On the afternoon of July 19, 1989, United Airlines Flight 232 was cruising at 37,000 feet over Iowa on its way from Denver to Chicago. It was a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 with 296 people aboard, a clear summer sky, and nothing on the schedule but coffee and a routine arrival at O'Hare. At 3:16 in the afternoon there was a loud bang from the back of the airplane. The engine mounted in the tail had come apart. Its fan disk, a heavy spinning titanium part, had cracked from a tiny flaw that had been sitting inside the metal since the day it was made, and when it failed, the fragments tore through the tail.
The DC-10 had three independent hydraulic systems, the redundancy that is supposed to make total loss of control impossible. All three ran through the tail, and the shrapnel cut every one of them. Within minutes the fluid was gone. The crew no longer had ailerons, elevators, rudder, flaps or a way to steer on the ground. The control column in Captain Al Haynes's hands was connected to nothing. The airplane began a slow, stubborn roll to the right, and there was no checklist for what came next, because the engineers had considered it practically impossible. As Haynes said years later, you don't train or drill for something like that, because it is just not supposed to happen.
Haynes was 57 years old, a former Marine Corps aviator with nearly 30,000 hours and more than three decades at United. In the right seat was First Officer Bill Records. Behind them was Second Officer Dudley Dvorak, the flight engineer. What the three of them discovered, almost by instinct, was that the two remaining wing engines could still steer the airplane. Add power on the left engine and reduce it on the right, and the airplane would turn. Add power to both, and the nose would come up. It was crude, slow, and nothing like flying. But it was something, and they took it.
Here is the first leadership moment, and it is easy to miss. In the old airline culture, the captain was a king. His word was final, his judgment unquestioned, and the people around him were there to carry out orders. Haynes had come up in that world. But in 1980 United had begun training its crews in something it called Command, Leadership and Resource Management, a then-new idea that the captain's job was to pull every brain in the cockpit into the problem. That afternoon, Haynes did exactly that. Nobody on that flight deck waited to be asked for an opinion. They talked constantly, offered ideas, argued options, and tried things together.
Back in the cabin, a flight attendant told the captain that a United training pilot was riding as a passenger and wanted to help. His name was Dennis Fitch, a DC-10 check airman who taught other pilots to fly the airplane. A different kind of captain, with his pride on the line, might have told him to stay seated. Haynes invited him forward. Fitch came into the cockpit, looked at what the crew was doing, and asked a simple question: what can I do? Haynes gave him the throttles. Fitch knelt between the two pilots and worked both engine levers with his own hands, which freed Haynes and Records to fight the yoke and the airplane's wild up-and-down oscillations while Dvorak handled the radios, the company, and the cabin.
Now there were four experienced airmen working as one crew, each in the job where he could do the most good. Haynes later counted it up: 103 years of combined flying experience in that cockpit, trying to get the airplane on the ground, and not one minute of it spent practicing this exact situation. What made the difference was not that any one of them knew the answer. It was that all of them were allowed to contribute to finding it. Haynes put it bluntly afterward: if they had not let everybody put their input in, it was a cinch they would not have made it.
On the ground, an air traffic controller at Sioux City named Kevin Bachman became part of the crew. He stayed calm, fed them headings and positions, and steered the crippled airplane toward Sioux Gateway Airport. And the city below was ready in a way almost no city is. Two years earlier, Sioux City had run a full-scale disaster drill that imagined a wide-body jet crashing at that very airport. They had planned triage lines, mutual aid from surrounding towns, and shelter for survivors. When the tower declared the alert, fire crews, ambulances, the two regional hospitals and the Iowa Air National Guard were in place before the airplane arrived. Someone, years before, had led a community to prepare for a day they hoped would never come.
There was even a flash of humor on the way down. When the controller told the crew they were cleared to land on any runway, Haynes laughed and asked if the controller wanted to be particular and make it a runway. It was not bravado. It was a leader keeping his crew loose enough to keep thinking. The cabin was ready too. Flight attendants briefed passengers row by row, and adults moved to sit beside children who were traveling alone.
At about 4 p.m., the DC-10 came down toward a closed runway at more than 200 knots, far faster than normal, and sinking at roughly six times a safe rate. At the last moment the right wing dropped, struck the ground, and the airplane broke apart and burned. One hundred and twelve people died. One hundred and eighty-four survived. Afterward, pilots tried the same scenario in simulators again and again, and could not get the airplane to the runway. The National Transportation Safety Board wrote that the crew's performance was highly commendable and greatly exceeded reasonable expectations.
Haynes never accepted the word hero. He spoke instead about the flight attendants, the controller, the rescuers, the doctors and the people of Sioux City. He carried guilt for the ones who did not survive for the rest of his life. When he talked about why anyone lived that day, he named five things: luck, communication, preparation, execution and cooperation. Only one of those was luck. The other four were leadership, spread across a crew, a control tower and an entire town. He spent much of his retirement teaching those lessons to anyone who would listen, until he died in Seattle in 2019 at the age of 87.
If you lead anything, United 232 asks you three questions. First: when the crisis comes, does your team feel free to speak, or will they wait for your orders while the airplane rolls over? Haynes did not lose authority by asking for help. He used his authority to open the floor. Second: when the Dennis Fitch in your building raises his hand, a person outside your chain of command with exactly the skill you need, do you protect your pride, or do you hand him the throttles? Third: what drill are you running now, on a calm day, for the emergency you hope never comes? Sioux City's readiness was built two years before anyone needed it.
I have studied this flight for years, and it is personal to me. I once flew an airplane from Redding, California, landed in Sioux City, Iowa, and later took it on to Pewaukee, Wisconsin. Coming into Sioux City, it is impossible not to think about that July afternoon, about a captain with no flight controls who chose to lead by gathering every mind and every hand he could find. That is the standard. Command is not the right to have all the answers. It is the responsibility to make sure every answer in the room gets heard, in time to save the people counting on you.