Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival
by Laurence Gonzales, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2014, $27.95
Twenty-five years ago, a United Airlines DC-10 crashed in a cartwheeling fireball in the most spectacular way possible: right in front of a TV news camera at Sioux City, Iowa. Though 111 people died, 185 survived because the airplane’s flight crew, with the help of a United training captain who happened to be deadheading that day, figured out how to barely control the airplane with asymmetric thrust, despite the fact that its flight controls had been rendered useless by an unprecedented triple-system hydraulic failure. (The same thing had happened in 1970 to the Grumman F-14 Tomcat prototype on its second flight—the two test pilots ejected on short final—but never to an airliner.)
Laurence Gonzales, a longtime general aviation pilot and superb writer, undertook a massive research job to re-create exactly what happened that fiery day, and his words come painfully close to carrying the sickly smell of kerosene and seared metal, plowed-up Iowa corn and torn-up bodies. The words come not just from reams of crash investigation documents but from interviews with every pilot, air traffic controller, survivor, policeman, first responder, onlooker, NTSB investigator and family member that Gonzales could find. And if the book has a fault, it’s that Gonzales tries to tell us everything he has learned, whether it is the exact constituents of cornfield loam or who gave up two home runs in a Cubs game to which a passenger was traveling.
Gonzales has actually written two books, with interwoven themes. One is about the raw, immediate experiences (and the soul-crushing aftermath) of those who rode through a barely controlled, 250-mph crash landing after half an hour to contemplate their fate. The other is the search for the villain that caused the crash: a deadly flaw in the titanium hub of the DC-10’s center-engine fan, the many-bladed shrouded prop that you see clack-clack-clacking in the breeze when you look into the front of any modern airliner’s engines. First it was a search for the flawed fan, which had fallen six miles and buried itself somewhere…well, somewhere in Iowa. And then, once the fan was found, it became a search for the reason it had flown for years with an internal flaw the size of a pinhead. Ultimately it became obvious that the center engine drove a piece of titanium that should have been in a bunch of golf clubs, not an airplane.
Originally published in the January 2015 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.
