Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival by Laurence Gonzales

Author:Laurence Gonzales [Gonzales, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

At one or two o’clock on the morning of July 20, when the Grumman Gulfstream touched down at the Sioux City airport and taxied to the ramp, more than a dozen people descended the stairs, including the chairman of the NTSB, Jim Burnett, and a young engineering intern from Auburn University named Laura Levy, with her laser transit packed in its case. Immediately after their arrival, while everyone else retired to hotels and motels, MacIntosh and Benzon took a group on a tour of the crash site. The group included Ted Lopatkiewicz, Jim Burnett, Randy Curtis, Gary Brown, Frank Hilldrup, and Dennis Swanstrom, among others.

“Indeed, it was nasty,” MacIntosh remembered years later. As they walked through the night swinging flashlight beams, their feet shuffling through blowing paper and yellow insulation and sparkling computer tape, they passed the throttle quadrant that the crew had used to fly the plane. About the cockpit, Benzon said, “Well, it wasn’t there. It was twisted-up seats, pilot seats, and part of the throttle quadrant. We were aware that the crew had survived, and we were very, very surprised after looking at what was left of the cockpit.”

Frank Hilldrup, twenty-nine, chairman of the Structures Group, had joined the NTSB the previous fall. Wielding a flashlight, he made his way across the naked swath where the broken fuselage had skidded, cutting corn. He came to the severed end of the coach cabin from which the tail had departed. He stepped inside amid fire-fighting foam and melted metal, and shined his flashlight around to see the condition of the plane. He was shocked to see people hanging upside down or sprawled on the ceiling—many, many people, who some nine or ten hours earlier had been eating chicken fingers and watching the Kentucky Derby. His flashlight set the shadows of the people dancing, arms thrown up as if in some gruesome mockery of jubilation. He felt “a jolt,” he said, and backed out of there.

MacIntosh followed Runway 04-22 all the way to the threshold where the right wing hit. There he saw a long hole a foot and a half deep gouged through the concrete by the right landing gear, and he understood the tremendous force with which the plane had hit. Again he shook his head, marveling that there was anything left of the plane and its passengers. This was definitely a Crowd Killer, and yet most of the crowd had survived.

Under a bright moon that had been full the day before, augmented by floodlights, the group proceeded down Runway 22, across the uneven slabs of concrete, mismatched and shifted through the decades. They stopped at the intersection of 17-35 near what remained of the tail. MacIntosh cast his flashlight beam up into the seats where John Hatch and Martha Conant had been sitting. He saw the torn and twisted metal, the tangle of wires hanging down, the fiberglass batting inside ripped aluminum foil, the bent magazine rack on its side where Susan White had braced her foot, and the lavatory thrown open where the blue toilet water had vomited out at her.

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