‘God Opened a Hole’ After Jet Landed Upside Down

SIOUX CITY, Iowa — Jerry Schemmel had escaped the burning United Airlines DC-10 after it crashed here Wednesday and found safety in a cornfield. But he heard the cries of a baby coming from the smoking wreckage and he plunged back into the airplane.

“I found her--a baby girl--in an overhead compartment, beneath a bunch of stuff, and pulled her out,” Schemmel, 29, said after he had been examined and released from a Sioux City hospital. “By that time it (the plane) was filled with smoke and I just ran with her. I ran down one of the corn rows.”

Another survivor, Charles Martz, described how he staggered from the plane into a cornfield that had been transformed into a nightmare.

“Bodies were strewn all over the place,” Martz said. “Bodies had burns, their clothing burned off, stripped off.”

Similar tales of heroism and horror were told by survivors who were on Flight 232, bound from Denver to Chicago, when it crashed, broke up and erupted in flames as it attempted an emergency landing in Iowa.

“The plane came down. It bounced twice, flipped into the air and we were sitting there upside down and it began to fill up with smoke,” said Cliff Marshall, who was returning home to Columbus, Ohio.

“Then God opened a hole in the basement (the bottom of the plane) and I pushed a little girl out. I grabbed another, kept pulling them out until they didn’t come no more.”

Half or more of the 293 passengers and crew members on the airplane survived and many of them walked away from the flaming remains of the wide-bodied jet.

C.O. Miller, a former chief investigator for the National Safety Transportation Board, called the survival rate remarkable. James Hamilton, an official at a local hospital, said it was amazing that people walked away from the wreckage unscathed.

The early-afternoon flight was about halfway from Denver to Chicago when the passengers heard what several described as a big jolt or bump followed by a bang. The sound of the three-engine plane changed.

“The pilot got on the speaker system and said that one of the engines had blown, that there was nothing to worry about, that there were two other engines, that we wouldn’t have any problem,” said Schemmel, deputy commissioner of the Continental Basketball Assn., who was on his way to Columbus, Ohio, with another league official.

Damages Tail

A few minutes later the captain told the passengers that the engine explosion had damaged the tail of the aircraft and that they would have to land in Sioux City, a city of about 80,000 in northwestern Iowa.

The pilot told the passengers that the landing probably would be a little rough because he did not have a lot of control over the aircraft.

The passengers were not told that pieces of the engine apparently had severed the hydraulic controls, leaving the pilot almost completely unable to maneuver the huge jet. The pilot reported by radio to air traffic controllers that he had sustained a complete hydraulic failure.

The plane descended gradually to about 11,000 feet and began to circle the Sioux City airport while emergency crews were assembled on the ground.

Aboard the aircraft, there was no panic. The flight attendants told the passengers how to prepare for an emergency landing by putting their heads between their legs. The crew described how to evacuate the plane from all available exits. The in-flight movie continued to play on the screens in the cabin.

“I was not aware of the danger,” Schemmel said. “I don’t know much about flying, but I certainly heard a lot of stories about one engine quitting and there being no problem. So I wasn’t worried about it.”

Struggle to Cope

The plane kept dipping, pitching and circling in one direction as the pilot and co-pilot struggled to cope with the hydraulic failure.

“For 35 minutes, we knew something was wrong and for 10 or 15 minutes we knew something was dramatically wrong,” said Brad Bayless of Highlands, Colo., as he stood in the lobby of the airport terminal after the crash.

David Lansberger told a television interviewer: “Everybody was pretty calm. We really thought we were going to land and walk off. They said it was going to be a real hard landing. I didn’t think it was going to be this hard.”

Martz, 58, is a former Navy pilot who still flies for his personal business. In a telephone call to his wife in Castle Rock, Colo., he praised the pilot’s ability in bringing the crippled plane so close to the ground.

He said that his experience as a pilot told him that the problems were probably far more serious than the pilot was telling the passengers as the plane circled the airport.

“I could tell it was worse than that,” he said.

About 40 minutes after the engine explosion, the pilot told passengers to get in position for the landing. He said that the plane would touch down in about 30 seconds.

Three or four minutes later, as the plane aimed for a 9,000-foot runway at the airport and emergency crews watched in horror, the right wing dipped into the ground.

“We did somersaults,” recalled Bayless, who was seated directly next to the right wing.

Another passenger seated near the front of the aircraft told a local radio station: “When we hit, the plane broke right in front of me. It rolled over twice, I think, then it burst into flames. I grabbed an old lady in front of me and a baby and I went out of the plane.”

Schemmel was seated on the aisle in row 26. Next to him was Jay Ramsdell, the commissioner of the basketball league.

“The section we were in rolled over at least twice,” said Schemmel. “It might have been more than that. It happened so fast I don’t remember.

“After we first hit, we stopped in a very short time. It seemed like seconds. I was expecting to be sliding for a long time, but we stopped suddenly because we were in a cornfield.

“When we came to a stop, I was upside down in my seat. I unbuckled my seat belt and fell to what would be the roof, because we were turned over. I found out that I was fine and I started helping other people. I looked to my right, there were flames coming out of the wall.”

Several passengers described the first frantic seconds after the plane came to a halt. Some rushed for the openings and others fought to rescue as many people as they could.

Lansberger said the calm before the crash turned into pandemonium, with noise and screams everywhere.

“I just remember thinking, ‘This is what it is like to die,’ ” he told CNN television.

“We tried to get as many people out before the fire hit,” said Bayless in the airport lobby, massaging a bump on his head. “I saw fire out of my window right away.”

Rod Vettor echoed Bayless, saying: “We ended up upside down in a cornfield with fire. We did everything we could to get people out of the airplane.”

Lori and Mark Michaelson were traveling with their infant daughter and 6-year-old son in Row 11. They unbuckled their seat belts and, in the confusion and smoke and fire, they left the plane without the baby.

“I went back in the plane to find my daughter,” Mark Michaelson told a TV interviewer. “I couldn’t see her because it was dark. I heard her cry. I knew it was her cry but I couldn’t hear it again. Others were coming out. I was walking forward shouting: ‘I’m looking for my baby.’ At that point the smoke got worse.”

He left the plane, searching for the rest of his family.

Grabs Young Boy

Ron Rhode of Columbus, Ohio, was riding next to an 8-year-old boy from Prairie View, Ill. He grabbed the child and held him tight as the plane bounced and flipped over on the ground.

“The plane hit, bounced and we ended up upside down,” said Rhode. “I let him go.”

The boy, Ben Radtke, was unharmed. He was still wearing the red-and-white badge that United gives to minors traveling alone.

Schemmel lives in Denver, but he is a native of Sioux Falls. He worked for a time as a basketball broadcaster before joining the Continental Basketball Assn.

“He is so calm,” said his wife, Diane, in a telephone interview from their home. “He is just a really mellow person.”

As the plane filled with smoke, Schemmel tried in vain to put out part of the fire in his broken section with a blanket and then saw sunlight through the darkening cabin.

“There was an opening,” he recalled. “Everybody was heading for the back of the plane where the opening was. So I helped some people out for as long as I could, when the flames just got too heavy and I had to get out. It was chaos.

“I got outside the plane. It was right in the cornfield. I had gotten a few feet out and heard a baby crying, and so I went back in,” he said.

Inside the plane, wedged in an overhead bin, he found the infant girl and carried her out of the plane.

“I ran down one of the corn rows,” he said. “The corn stalks were about seven feet tall and I couldn’t really see anything. I got to a little bit of a clearing and I handed the baby to a lady who looked like she was all right. She took the baby and took off toward the road.”

Outside the plane, Michaelson spotted a woman carrying his baby daughter. He ran up to her and she said that a man had just handed her the child. He said he didn’t know who brought his baby off the plane.

“Just some hero,” he said.

Penelope McMillan reported from Los Angeles and J. Michael Kennedy reported from Sioux City; staff writer Douglas Frantz contributed to this story from Los Angeles.