Captain Alfred Haynes, big damn hero, has passed away at 87.
Aviation buffs know this name well. For everyone else: Captain Haynes was the pilot of United Airlines Flight 232 on July 19, 1989. He was flying a DC-10 to Chicago from Denver.
About an hour into the flight, the engine mounted in the tail of the plane “exploded”. (It was later determined that a cracked fan disk had disintegrated.) Fragments of engine parts took out all three of the plane’s hydraulic systems. This was something that was never supposed to happen: the crew was actually in radio communication with United maintenance people who flat out could not believe the plane had lost all hydraulics (since the plane had three redundant systems). This was supposed to be impossible, and there were no procedures for dealing with this kind of emergency.
Without hydraulics, the pilots lost all normal control of the plane: they couldn’t move the flaps, elevators, or rudder. They couldn’t steer the plane or control ascent or descent. Captain Haynes and his crew (which included a DC-10 instructor pilot for United) figured out how to control the aircraft using only the engine throttles. They flew the plane for 44 minutes to Sioux City, Iowa, varying power to the engines to turn, climb and dive.
“Nothing in United’s training would have prepared the pilot for something like this,” John P. Ferg, a former director of flight operations for the airline, told The New York Times at the time. “By all laws of airmanship, he shouldn’t have gotten that close to the runway.”
Without the standard tools for slowing and steering the plane, Mr. Haynes approached Runway 22 of Sioux Gateway Airport going much too fast and descending at a much steeper angle than what was normal for a landing. As the plane tried to touch down, the right wing clipped the ground and the aircraft broke apart amid smoke and flame.
There were 296 people on the plane. 184 survived. 112 died.
Mr. Haynes would often say in later years that his thoughts were with those who did not survive — 111 that day and another a month later.
“It was very hard to get past the guilt of surviving,” he told New York magazine in 2009. “My job had been to get people from point A to point B safely, and I didn’t do it. I felt that I had killed them.”
Many of the accounts I’ve seen say that Captain Haynes resisted being called a hero. But:
Because of a promotion the airline was running, there were numerous children on the flight. One was Mr. [Spencer] Bailey, who was 3 at the time and today is a journalist and host, with Andrew Zuckerman, of the podcast Time Sensitive. He remembers nothing of the crash but learned about the efforts of the crew in later years.
“I would not be here, alive and typing this sentence, were it not for the actions of Captain Haynes and those who were in the cockpit with him,” he said by email. His mother, Frances, died in the crash, but his older brother Brandon survived.
“Brandon and I both know that day will always remain a part of us, but our lives continue onward, growing far beyond it,” Mr. Bailey said. “And for this fact, that we lived on and were able to grow up past July 19, 1989, we largely have Captain Haynes to thank.”
And:
I emphasized “and his crew” above for a reason. After he retired, Captain Haynes traveled around the country giving talks. I always wanted to see one of his presentations, but never did. (There’s an archived transcript of one here.) One of the things he emphasized was the importance of crew resource management (CRM) which was a relatively new concept at the time. (The FAA didn’t make CRM training mandatory until after the incident, but it was already part of United’s training.)
…
Great moment from the CVR transcript:
Sioux City Approach: United two thirty-two heavy, the wind’s currently three six zero at one one three sixty at eleven. You’re cleared to land on any runway …
Captain: [Laughter] Roger. [Laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?
(That CVR transcript is also the final act of “Charlie Victor Romeo“.)
He was also a well regarded Little League ump, which makes me smile:
“If he weren’t an airline pilot, he could be a professional umpire,” Jim Chavez, a Little League district administrator, said in 1989, when Mr. Haynes was in the news because of the crash. “He knows the book. When Al calls a strike, you know it’s a strike.”
On Dan Haynes’s Facebook page, the many tributes to his father were as apt to mention the umpiring as they were the heroics.
“A legend in aviation for sure,” one reads, “but he was so much more. I’ll never forget seeing him at the Little League regionals in San Bernardino, where he was the master of ceremonies. He gave a great speech in front of thousands, and then went into a booth behind the outfield, put an apron on, and started selling corn on the cob to raise $ for LL.”
(Subject line hattip: adapted from something FotB RoadRich once said about a different pilot in a different context. Errors and omissions are mine alone: I welcome any additions and/or corrections anyone has to offer.)