DC-10 crew ‘made up procedure’

Press, 27 July 1989, Page 8

DC-10 crew ‘made up procedure’

NZPA-AP Sioux City . The pilot of United Flight 232 yesterday said his crew “made it up as we went along” because there was no procedure for handling the complete hydraulic failure which caused his plane to crash.

Captain Al Haynes said the plane’s seasoned crew made the best of a bad situation and he never worried about the plane crashing. The crippled plane crashed while attempting to land at Sioux Gateway Airport.

"We have a lot of experience here and it showed up in the cockpit,” Captain Haynes, aged 57, told reporters at a news conference shortly before his release from hospital. “There is no substitute, as far as I am concerned, for

experience.” Captain Haynes, who has been a United pilot for 33 years, was pushed into the news conference in a wheelchair. Gashes and bruises were visible on his face and neck.

However, he said all of his stitches had been removed and he was in good health.

He declined to discuss last week’s crash in detail, saying he wanted to wait until the National Transportation Safety Board (N.T.5.8.) had completed its investigation. But he briefly described the situation in the cabin as he, the first officer, William Records, and second officer, Dudley Dvorak, struggled to control the DC-10. After an explosion in

the rear engine, he said, it became “apparent that we had lost all of our hydraulics. ... When I asked Dudley what the procedure was, he said we didn’t have one. So we made it up as we went along.” Investigators have ordered another aerial search for key parts of Flight 232’s rear engine and planned to visit the General Electric plant where the engine was made. Members of a transportation safety board team said they expected to finish their work this week at the Sioux Gateway Airport, where the DC-10 crashed-landed after its rear engine blew apart.

Of the 296 people on board, 185 survived,

including 10 of thej 11 crew members. More than 30 people remained in hospital yesterday. The investigation into the accident has been hampered because the rear engine, one of three on the DC-10, flew apart over farms in north-west lowa. Teams searched a 40 sq. km section of corn and soybean fields about 95km from the crash site this week in hopes of finding missing'pieces of the engine. Officials also used aircraft to take infra-red photographs of the area and asked farmers working their fields to look for pieces of the engine. While some debris was recovered, key sections

have yet to be found, including a 180 kg disc from the fan portion of the engine, an N.T.S.B. investigator, Robert Macintosh, said. Other investigators will travel to a General Electric Co. plant in Cincinnati, where the rear engine was made. So far, investigators have found no evidence that foreign matter went into the rear engine, Mr Macintosh said. The crew of the flight from Denver to Chicago reported that they lost all three of the airplane’s hydraulic systems immediately after the rear engine exploded. Mr Macintosh said investigators had found breaks in two of the systems and were still looking for a breach in the third.