At 3:16 p.m., some 37,000 feet over Alta, Iowa, the tail engine exploded.Ī microscopic flaw in an engine part, investigators later discovered, caused it to fail. But soon it became clear people expected - and a few needed - something more to mark the occasion.įlight 232 took off from Denver at 2:09 p.m., July 19, 1989. Gary Brown, Woodbury County emergency management director who worked the crash in 1989, said he originally didn't want to do anything. The names of those who died will be read aloud in a public ceremony for the first time since the crash.Īmong topics to be discussed are how the crash shaped emergency responses, aviation and the lives of those connected. Survivors, families of those lost and rescuers will gather in Sioux City next weekend for a three-day memorial and discussion of the crash some 25 years later. "On my mind forever will be the thoughts of the 112 who did not survive," added the retired pilot, now 83. But more than two decades after the crash, he remains saddened that the flight attendants never received the recognition he says they deserved. In an email that Flight 232's captain, Al Haynes, sent to The Des Moines Register last week, he praised the flight crew, the rescue teams and the hospitals. But an unprecedented show of skill and ingenuity by the pilots combined with a magnificently coordinated response by an army of rescue workers on the ground saved 184 of the 296 people aboard the flight. The odds of such a failure were one in a billion. Shrapnel from the blast shredded hydraulic lines. The DC-10 was bound for Chicago when the tail engine exploded. DES MOINES, Iowa - Fate meted misery and miracles in nearly equal measure when United Airlines Flight 232 crashed at the Sioux City airport on July 19, 1989.
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