Airline Hero Addresses Washington Air Guard
Story & photos by Maj Herb Porter
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Captain Al Haynes, the famous airline pilot that is credited with saving the lives of 184 people in the crash of United Airlines Flight 232, recently spoke to a large gathering of Washington Air National Guard members during a special presentation at the McChord Base Theatre. Approximately 200 hundred attendees were held spell bound during the one and half-hour presentation, as they listened to Captain Haynes recount his amazing story of courage, quick thinking, and determination.
Captain Haynes attributes the survival of the crash landing of Flight 232 to five factors. These included preparation, communication, cooperation, execution, and most of all luck. According to Captain Haynes, quick and total response by air traffic control, cockpit and cabin crew training, proper communications training among ground units, and proper use of available facilities, contributed to the communications factor.
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Captain Haynes also said that live drill exercises leading to improvements and better planning for a disaster, coupled with thorough training of the cabin and cockpit crews prepared everyone for this seemingly impossible disaster. He reiterated that everyone responded as his or her training dictated and exerted a total team effort, along with the cooperation from every agency involved, as well as the general population. One other piece of luck was that the crash occurred on a day that the Air National Guard at Sioux City was on duty, and the nearly three hundred trained National Guardsmen were at the airport, were also ready to render assistance. It was all these factors along with the almost perfect weather, according to Captain Haynes, that allowed what appeared at first to be a non-survivable accident to become one in which most of those aboard survived.
Captain Al Haynes was born and raised in Texas. He attended Texas A & M College before joining the Naval Aviation Cadet Training Program in 1952. He was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1953. After a tour in an operating squadron, he taught instrument flying in Kingsville, Texas until his release from active duty in 1956. He joined United Airlines as a flight engineer later that year, serving in that capacity until his promotion to first officer in 1963. He became a Captain in 1985. During his tenure as an airline pilot, Captain Haynes flew a variety of commercial aircraft including the DC-6, DC-7, DC-8, DC-10, and the Boeing 727. He retired in 1981 have accumulated over 27,000 hours of flight time.
It was on July 19, 1989 that United Airlines Flight 232 departed Denver, CO, shortly after two in the afternoon and climbed to a cruising altitude of 37,000 feet. About an hour later, the flight notified the Minneapolis Air Traffic Control Center that its number two engine had failed and that the aircraft was marginally controllable. Having no hydraulics, there was no controllability, as the plane could only turn to the right. Captain Haynes and his flight crew were instructed to land at a small airport about seven miles from Sioux City. Despite the DC-10 three redundant fail-safe systems, all three were lost. As a result, the aircraft had no ailerons, rudder, elevators, and flaps. Once on the ground, there were no steering, nose wheel or tail, and no brakes. Miraculously, with the help of the throttles, the plane was able to land skidding into a turn. In the process, the plane’s right wing and tail broke off. The plane landed on its back with the cockpit breaking off. In the end, of the original 296 passengers, 184 survived the ordeal. That so many survived is a tribute to everyone involved in the rescue of the crash of United Flight 232, and it is this legacy that Captain Haynes has been sharing with countless numbers of people since that time.
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