While Records struggled with the controls, Haynes called to Dvorak to read out the checklist for shutting down the failed engine, the one mounted through the tail. 'It actually looked like something from Night of the Living Dead, because many of these bodies all of a sudden started sitting up.' 2 engine, like to lower our altitude, please.' Dvorak radioed the Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center in Farmington, Minn., 'We just lost No. It shuddered and shook violently, almost immediately climbing 300 feet, as the tail dropped sharply. Records lurched forward and took the control wheel, or yoke, saying, 'I have the airplane.' The DC-10 slewed hard to the right. It was so loud, I thought it was a bomb.' 'And there was this loud bang like an explosion. 'Everything was fine,' Haynes said many years later. With the plane on autopilot, the crew had few tasks to perform until the time came to descend into Chicago.

The lunch trays had been cleared away Haynes was nursing a cup of coffee. It was 3:16 pm, a bit more than an hour into the flight. The DC-10 carried a maximum of 380 passengers on this flight, there were 296 people, including crew, on board. The most distinctive feature of the three-engine DC-10 and the L-1011 was a turbofan mounted through the tail. DC-10s were introduced in the early 1970s as McDonnell Douglas's entry in the new class of wide-body aircraft, which included the Lockheed L-1011 and the Boeing 747. Behind Records, Dudley Dvorak, the second officer, was monitoring all systems.

Alfred Haynes in the left seat acting as his copilot. William Records, the first officer, was flying the Denver-to-Chicago leg of the trip with Capt. On the flight deck of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10, the crew ate lunch in their seats, as usual. 'It was obvious they'd had a wonderful vacation,' Murray said more than two decades later. They were laughing and enjoying the perfect ending to their trip. The ladies were dressed in muumuus, and their husbands wore Hawaiian shirts. Virginia Jane Murray, a thin, youthful, 34-year-old flight attendant with bleached silver hair, stopped to talk with passengers Bill and Rose Marie Prato and Harlon 'Gerry' Dobson and his wife, Joann, from Pittsgrove Township, N.J.

There was a festive atmosphere in first class that day, July 19, 1989, on United Flight 232. On July 19, 1989, one of the most dramatic events in aviation unfolded in the skies over Iowa as heroic pilots battled to land a crippled DC-10.

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