The Curious Pull of the Plane Crash
In the jaws of calamity, we find our deepest power
I am drawn to plane crashes: I do not know why. I listen to cockpit recordings, pour over incident reports, argue over the minutia of crashes online. I have heard the dying words of pilots who did not speak my language without knowing what they meant, felt the abrupt jerk when the recording stops mid-sentence. It startles me, each time. But I always return. As strange as it is to admit a sense of appreciation for the catastrophic, I appear to be, by all measures, a fan of plane crashes. It’s a morbid fascination, I’ll admit, but not one I hold alone.
There is something we see in these moments, specifically because they are so unlike every other moment of our live. The plane crash is a unique experience, known only to those who have lived it. I cannot escape the feeling that they contain a secret: that in the most desperate extremity, there is some truth to be witnessed about what it means to be a human.
In a plane crash, we are at our highest possible level of alertness. The stakes cannot be raised. Nothing is off the table, and everything is on the line. Here, in this unbearable crucible, we discover what people do when pushed to their absolute limit: stripped of all pretense, hurtling through the air, struggling to stay alive. We can see what makes us human, here, at his horrifying velocity. We can see what makes us burn.
Imagine.
You’re flying a DC-10, the three-engine workhorse airliner of the 1970s and 80s. You cruise on autopilot above middle America, secure. You marvel at the clouds passing, at the baffling wonder of flight, as I imagine all pilots must, from time to time.
The idyll breaks, catastrophically. A hairline fracture in the tail engine’s turbine suddenly bursts. The high-strength, knife-sharp fan blade shreds through thin cowling and solid engine block in the space between heartbeats, barely slowly in its departure, alarm tones bursting to life in time with an explosive blast. You don’t know it yet, but the hydraulic systems have been destroyed. Flight controls are permanently lost. Your stick is dead: horse and rider are reversed.
This is the exact situation that Captain Alfred Haynes faced on July 19, 1989, when his first officer on United Airlines 232, William Records, told him “Al… I can’t control the airplane.”
I cannot imagine a more terrifying sentence.
What do you do now?
Think about the way a child’s paper airplane flies. Imagine it, waving in the invisible breeze. It bucks and dives in the air, wagging up and down before stalling and crashing. That sine-wave flight pattern is called the phugoid cycle, and it’s characteristic of airfoils without control surfaces. Like a paper airplane. Or your DC-10.
The aircraft dives and plunges in gasping heaves, hunting for lift like a desperate swimmer gulps for air. It climbs and falls distances measured in thousands of feet as it races towards inevitable stall, the sine-wave motion obscuring the final, fatal dive into the loving soil.
Everything changes. In an instant, hundreds of lives, your own life, the lives of coworkers you know well — they all now hang in the balance. If you die here, you never see your spouse again; never kiss your children; never correct your mistakes.
You have not been trained for this moment. There is no training for this moment. It a moment unknown but to those who have faced it, and they were lucky if they made it out alive.
You plummet again, this time deeper, faster. The useless control surfaces waggle in the air, almost like they’re waving. The metal skeleton of the aircraft sighs out in pain, its whine at the edge of human hearing, begging for release, for the ecstasy of fracture.
The complete loss of hydraulics on a DC-10 was believed to be virtually impossible. But no one had imagined a turbine blade shearing through triple redundancies.
There is no plan. This is not on a checklist. The airplane is no longer flying. We can call it falling: it will be, soon enough.
In that moment, and with no indication that this tactic will be successful, Haynes somehow finds exactly the right solution, knows it, intuits it. To this day, Haynes can’t explain it.
Haynes slams the right engine to the firewall and cuts the left engine to nothing. Somehow, the plane begins to gradually return to something approximating neutral flight. Nothing in his training had prepared him to recover from a sudden loss of control in this way. But it worked.
The flight crew, with the able assistance of Dennis Fitch, a United Airlines DC-10 training-check airman who was coincidentally on the flight, regained enough control over the plane to right it. In a series of ever decaying right-handed turns, they pinwheeled around to line up with an airport. Somehow, impossibly, they were headed home.
The plane still crashed: God himself couldn’t stop it. At the last moment of descent, the plane suddenly bucked, jackknifing into a conflagration that almost looks like a cartwheel. Of the 296 souls aboard, 112 were lost. Haynes and the entire flight crew survived, the cockpit somehow ejected from the main body of the fire that engulfed the cabin, a final lucky break in a day that was nothing but the opposite. That anyone survived the crash at all is extraordinary. Every person who walked away did so thanks to the impressive teamwork in the cabin that day.
In 1989, no one knew how to recover an aircraft of this size from this kind of flight condition. But on the fly, Haynes created it. How?
He had to, or everyone would have died.
The thing that strikes me about cockpit recordings is how calm everyone sounds. Pilots are trained to stay cool and, in most cases, they do. They understand their grave responsibility, and they know how to manage stress. They follow their instructions, proceed linearly through a checklist, report to ATC, all the while falling out the sky with hundreds of other people. It is a kind of practical calmness I could never imagine myself occupying. I do not see, in myself, that cool John Wayne power. But I admire where I find it.
Consider Haynes’ request to air traffic control, made as the aircraft fought to line up with the runway it would eventually smash into: “Whatever you do, keep us away from the city.”
At some point, Haynes must have thought about it, calmly and carefully, in the same way he flew an airplane. Knowing his odds were slim, he mentally prepared his exit: If we all die, he must have thought, I’d better take as few people with us as possible. Full gaze of mortal terror, Haynes was clear-headed enough to make that call. I think no one knows, but him, what that moment was like. With luck, we’ll never find out.
In the end, no one in the cockpit could have stopped the crash of UA 232. The aircraft was doomed the moment it leapt, defiant, skyward. But Haynes and his crew saved lives that day: struggling with a airplane falling suddenly from a crystal clear sky, battling the sudden rush of crisis, of white-hot terror, bursting into bland normalcy, he somehow created the solution he needed to stay alive.
What else is it, to be human?
