Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival by Laurence Gonzales Page B

panicked people. She passed near Lena Ann Blaha, sixty-five, who sat beside James Matthew Bohn. The boy had celebrated his twelfth birthday in May. Blaha reached out to Jan Brown. She told Brown to look out the starboard window at the tail. Already deeply afraid, Brown leaned over the woman and the boy and craned her neck to see toward the rear. And now she understood that the situation was so much worse than she had imagined. She saw a piece of torn metal sticking up from the tail “like you’d peeled a pop-top tab off.” The hole was a foot wide. As she raced from C-Zone to B-Zone, Wilbur and Vincenta Eley, both in their seventies, waved at her. “I think I’m having a heart attack,” the woman said.
    Brown later mused with a laugh, “I can’t believe I said, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ I was walking away through B-Zone going, ‘Jan, was that you that said that?’ I mean that is so totally contrary to who I am.” As she passed into the forward galley, she said to Jan Murray, who had been a nurse, “The woman in 22-F thinks she’s having a heart attack.” Then she continued on toward the cockpit. She knocked on the door for the second time that day. She received no response.
    Behind the door, after almost twenty minutes of working together at the edge of human tolerance, Haynes had introduced himself to Denny Fitch, reaching his left hand over his right shoulder to shake Fitch’s hand without looking.
    “I’ll tell you what,” Fitch said, “we’ll have a beer when this is all done.”
    Haynes said, “Well, I don’t drink, but I’ll sure as hell have one.”
    Brown waited half a minute—an eternity—and knocked again. She didn’t know that the plane had been approaching a towering cumulus cloud. If the crew allowed the plane to enter it, they would have to fly not only blind but also in the turbulence usually found inside those incipient summer thunderheads. So the crew was trying to steer the plane clear of the cloud. Oblivious of this close call, Brown waited a quarter of a minute and knocked again—three distinct raps. She was thinking, as she later recalled, “The tail? No one said anything about the tail.” And “I have to tell the captain.” Another three-quarters of a minute passed before the door opened at last.
    When Brown entered the cockpit, before she could get a word out, Haynes launched into his explanation of the situation. “We almost have no control of the airplane,” he began, as she stared in shock and horror, her mind frozen. “We have no hydraulics at all.” He was so keyed up with adrenaline and with the effort he was exerting on the yoke that his ability to make sense was deteriorating. “We can’t go to Sioux City, and we’re gonna try to put it into Sioux City, Iowa,” he said, a clear contradiction.
    All Brown could say was, “Yeah . . .”
    “It’s gonna be tough,” Haynes said as he struggled with the useless controls. “Gonna be rough.”
    “So we’re gonna evacuate?” Brown asked.
    “We—yeah. Well, we’re gonna have the gear down.”
    “Yeah . . .”
    “And if we can keep the airplane on the ground and stop standing up, give us a second or two before you evacuate,” Haynes said. “Brace—the brace will be the signal. It’ll be over the PA system: ‘Brace, Brace, Brace.’ ”
    Brown was confused too when she asked, “And that will be to evacuate?” She later said that all she could think about was evacuating because she just wanted to be out of that plane.
    “No,” Haynes said. “That’ll be to, ah, to, ah, brace for landing.”
    Brown was practically speechless at that point. She said, “Uh-huh.”
    “And then, if we have to evacuate, you’ll get the command signal to evacuate, but I think—really have my doubts you’ll see us . . . standing up, Honey.” Haynes paused and then said, “Good luck, Sweetheart.”
    “Thanks,” Brown said, her eyes clouding with tears. “You too.”
    As she left the cockpit and started down