United Airlines Flight Two Thirty-Two: The Landing No Test Pilot Could Duplicate

On July nineteenth, nineteen eighty-nine, a United Airlines DC-ten was cruising at thirty-seven thousand feet over Iowa, carrying two hundred eighty-five passengers and eleven crew from Denver toward Chicago and then Philadelphia. At approximately three fifteen in the afternoon, the tail-mounted engine exploded.

The explosion was not simply an engine failure. Shrapnel from a fractured fan disk, a defect introduced during manufacturing that had gone undetected for years, tore through all three of the aircraft's hydraulic systems simultaneously. A DC-ten without hydraulics has no working flight controls. No rudder. No ailerons. No elevator. There was no published procedure for this scenario. There was no simulator training for it. No test pilot, given the same failure in subsequent trials, ever managed to bring the aircraft to the runway.

On board was Dennis Fitch, a DC-ten flight instructor traveling as a passenger. He made his way to the cockpit and volunteered. For forty-four minutes, Fitch worked the two remaining wing engines by hand, increasing thrust on one and reducing it on the other, using differential power as the only available means of steering. He described it later as trying to balance on a beach ball. Captain Al Haynes and his crew kept the plane coherent enough to reach Sioux Gateway Airport here on the Missouri River plain.

The landing was a controlled crash. The right wing struck the runway first. The plane cartwheeled, broke into sections, and burned. Of the two hundred ninety-six people on board, one hundred twelve died. One hundred eighty-four survived. In any conventional analysis of the scenario, there should have been no survivors at all.

The National Transportation Safety Board credited the crew's improvised use of differential thrust as the reason anyone walked away. Aviation training programs around the world incorporated the lesson. What happened at Sioux City that afternoon rewrote what pilots are taught to try.