Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (11 page)

“I sure can,” MacIntosh said.

“We’ll send as many people as you need,” Armentrout said, “but you’re gonna take it.” Then he turned to Robert Benzon, another major investigator, and said, “Bob, you’ve just done a big one out in Denver. Why don’t you go with Bob and we’ll put both Bobs on it.”

Then, as MacIntosh described it, “We were headed out the door.”

He had been at the NTSB for about fourteen months, and this was his first major crash for “the Board,” as the people there called that organization. From 1966 to 1978, MacIntosh had been flight safety officer and accident investigator for the Air Force. He had then joined Beech Aircraft and conducted sixty accident investigations in three years for that company. In addition, as Benzon put it, MacIntosh “flew RF-101 Voodoos over North Vietnam for at least one tour. Very fast flying, but very low, and unarmed. No way to shoot back . . . no way. Very scary stuff.” So MacIntosh brought considerable experience to the job as he drove home to suburban Virginia to get packed for the Go Team.

NTSB Go Teams have become burdened with a good deal of mythology over the years. It is said, for example, that each member of the Go Team keeps a packed suitcase under his desk to make a quick getaway any time a plane crashes. However, as members of the Go Team that responded to United Flight 232 later explained, that would be impractical, since you never knew if you were going to Alaska in January or to Iowa in the middle of summer. Ted Lopatkiewicz, who was the public affairs officer for the NTSB during the investigation, said, “The rule is you need to be able to leave town in two hours. That’s a little exaggerated. I don’t know when we’ve actually left in two hours.” The NTSB issues a schedule each Monday at 5:00 p.m. designating the Board member, public affairs officer, and the technical specialists who will be on the Go Team in the event of a crash. Every Go Team includes one of the five members of the Board.

As MacIntosh made his way home, the administrative staff at NTSB headquarters flew into action. It was up to them to arrange for an aircraft to take the Go Team to Sioux City. They also set about securing the resources that the Go Team would need on the ground once they arrived. The staffers were acutely aware of the potential hazards of moving more than a dozen highly technical investigators across the country and establishing them effectively in the midst of a wrecked 185-ton aircraft and its contents. Foremost in the minds of administrative staff members was securing hotel rooms and rental cars. They knew that members of the press, even in those crucial first moments, were descending on the town and snapping up all lodging and transportation. Network TV stations and CNN would buy off blocks of rooms. As it happened, by the time the NTSB staff members called Sioux City, the only lodging left was a run-down motel called the Flamingo. Across the river in South Sioux City, Nebraska, it would quickly become known among Go Team members as “the Flamin’ O.”

Susan White stood at her demonstration position waiting for Jan Brown to give the final briefing to the passengers. Looking aft from exit 3-Left, she noticed a blonde woman in a window seat a few aisles back. Cynthia Louise Muncey, twenty-five, was on her way back from vacation in Hawaii, as were many passengers on flight 232 that day. Muncey was dressed in bright summer yellow.
She had sent a postcard
to her little sister Pam before boarding a flight to Denver. “Hello All!” read the card from the Outrigger West Hotel in Honolulu. “I made it!! You wouldn’t believe it here!! Lots of really big motels! You would love it here, Pam! Even better than Florida! Call you if I ever go home! Ha! Ha!”

Now Cindy “was crying hysterically,” White later said. She thought, “I should go comfort her before this starts spreading.” White left her position and hurried down the aisle. She stood before Cindy’s row. The dark-haired man sitting next to her, Efram Upshaw, twenty-three, looked imploringly into White’s eyes. She could see that he was both frightened and at a loss for how to help the weeping woman. Upshaw would be severely injured, the last of all the survivors to be released from the hospital, but he would live. White said, “Excuse me,” and leaned across him to hug Cindy. “She was sweaty from crying. I just wanted to cry right there with her,” White said, “and I just prayed for the will, the strength not to cry.”

Cindy began keening, “Are we gonna die? Are we gonna die? I feel like we’re gonna die! I can’t die, I have three small children. They’re waiting for me to come home. They need me! I can’t die!”

Years later, White said, “I honestly felt we were going to die when she asked me, that’s how afraid I was inside. But I had willed myself not to cry and I somehow remained composed.”

Cindy’s three little girls—seven-year-old Kayce; Amber, who was about to turn five; and Audra, who had recently celebrated her second birthday—were waiting for her at home, along with Pam, twenty-one. Pam adored her sister and was especially eager to reunite with Cindy. “My first memory of our special sister bond,” Pam recalled, “is a day that we were running late for school. I was in first grade and she was in fifth.” As the two girls came out the front door, they saw the school bus pulling away. Cindy ran down the street to catch the bus, but little Pam was too slow. Pam was seized with the fear that Cindy was going to leave her forever. She screamed, “Wait for me!”

Cindy turned around to look at her little sister. She could hear the panic in her voice. She returned to Pam and said, “I wasn’t going to let the bus leave you. I was going to have it wait for you.”

“At that moment,” said Pam, “I knew she would always have my back.”

When Pam was five years old, she had a crush on a boy named Rick. Cindy, along with Rick’s sister, contrived to marry them behind a bush outside the church they all attended. Rick slipped a pop top from a soda can onto Pam’s finger, and Cindy pronounced them married for life. Later, when they were older, Pam confided in Cindy that she was in love with that same boy, Rick McDowell, but it seemed unlikely that they would ever get together.

“Others thought I was nuts and that I should move on,” Pam said. Pam and Rick had stayed in touch by phone and through letters. But “he was on one coast, and I was on the other. It seemed impossible.” She was living on Carolina Beach where her family ran a motel, and Rick was in San Diego in the Marines. “I mean, you couldn’t get farther away.”

But Cindy assured her, “I believe in fairy tale endings, Pam.”

Rick proposed over the phone. They were apart during the entire year of their engagement. In fact, Rick was swept up in the Gulf War and was out on a ship for six months. Pam had wanted her sister to be her maid of honor, but the wedding didn’t take place until two and a half years after the crash. Pam had saved the pop top from her wedding ceremony at the age of five. She wore it around her neck at the real wedding on December 14, 1991. “I married that boy and have been happily married for over twenty-one years,” Pam said when we spoke the day before her anniversary. After the wedding, they had the pop top embedded in an acrylic cube and made into a nightlight that burns in their bedroom.

As White held Cindy in her arms, wondering what to tell her, Captain Haynes announced, “This is gonna be the roughest landing you’ve ever had.” And White was thinking, as she later put it, “Oh, my goodness. For a DC-10 captain to say that, you know it’s gonna be bad.” White said, “I couldn’t lie to her and tell her that we’re going to be okay, because in my heart at that moment, I did not feel we were going to be okay.” White held Cindy tighter and said, “We need to pray.” She took a breath and explained, “We need to be prepared for the roughest landing, like the captain just said. And we need to pray.”

“Okay,” Cindy said, gulping air in hard shuddering sighs.

White returned to her exit. As she glanced to her left, she saw Bruce and Dina and Ruth Anne Osenberg holding hands with one another and praying with Tom Postle. Postle had his Bible in his lap. Their heads were bowed. White felt a rush of emotion and confidence that what she had told Cindy was right. She looked up and saw that Cindy “still had tears, but she had calmed down.” White later said, “She made such an imprint on my heart. I will never forget her, and we only shared a brief moment.” Later, while testifying about Cindy in court, White burst into tears and ran out of the courtroom.

When Jan Brown finished briefing the passengers, White started down the aisle, helping people practice bracing. She came across thirty-one-year-old William Phillip McNulty III across the aisle from Janice-Long Brown and her daughter Kimberly. Three-year-old Annabelle Lee McNulty sat in her father’s lap with a blanket over her. White lifted the blanket and saw that McNulty had belted Annabelle into his own seat belt, which would almost certainly have killed the child on impact. White explained to him that he was supposed to put the baby on the floor cushioned with pillows and blankets. “I’ll go get some pillows,” White told the young father.

Janice and Kimberly overheard the conversation and passed their pillows and blankets across the aisle. “And so we wrapped his baby in pillows and blankets and he put the baby on the floor.” White paused and sighed wearily as she spoke about it. “And then I learned that he and the baby both died.”

White proceeded down the aisle, looking around her at the surreal scene. A man in a Hawaiian shirt comforted his wife. People wrote notes as last testaments. “I saw a few women put their [driver’s] license down their shirts.” She felt as if she were in a movie. Nothing seemed real any longer. When she reached the rear of the plane, she assessed how she would respond to the emergency evacuation. She decided that Dave Randa and his mother could not help. Dave was still folded completely in half, clutching his legs, his mother’s left hand draped across his back. He still wore his favorite Chicago Cubs hat. White turned to John Hatch beside Conant and asked him to help with the door.

White strapped herself into the jump seat, facing aft, back to back with Susan Randa. “We got a four-minute warning, and it just seemed like it was . . .
forever
,” White recalled. “And I looked up at the Airphone and I wanted to call home. And I thought, Oh, no, I can’t call home, because that’ll just make them sad.” Her mind was racing, crazy, jumping all around. She remembered Jan Brown telling her to watch out for fire when they landed. She remembered that her United Airlines coed softball team was playing that night. They played every Wednesday night in Chicago, and she had promised to be there. She leaned forward in her jump seat to look around the magazine rack with the
Newsweek
s and
Time
s and
Wall Street Journal
s. She called in a stage whisper to Donna McGrady, the flight attendant who had switched the seats of Yisroel Brownstein and Richard Howard Sudlow.

“Donna! Donna! Do you think they’ll know why I’m not at my game tonight?”

“I think they’ll know,” McGrady replied.

“Okay,” White said. She sat for a while, letting her thoughts churn and fidgeting in her seat. Then she leaned forward again and called out, “Donna! Donna! Do you think they’re going to release me for tomorrow?” She had two more days of reserve when the airline could call her for any flight, but after this experience, she didn’t want to work.

“Yes!” McGrady said. “I think you’ll be released.”

As White leaned forward, looking across the galley, she saw that McGrady had taken out her earrings. She liked big earrings. “I thought, Gosh, I need to take my earrings out too. Here we went through and told everybody take off their eyeglasses and pens out of their pockets, and here I had my earrings on.” She unfastened her harness and stood up.

“What are you doing?” McGrady called in alarm.

“I’m taking my earrings off!” she said. The passengers—Conant and Hatch and Dave and Susan Randa—could hear the two flight attendants, and must have been wondering what on earth they were thinking. White opened the cubby behind her seat—they called it the doghouse—and hauled out her tote bag. She took off her earrings and put them in the bag. Then she stowed it once again. She sat down, fastened her harness, and “about every five seconds, I kept tightening my seat belt. I couldn’t get it tight enough.”

She checked her door again, rehearsing in her mind how she would open it. She recited all her commands and reviewed how she would notify the cockpit, while at the same time recalling her whole life and wondering how her parents were going to survive losing a child. “I have five sisters, and I thought about my sisters, and they were going to wear my jewelry and my clothes after I died, and I just kept thinking of all these horrible sad, sad thoughts. And I thought, ‘My goodness, I wish I’d never gotten this job.’ I got this job to see the world, and I’d only been to Jamaica, and I started feeling sorry for myself. I just remembered everything in detail. I could picture my pastor up at the pulpit announcing my death in the church I grew up in, and how my mother was going to be so sad. And then I would go back to, No, we’re going to evacuate and we’re going to be fine. And then I kept going back to more thoughts. How are they going to get my car keys? How are they going to get my car out of the employee parking lot? All my bills are paid. Everything is in order.”

She craned her neck around toward the front and saw a man with his arm around his wife, comforting her, Forrest and Sandra Mixon, in their fifties, from Chapel Hill. White wished for someone to comfort her. Then she began focusing on a movie she had seen about people who had died and then come back to tell their stories. “I started focusing on that thought of going to heaven, a much better, peaceful place.” And White’s experience of all those thoughts and memories took a mere two minutes, for now she heard Dvorak call out the two-minute warning from the flight deck.

Conant watched White and the boy in the baseball cap and his mother. She saw White glance around at her passengers with a drawn and ashen expression. Conant now lowered her head and tried to make herself small. But then as the landing approached, she began to panic. “I just started to lose it,” she said. “It felt like I was just churning, like I had no center and no control over my limbs, my arms, my legs, and I was so frightened that I couldn’t think.”