A Chicago-bound DC-10 lost part of its tail in midair, tried to make an emergency landing and crashed Wednesday afternoon in Sioux City, Ia., killing more than 100 of the 293 people on board.
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For 30 gut-wrenching minutes after the tail cone section fell off, the pilot struggled to fly the disabled United Airlines jumbo jet 70 miles to the Iowa city’s airport.
Then, as emergency personnel watched helplessly, the huge plane slammed down on the runway, flipped over, lost its wings and burst into a huge fireball, spewing wreckage and bodies into an adjacent cornfield.
Miraculously, more than 170 passengers, some of them children, and the three-man cockpit crew survived. Some passengers crawled and walked through twisted metal and flames.
Survivors painted a picture of calm in the moments before the impact, as the pilot warned all aboard to brace for a rough landing. Those who survived described the aftermath as horrifying.
A Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said the pilot had reported an “uncontained engine failure” at the rear of the plane about a half-hour before the crash, meaning parts of the engine had come off. The DC-10 has three engines, one in the tail and one under each wing.
The pilot also reported a “complete failure” of the hydraulic control system, which would make it extremely difficult to stabilize the plane on landing, FAA spokesman John Leyden said. He speculated that the control system may have been damaged when the pieces ripped loose from the tail.
“The pilot reported the loss of all of his hydraulic system, which made it very, very difficult to control that aircraft,” Leyden said. “We know he had a real problem bringing the aircraft down and lining it up with the runway.”
The tail cone was found on a farm in Alta, Ia., about 70 miles east of Sioux City, which is in the northwestern part of Iowa, 500 miles west of Chicago.
Government investigators refused to speculate about what had caused the tail to separate. But Dr. Romaine Bendixen of the Iowa Air National Guard, a former air crash accident investigator for the Naval Safety Center, said:
“The assumption you have to make is . . . that one of the turbines in the (rear) engine disintegrated and just ate up the tail section, perhaps damaged the rudder.”
The plane, United’s Flight 232 from Denver to Philadelphia by way of Chicago, carried 282 passengers, 8 flight attendants and a crew of 3, United officials said. United spokesman Lawrence Nagin identified the crew as Capt. A.C. Haynes, a 33-year veteran; First Officer W.R. Records, a 20-year employee; and Second Officer D.J. Dvorak, a three-year employee. Nagin said the cockpit crew, all of whom are based in Seattle, had survived, but he could not say how many flight attendants or passengers survived.
Donald Dunn, president of the Iowa Hospital Association, said 115 people from the plane had been hospitalized and that 71 were treated and released.
Sioux City Fire Chief Bob Hamilton said the search for bodies was difficult because they were scattered throughout a field of 4-foot-high corn. Officials called off the search about 11 p.m. because of darkness.
“We don’t believe there are any more survivors,” said City Manager Hank Sinda of Sioux City. “There have been thorough searches.”
Spokesman Diane Kay of the Marian Health Center being treated at her hospital and at the larger St. Luke`s Regional Medical Center.
The plane, United’s Flight 232 from Denver to Philadelphia by way of Chicago, carried 279 passengers, 8 flight attendants and a crew of 3, United officials said.
About a half-hour before the crash, survivors said, they heard a loud noise from the rear of the plane, followed by an announcement from the pilot that one of the engines had failed.
There was no panic after the announcement, said survivor Charles Martz of Castle Pines, Colo. But just before landing, he said, “the pilot came on and said that this may be more than a rough landing, so do the best you can to assume the (crash preparedness) position.
“Then the plane began to dip and yaw. We hit with the right wing down. We rolled inside and out and all over the place.”
Martz said he crawled through a broken window engulfed by flames. “I said the hell with it-I’m going for it,” he said.
When the plane came to rest, said passenger Cliff Marshall of Columbus, Ohio, “we were sitting there upside down and it began to fill up with smoke. Then God opened a hole in the basement and I pushed a little girl out. I grabbed another, kept pulling them out until they didn`t come no more.”
Witnesses said the crash was horrifying. “It was the most sickening feeling I have ever had,” said Maj. Rick Sorensen of the Iowa Air National Guard.
Sorensen said he was flying a single-seat jet fighter to Sioux City from a training mission in Wisconsin when an air traffic controller told him to land immediately “because a DC-10 was beneath us with an engine out and could only turn in one direction.”
Sorensen landed, then watched in horror as the plane crashed. “It came in from the east, heading west,” he said. “He made a gentle left turn . . . then he began to roll to the right, dipping the right wing and the nose was low.
“It was apparent there was going to be a crash. The question was how bad. The gear was down. He was shooting the runway a little fast. . . . Then he impacted the runway. The plane tumbled, broke apart and began to disintegrate.
“Pieces of sections cartwheeled. There was a huge fireball and black smoke from the fuel.”
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Though details were sketchy, the plane`s troubles apparently began about a half-hour before the crash as it was flying above Alta. About 3:30 p.m., employees of Neil Quirin’s seed corn company discovered the tail cone in a research plot.
It was about 8 feet long, 8 feet high and 4 feet wide, Quirin said in a telephone interview.
“It looks like something inside of it popped and blew a few holes in it and it came down,” he said. “It looks like something was thrown out through the side of the cone. Whatever it was went through the side of the cone from the inside.
“Everything came down in one chunk. And it doesn’t seem to have a lot of parts missing. It separated very cleanly because this part of the plane is detachable. There’s a ladder inside of it and there are inspection doors inside of it.
“No bolts ripped out. It would appear this part of the plane is attached with some kind of latch mechanism.”
Other, smaller pieces of the plane were found scattered around the Alta area.
Byron Bulthuis, codirector of the LeMars Ambulance Service in Sioux City, said he was alerted over an emergency radio that the plane was in trouble about 40 miles northeast of the city.
The plane chose to turn back to attempt a landing at Sioux City, but it was not clear if the plane was going to make it, and ambulance services along the route were alerted to be prepared, he said.
Bulthuis said that after the plane crashed, his ambulance was ordered by radio to the scene. He said he and his ambulance crew took three survivors from the plane, including the pilot, to Marian Health Center.
Bulthuis described the cockpit area as “just a pile of wires as far as I could see.”
Aviation authorities said the failure of a hydraulic control system in a DC-10 would not necessarily lead to disaster. The planes have three parallel hydraulic systems, so that if one fails, two others should be available as a backup.
A plane’s hydraulic system helps push its wheels down for landing, opens and extends flaps to increase the lift of the wings and governs other control surfaces on the wing and tail.