Captain Gene Hall Flies West:
Gene’s
notice and Obit was shared with our group by Carol but I wanted to share his
website that includes a number of pieces that Gene wrote. I never personally met Gene, but always felt
I really knew him. I like his story
telling and have printed a number of his writings in the past. In this way I felt I really knew him and what
I learned I liked. On his web site are a
number of writings that I think you may enjoy.
Click here: www.wehall.com
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United Airlines Pilot Al Haynes Shares His Story
of Crash-Landing an Aircraft (DC10) --
New York Magazine
Name: Al Haynes, captain
Flight: United
Flight 232, Denver to Chicago
Date: July
19, 1989
Incident: Uncontained
engine failure, complete loss of flight controls
Fatalities: 111
Survivors: 185
Our No. 2 engine failed us at 37,000 feet, just as we were being
vectored east by Minneapolis air-traffic control. We started to shut down the
engine using the standard checklist. But within a few seconds, First Officer
Bill Records said, “I can’t control the aircraft.” I turned around and saw that
he had the controls all the way to the left and back in his lap, even though
the aircraft was in a descending right turn. This was impossible, but he was
doing it anyway. We couldn’t figure out why.
I took control, not that I knew what to do. As I was reducing the
left throttle, Second Officer Dudley Dvorak advised me that we were losing
hydraulics in the other two systems, too. The only way to steer an airplane is
with hydraulics, and now we had none at all.
I thought to myself, How
are we going to keep this thing in the sky? You don’t train or
drill for something like this, because it’s just not supposed to happen. After
a little while, we determined that by manipulating the throttles, we could keep
the airplane from rolling over, and by alternating the thrust we could try to
control the altitude.
Our chances of landing this plane at an airport were not very
good. The plan was to keep it flying till we got close to the ground and then
just ditch it in a field somewhere. Dudley made an announcement about engine
failure, explaining to passengers that it would take us a little longer to get
to Chicago. One passenger, a pilot named Denny Fitch, tried to calm a concerned
flight attendant, explaining that the DC-10 is designed to be able to fly on
only two engines. When she told him we’d lost all the hydraulics, he didn’t
believe her—How had we
been flying?—but he sent word that he was happy to help.
When he entered the cockpit, we had him take the throttle. Bill
and I were both flying by the control wheels, which wasn’t doing any good—but
we weren’t sure it wasn’t doing any good, so we weren’t going to stop. Denny
stood between Bill and me and started manipulating the throttles at our
requests for nose up or nose down, and experimenting with how much power to
give us.
We flew like that for 45 minutes, trying to maintain our headings,
sometimes drifting off and doing a 360-degree turn to catch the heading on the
way back. We were aiming for Sioux City now, and about fifteen minutes before
we arrived, I got on the air. “I’m not going to kid you,” I told the
passengers. “We’re going to make an emergency landing in Sioux City, not
Chicago. It’s going to be a very hard landing, harder than anything you’ve been
through. Please pay close attention to the flight attendants’ briefing, and
we’ll see you in Sioux City.”
We assumed we’d land flat, hit hard, then bounce. Bill said he’d
go on the brakes with me, but of course there were no brakes. Then he said that
he’d use the spoilers to slow us down, but there were no spoilers, either. We
needed something to absorb the shock, so we all agreed that the landing gear
had to go down.
We tried to slow down by tipping the nose back up. Bill said,
“Ease the throttles back, we’re going too fast.” Denny said, “I can’t—it makes
us turn.” We both said, “Okay, okay,” and that’s the last thing I remember. We
didn’t know the wing was going to catch on the ground like it did.
I was knocked out after we hit, and I came to in the crash site. I
had no idea what had happened. I didn’t realize that the cockpit had broken off
from the rest of the fuselage, or that the caught wing had sent the plane
cartwheeling down the runway. I do remember talking to Dudley just before they
put me on the ambulance. I asked him if everybody had made it, and he said no.
It was very hard to get past the guilt of surviving. My job had
been to get people from point A to point B safely, and I didn’t do it. I felt
that I had killed them. I had a lot of psychiatric help at the hospital and
afterward. Finally, one psychiatrist said, “You’re not going to find an answer.
You just have to accept that it happened.”
Somewhere along the line, this snuck into my thinking and became
my way of doing things. Questions like “Why me?” and “What if this had
happened?” just don’t do any good. My son was later killed in a motorcycle
accident, and if it had been raining, he’d probably have taken a car. My wife
of 40 years died suddenly from a very short illness, and she didn’t do anything
to deserve a ruptured colon. My daughter had to have a bone-marrow transplant
five years ago. These things happen. What something like this teaches you is to
accept things and deal with them as best we can.
As told to Jacob Gershman.
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