his own angry voice and thereafter found it more difficult to deceive
himself that he actually felt as calm as he was pretending to be.
Pete Yankowski, the flight instructor from Denver, returned from his
trip to the rear of the plane and reported that through a window he had
spotted an eighteen-inch hole in the horizontal part of the tail.
“There’s probably more damage I couldn’t see. Figure shrapnel ripped up
the rear section behind the aft bulkhead, where all the hydraulic
systems pass through. At least we didn’t depressurize.”
Dismayed at the rippling sensation that quivered through his bowels,
achingly aware that two hundred and fifty-three passengers and ten other
crew members were depending on him to bring them home alive, Delbaugh
conveyed Yankowski’s information to SAM. Then he asked for assistance
in determining how to fly the severely disabled aircraft. He was ùnot
surprised when, after an urgent consultation, the experts in San
Francisco could come up with no recommendations. He was asking them to
do the impossible, tell him how to remain the master of this behemoth
with no substantial controls other than the throttles-the same unfair
request that God was making of him.
He stayed in touch with United’s dispatcher office, as well, which
tracked the progress of all the company’s hardware in the air. In
addition both channels-the dispatcher and SAM-were patched in to
United’s headquarters near O’Hare International in Chicago. A lot of
interested and anxious people were tied to Delbaugh by radio, but they
were all as much at a loss for good suggestions as were the experts in
San Francisco.
To Yankowski, Delbaugh said, “Ask Evelyn to find that guy from McDonnell
Douglas she told us about. Get him up here quick.”
As Pete left the flight deck again, and as Anilov struggled with his
control wheel in a determined if vain attempt to get at least some
response from the craft, Delbaugh told the shift manager at SAM that a
McDonnell Douglas engineer was aboard. “He warned us something was
wrong with the tail engine just before it exploded. He could tell from
the sound of it, I guess, so we’ll get him in here, see if he can help.”
At SAM, the General Electric expert on CF-6 turbofan engines came
back at him: “What do you mean, he could tell by the sound? How could
he tell by the sound? What did it sound like?”
“I don’t know,” Delbaugh replied. “We didn’t notice any unusual noises
or unexpected changes in pitch, and neither did the flight attendants.”
The voice in Delbaugh’s headset crackled in response: “That doesn’t make
sense.”
McDonnell Douglas’s DC-10 specialist at SAM sounded equally baffled:
“What’s this guy’s name?”
“We’ll find out. All we know right now is his first name,” Sleighton
Delbaugh said. “It’s Jim.”
As the captain announced to the passengers that they would be landing in
Dubuque as a result of mechanical problems, Jim watched Evelyn approach
him along the port aisle, weaving because the plane was no longer as
steady as it had been. He wished she would not ask him what he knew she
had to ask.
“. and it might be a little rough,” the captain concluded.
As the pilots reduced power to one engine and increased it to the other,
the wings wobbled, and the plane wallowed like a boat in a swelling sea
Each time it happened, they recovered quickly, but between those
desperate course corrections, when they were unlucky enough to hit air
turbulence, the DC-10 did not ride through it as confidently as it had
done all the way out from LAX.
“Captain Delbaugh would like you to come forward if you could,” Evelyn
said when she reached him, soft-voiced and smiling as if delivering an
invitation to a pleasant little luncheon of tea and finger sandwiches.
He wanted to refuse. He was not entirely sure that Christine and Casey
-or Holly, for that matter-would live through the crash and its
immediate aftermath without him at their side. He knew that on impact a
ten-row chunk of the fuselage aft of first-class would crack loose from
the rest of the plane, and that less damage would be done to it than to