make it. I thought this is my day to go. There was serious uncertainty as to what the outcome was going to be. I think there was a realization that the airplane was going to be very badly damaged and that there was a high likelihood of injury or worse." Okay, let's start this sucker down. Flight 232 is 9,000 ft from the ground and less than 10 minutes from the airport, but it's still traveling far too fast to land safely. Instead of being at the normal 120-140 knot range, they were well over 200 knots to be able to control the airplane. This means that it is going to arrive with a whole lot more force; it's going to need a much, much greater distance to land, and equally, their margin for error now becomes extremely small. > "Anybody got any ideas about putting the gear down?" Lowering the landing gear will help slow the plane down. Without hydraulics, the pilots have to release the gear manually and hope that gravity locks it into place. > "I hope that doesn't... If the gear doesn't lock, the plane is doomed." All green. The gear creates enough drag to slightly reduce the airspeed, but the plane is still traveling almost 70 knots faster than it should be. > "Okay, start it down now." The passengers try to prepare themselves for what may be their final moments. > "The last three things I said to my wife were, 'I love you.' I thought things were in place for me not to survive this incident. And then the last couple of minutes, I started thinking to myself, you know what? Just in case you're wrong, you better get ready and form a game plan here. So the last four or five minutes, I thought to myself, all right, if you hit the ground and you're dead or you're hurt seriously, you might not be able to help. But if you aren't, don't flee the plane. Don't panic. Stay around, stay under control, and try to help other people as best I could." The plane is only 27 km away from the airport. > "Do you want to seat? Yeah, you might." Okay, all the pilots will need to be securely strapped in for the attempted landing. Only a few kilometers away from the airport, the crew must make another circle to the right to adjust their course. > "The airport's down there. Got it? I don't see it yet." As soon as it starts down, back we go. Concern within was how fast are we going to hit the ground and what's going to happen when we hit the ground. When we hit the ground hard, let's hope it's not hard enough to tear the airplane apart. > "Forward, forward, forward." Without flaps, airspeed is the only thing keeping the plane in the air. The pilots have no choice but to keep the engines at close to full power. > "Will this be a fun landing? Hold the heading if you can. That's fine." From an altitude of 37,000 ft, the pilots have corkscrewed their way down to within sight of a runway. Now they have to get the plane on the ground. The plane is descending to the runway at 1,600 ft per minute, faster than the space shuttle comes into land. > "That's fine. I got the runway. It's off to the right over there." But the pilots can't slow their plane. In fact, Fitch must increase engine speed to keep the nose up. > "Bring it on down. Oh baby, he's around down. Tell them we're 2 minutes away from landing." 2 minutes away from landing. 2 minutes. > "Your attitude is you will get it. I will do this. I will do it. I will not accept failure. I will not accept anything less than the best. And so even if I die, that's the way I die." 232, you are clear to land on any runway. > "You want to make a particular and make it a runway, huh? I know we're close enough now, coming in fast enough now that we're going to make the airport. That was the main thing." Whether we actually made the runway or not, I don't know. The aircraft is still traveling much faster than normal, but the crew cannot delay any longer. This is their only shot at a landing. > "Get on the brakes with me." Yeah, they will have only minimal braking power and reverse thrust to stop the plane on the ground. They won't be able to steer. No pilot at the controls of a commercial jetliner has ever landed a DC-10 safely at this speed, with or without flight controls. > "Pull the power back. That's right, pull the left one back." You could hear people crying, and every once in a while, you could hear people kind of scream a little bit. I remember at the end thinking, all right, there's nothing else I can do to get ready here now. I just got to see what happens, see what unfolds. > "The plane is 30 seconds from landing. Brace, brace, brace!" I had no idea what was going to happen when we touched down. We were going way too fast. We had no flaps, we had no brakes, and we had no way to steer the airplane once we did arrive at the runway at the very bottom. I was hoping to do the pitch up by putting more power and pulling the nose up, causing the whole belly to become drag into the wind and slow on so that we would touch down on a landing here and then roll on the runway. Controllers can't bear to watch what's about to unfold. Only 100 ft from the ground, the nose dips again, increasing its already dangerous speed. > "The nose lower the airspeed, and we get to build up again, and the right wing started to go down again, and we couldn't have that. We had to try and get it level." Close the throttles. Close them off. > "I can't pull them off or we'll lose it. That's what's turning you." We both said, okay, he's in charge of the throttles. Do whatever you have to do there. There had to be complete trust. > "Okay, okay, left! R left! Left! Left! Left! Left! Left! We're turning! We're turning!" **We're turning!** I didn't get it quite right, and, uh, we hit very hard. My head smashed down into the radio rack in front of me. It's just like somebody had a giant hand on the back of my head, forcing my face down into this rack. We hit just incredibly hard. I don't think, for all the thoughts about what it might be like, that I was ready for that impact. I could feel the plane go upside down, and we slid upside down and backwards for what seemed like forever. I remember looking out the window and saw it go blue for a split second, darkened again to brown and green, and then more violence than I can put into words. I had to take a couple of seconds to figure out whether I was alive or not. I figured if I'm feeling pain, I must be alive. Then I realized what had happened. I realized we had flipped over. I was hanging upside down in my chair. I had no choice but to go back because smoke was chasing us all to the back of the plane. I finally found an opening where we had broken off in the tail section and got out that way. I stepped out of the plane and realized I was in a cornfield. I had been in plenty of them; that gave me some comfort. I knew that at this point, I was probably in pretty good shape and that I wasn't going to perish in that crash. I took a couple of steps out of the plane and heard a baby crying back inside the wreckage. I didn't stand there and weigh the risk; I didn't think it through. I just reacted to the sound. The next thing I remember, I'm back inside the wreckage. > "It's okay, it's okay." Jerry Shaml manages to find the child and helps reunite her with her parents. > "It's okay." But others are not so lucky. The plane lies in pieces on the runway and in a cornfield. There is no sign of the cockpit or the pilots. > "On the initial viewing of the aircraft, hitting the ground and tumbling down, there was a huge fireball, and so on and so forth. We didn't expect to find survivors." Forty-five minutes after the crash, the cockpit is discovered 180 m from the rest of the wreckage. All four pilots have survived. > "I was unconscious. Fortunately, I was knocked out on impact. I have absolutely no recollection of the crash at all. The next thing I heard is somebody say, 'Are there really four of you in there?' and I heard more than one voice say, 'Yes.' I knew at the time that I saw this fireman coming across the field that I had been in a crash and I'm alive." I had no idea what kind of shape I was in, whether my legs were attached. I couldn't move my fingers; I was literally pinned to the ground, compressed in the wreckage. A white-hot pain in my back and my side—broken ribs, punctured lung. I never lost consciousness; I have complete recall of it all. My time in the hospital: first night almost died, subsequently nine surgeries, and 18 months of recovery. One hundred eleven passengers and crew are dead, including 11 children, but 185 people have survived the fiery crash landing. > "The first feelings were that there were not likely to be any survivors out of this, and yet there were a large number of survivors." The damage to the tail section confirms what the pilots reported: the number two engine exploded in mid-flight. Investigators need to know why and how it led to the catastrophic loss of all hydraulics. > "We already pretty well knew what we were looking for. We knew we'd had an engine failure of horrific proportions. We knew we'd had a hydraulic issue that had depleted all three hydraulic systems." The NTSB's Bob Macintosh is in charge of the team dispatched to Sioux City. The investigation focused fairly quickly on the shrapnel, the trajectories of the various parts, and how they could have disabled the airplane in the way that it did. It doesn't take investigators long to discover that a vital piece of the engine is missing. > "The fan disc is such an obvious part of the front of the engine that when it's missing, you know it. The fan disc is one of the largest pieces of the engine; it is responsible for bringing air into the core. It's around almost 400 lb and about 32 in in diameter." That was missing, and we knew that it was going to be our job to find that because that was the destructive force that had brought this airplane down. Since the accident involved the failure of such a key component, metallurgists join the NTSB to help find the cause. > "The rotating parts in the engines of jet airplanes have to withstand a lot of stress, so you want to use a material that optimizes the strength while minimizing the weight. At the front of the engine, the fan disc, for example, they use titanium alloys." Jet engines are extremely reliable; to have a fan disc break off is almost unheard of. The failure of a major rotating part of any kind, whether it be at the front end or anywhere in the engine, is a major event. Before they can understand this rare failure, investigators must find the missing fan blade assembly. The clue to solving the mystery behind the crash is likely lying in a farmer's field somewhere in Iowa. A massive search gets underway. > "It was extremely frustrating to us because we knew we didn't have it, and we knew it was going to be a pretty tough job to find it. We were motivated to find it, but we knew it was going to be tough." Now I can't control the airplane. Meanwhile, investigators turn their attention to the plane's hydraulics, wondering how a system with triple redundancy could have failed. > "In theory, if you lose an engine, you lose one of the systems. Our challenge, recognizing that the number two engine was the origin of the problem, was to try and figure out why all three hydraulic systems had failed." Each of the three hydraulic systems is powered by one of the three engines. Since only one engine failed, two hydraulic systems should have kept working. Investigators examined the wreckage around the number two engine and began to see what might have happened. > "There was a place where all three hydraulic systems were getting together, and that was in the horizontal stabilizer to actuate the elevators for up and down control. All three of the plane's hydraulic lines concentrate at the back of the plane below the rear engine. The number two system was destroyed when the fan disc blew apart; exploding shrapnel damaged the two remaining systems. All the hydraulic lines were either punctured or severed. The plane essentially bled to death." So we were able to understand how an engine failure in number two would result in number one and number three being rendered inoperative. > "Now that investigators know how much damage the broken fan disc caused, it's all the more urgent to figure out why it failed. They must find the broken piece. A $50,000 reward is offered to anyone who can find it." Three months after United Flight 232 crash-landed in Sioux City, Iowa, a farmer finds the crucial piece of the puzzle lying in her field about 100 km from the airport. > "This was a whole combine, and the combine met with resistance. I backed up, and I, oh my gosh, this is it!" The lady who found the fan disc was our hero of the day. This was an extremely important piece of evidence. The massive disc is broken into two pieces. > "How could a break like that? It was extremely unusual, and we really wanted to try and figure out why this thing had what we call burst." The titanium alloy used to make this vital part is extremely strong and resilient; it shouldn't just snap in two. > "Take a look at this. When you first see the disc broken, it's almost unimaginable to see how something so large could break into two big pieces. It didn't happen overnight." A close examination of the broken part reveals surprising evidence of why it fractured. > "It's definitely fatigue. It was pretty easy to visually look at this to see that there was a fatigue crack there." The investigation then continued to see where the fatigue crack initiated. > "Can you cut me a small section from here?" Investigators need to know what had weakened this powerful alloy. They trace the fracture back to where it began and remove the section for testing. > "Well, well, well." They find elements that should not be in the metal: nitrogen and oxygen mixed in with the titanium. > "Nitrogen and other elements such as oxygen, if they are present in the titanium alloy, cause an increase in brittleness so that when you load this area, it'll crack very easily. A bad batch of titanium, I say so." Investigators conclude that a microscopic imperfection in the titanium used to make the fan blade caused a crack that developed slowly over 17 years. It kept progressively getting bigger and bigger each time the engine started and stopped. It was only a matter of time before the disc finally broke, and disaster occurred. > "This part was supposed to be inspected on a regular basis, and indeed it was, but where the crack was located simply was extremely difficult to detect." The NTSB immediately recommends more thorough inspections of all engine fan discs. Titanium is now melted three times in a vacuum to remove impurities. Any kind of oxygen and nitrogen that might be in the material is sucked out into the vacuum and drawn out. The DC-10's hydraulic system also gets an upgrade. Designers add a series of valves so that a line can be sealed in case of a rupture. > "Every accident is a learning experience, and Sioux City, although it was several decades ago, continues to be a learning experience." Despite the loss of life, the pilots' actions during the disaster are hailed as a magnificent feat of flying. > "I think it surprised some of the survivors that they had made it, but it was a testament to the skill of the crew and the ruggedness of the airplane." We have no hydraulic fluid left; all systems are down to zero. > "That's impossible. Once they lost the third hydraulic system, they were in uncharted territory with no checklist and having to improvise." > "Let's use the engines." It was a catastrophic event that they made turn out reasonably well. > "Tell me what you want, and I'll help you take the throttles." Captain Haynes' decision to accept an offer of help in a moment of crisis is what many believe saved the lives of 185 people. > "For Al Haynes to give a perfect stranger the only thing controlling his airplane, I think he knew clearly at this point that was all that was there. I think it's a phenomenal feat, and I can't give enough kudos to him for that." All four pilots received the Polaris Award, the highest civilian aviation decoration awarded for exceptional airmanship and heroic actions. > "We got the airplane to the runway; that's the most we could hope for, even more than most people thought we could hope for. To say that we were heroes in doing that? No, no, we were just fortunate that the things we tried worked." I was willing to give up my life. > "No, I mean that's not being heroic. I was willing to give up my life because to me that's my responsibility as an airline captain. You trust me; I don't want to fail that trust." Al Haynes and Bill Records were back in the cockpit within a year of the accident. For Denny Fitch, it took a bit more time. > "Doctors, God love them, they fixed me, but they didn't believe I'd ever make captaincy again. They didn't think I'd ever be able to fly." I think it was 16 or 18 months later; it was Flight 187 to Honolulu. > "If you've been in the cabin, you would have heard this announcement: 'Today in command of your flight as Captain Denny Fitch. Never give up.'"

Назад

Залогинтесь, что бы оставить свой комментарий