Over the course of 45 minutes an eternity, really Jerry Schemmel figured he was going to die.
The date was July 19, 1989.
Schemmel, then 29, was aboard United Airlines Flight 232, along with 295 other passengers and flight crew.
An explosion in the DC-10s elevated tale engine sent shrapnel through three separate hydraulic control systems and the planes horizontal stabilizer, a sequence so rare it had never been conceived by engineers or airline manufacturers.
As a result, there was no way to steer the aircraft.
The flight crews only recourse to prevent the plane from spiraling out of the sky was to pull back the thrust in the left engine, while periodically increasing thrust to the right.
(Al Haynes, the flights captain, once compared the maneuver to attempting to steer a speeding car by opening its doors.)
For three-quarters of an hour, the flight crew tried in vain to get the crippled DC-10, en route from Denver to Chicago, to the ground.
What little control they had led them to Sioux City, Iowa.
Though the toggling of the engines thrust provided a glimmer of hope, Captain Haynes repeatedly warned the passengers to expect the worst.
He told us it was going to be rough, Schemmel told the Register in a telephone interview, rougher than anything wed ever gone through before.
The pilot was right.
Through a combination of skill and luck, the flight crew was able to get Flight 232 lined up to one of Sioux Gateway Airports runways, but at a speed and pitch much too fast for a typical landing 255 mph, compared to a normal 125 mph.
The effort almost worked, until the right wing clipped the ground, sending the aircraft careening along the runway, skidding and breaking apart as it cartwheeled into an adjoining cornfield amid a shower of flames and sparks.
Of the 296 on board, 112 died, many from the blunt trauma of the disintegrating aircraft; others from smoke inhalation of the raging fire.
If you see the videotape of the crash, you wonder how anybody could have survived, Schemmel said. Im still just amazed that so many of us survived.
Schemmel walked away relatively unscathed. He escaped through an opening in the planes fuselage, only to re-enter the aircraft moments later after hearing the sound of a crying infant who had been wrenched from her mothers arms. (He pulled the baby from the luggage compartment. The baby girl, her parents and siblings all survived.)
Schemmel, who went on to embark on a broadcasting career that is about to enter its 30th year the past nine as the voice of the Colorado Rockies will be in Iola Thursday to speak about his harrowing ordeal at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center.
