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| United 232 trying to land |
The date was July 19, 1989. I was three weeks away from going to Captain upgrade training in the Saab 340 at Northwest Airlink. It was a hot summer afternoon as we flew south from Minneapolis to Sioux City, Iowa. I forget the Captain's name, the flight attendant was Michelle Boyer. As we landed we could see a lot of fire trucks and ambulances driving onto the airport. I said something like "I guess they heard you were coming," and he replied "Oh ha ha. Very funny." It was around 3:30 pm as we pulled up to the gate. We sat there doing our thing, waiting for bags and people to get unloaded, then bags and people being loaded for the 4:00 pm departure back to MSP. We could hear the ground controller talking to the firemen, something about a DC-10 that could only turn right. The National Guard A-7's were landing, so we figured one of them must have bumped an Air Force KC-10 or something. Finally we get loaded, doors closed, engines started and I call for taxi. They clear us to taxi to runway 17. We do a 180 on the ramp and start to taxi north when the controller yells at us to "Stop! Stop right there!" then to the fire trucks, "He's coming in on 22!" This was a surprise, as all the emergency vehicles were lined up on runway 22, expecting them to land on runway 31. So all these emergency vehicles takeoff across the grass, heading right towards us. We looked off to our right and here he is, quite low, flaps all up, gear doors hanging open, going very fast. Just then Michelle came up front to say everything was ready in back and I said, "Hey Michelle, watch this. This guy doesn't have any brakes." I fully expected to see a KC-10 roll down the runway, off the end and get stuck in the mud for a week, nothing more than that. It was then we noticed it wasn't a KC-10 at all, but a United DC-10. Just as he got to the airport he started a roll to the right. The right main gear and wingtip hit right at the corner of the runway, right where we would have been had we kept taxiing! This huge airliner then crashed into the ground, blew up and ricocheted back in the air, a giant cloud of black smoke and flames erupting high into the sky above, right in front of us.
As the crash continued we could see part of the plane, the United emblem, cabin windows, appearing and disappearing in this tremendous black cloud of flame. The video they showed later didn't look half as big as it did to us, a mere thousand feet or so away from it. The crashing slowly stopped, the tail section directly in front of us. The center section came to rest nearly upright just to our left. The front continued on into the corn field to the right of the runway. The flames and smoke continued to bellow upward. We were in shock. We thought we had just seen like 300 people die. No one could have possibly survived that fiery inferno. Finally the Captain notices this huge cloud of... napkins. Thousands of napkins and paper were floating down towards us. I've read that in a plane crash, lightweight things like paper get blown up and out, and usually end up all over the field next to the crash. He says "This stuff is gonna FOD the engines. We'd better shut down," so we did. That snapped us out of it. Then we saw a helicopter swoop in and land just to our left, some firefighters had a body they carried to the helicopter, threw him in and it took off for the hospital. We were amazed anyone had actually survived! Actually, of the 296 people on board, only 111 died. That was a miracle. The cockpit was so crushed that it took rescuers 35 minutes to discover that the pile of debris was the cockpit and the four pilots inside were in fact still alive.
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| We were parked on the ramp just to the right of this |
We opened the door and went outside to watch. Our airline people took the passengers back inside. No one felt like flying after seeing that, and who could blame them? A short time later a guy in a suit walked up to us from the crash and asked if that was the door to the terminal. We said yes it was. I thought it was some sort of FAA person. Then the Captain whispers to me "Look at that!" This guy's suit was completely burned away in back. He had actually walked away from the crash. Still later a United 727 flew low overhead and circled the airport a few times. It landed on runway 31, blowing a huge amount of napkins into the air as it did. The copilot came out and asked us what happened. They'd been at the gate in Chicago when all this took place. "A large group of United management personnel ran down the jetway, kicked off the few passengers that had been boarded and handed us a flight plan to Sioux City. We'd never even heard of Sioux City," he said.
The police did a great job. The state police closed down the interstate from the airport to the downtown exits. The city police blocked the main road from the interstate to the hospital. Ambulances ran back and forth non-stop with the most seriously injured. Less serious patients went to other area hospitals. We finally left around 9pm that night, flew empty back to Minneapolis. I remember that for a week or so after that, Sioux City passengers on our flights were mostly FAA and NTSB people, and a whole lot of priests. Later they put all the wreckage in one spot, put up a big fence around it, parked a rent-a-cop by the gate and it stayed like that for years. If I never see anything like that crash again I'll be happy.
