United Airlines Flight 232: KCCI’s Archive Report From Sioux City

This short report from KCCI, the Des Moines television station, was published for the anniversary of the United Airlines Flight 232 crash. It combines the station's archive coverage from 1989 with later interviews.

The day of the crash

The archive footage reports that the flight from Denver was on its way to Chicago when it made an emergency landing at Sioux City. A passenger describes the jolt when the No. 2 engine failed and the captain's announcement that followed. At about four o'clock the aircraft flipped and cartwheeled down the runway. A doctor who was among the first to reach the wreckage describes what he saw. Reporters note that the break-up of the aircraft gave passengers more openings through which to escape.

The investigation begins

The report explains that the DC-10 had three hydraulic systems, one powered by each engine, and that investigators wanted to know why all three had failed. The flight recorders were sent to Washington. Captain Al Haynes says that when he asked the flight engineer for the procedure, there wasn't one, so the crew "made it up as we went along." Later footage shows the damaged fan disk found in an Iowa farm field, the crack investigators focused on, and the order for ultrasonic testing of CF6 engine disks.

Years later

Haynes, interviewed in his later years, talks about the people who died and how he learned to deal with it by talking about it. The report ends with people in Sioux City who call the event "a miracle in a cornfield".

Note: the archive footage says 185 survived, and a later caption says 184; the NTSB records 296 on board, 111 killed in the crash and one passenger who died 31 days later, so 184 survived.