Flight attendants aboard United Flight 232 moved through the cabin of the DC-10 on the afternoon of July 19, 1989, telling 285 passengers to brace for an emergency landing somewhere in Iowa. In the cockpit, Dennis Fitch was steering the aircraft with the only controls they had left: two engine throttle levers.
About an hour into the scheduled Denver-to-Chicago flight, the No. 2 engine mounted in the DC-10's tail had suffered an uncontained fan disk failure. Shrapnel from the disintegrating disk severed all three of the aircraft's independent hydraulic systems, leaving the ailerons, elevators, and rudder without pressure.
Without hydraulics, the flight controls were dead, and the aircraft rolled into an uncontrolled bank to the right. Haynes closed the throttle on the left engine and pushed power to the right, using the imbalance between the two remaining engines to force the wings level.
Dennis Fitch, a 46-year-old DC-10 training check airman riding in first class as a passenger, came forward to the cockpit and offered to help. Haynes sent him to check the ailerons through a cabin window, and Fitch reported they were not moving at all.
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Haynes put Fitch on the throttle levers, positioning him on his knees between the two pilot seats, while First Officer William Records and Flight Engineer Dudley Dvorak worked their own stations. For forty-four minutes, the crew steered a widebody airliner toward Sioux Gateway Airport in Sioux City, Iowa, using nothing but the difference in thrust between two engines.
Haynes radioed the approach controller: "Unless we get control of this airplane, we're going to put it down wherever it happens to be." When the controller cleared him to land on any runway, Haynes answered, "You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"
They lined up with Runway 22, a closed strip that had been out of service for a year. A normal DC-10 approach comes in at about 140 knots with a descent rate near 300 feet per minute; Flight 232 was doing roughly 215 knots and sinking at about 1,620 feet per minute.
At approximately 4:00 p.m., forty-four minutes after the engine came apart, the right wing tip of Flight 232 struck Runway 22 first. The aircraft cartwheeled, broke apart, and caught fire.
Of the 296 people on board, 111 died and 185 survived. The NTSB later determined that the crew's improvised use of differential engine thrust, a technique for which no training program existed and no simulator had ever been programmed, was what brought the aircraft to a point where survival was possible.
Haynes told reporters afterward that it came down to "just a group of four people who did their job." He retired from United Airlines two years later and spent the rest of his life giving credit to the three men beside him, until his death in Seattle on August 25, 2019, at 87.
If every system you were trained to rely on failed at once, could you work the problem for forty-four minutes with what was left?
