FLIGHT 232

On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, this book recounts a 1989 flight from Denver to Chicago that crash-landed in an Iowa cornfield.

Astoundingly, nearly 200 of about 300 passengers survived to tell their tale of the legendary and miraculous landing. It was such a tremendous crash that everyone for miles around saw flames and smoke and figured there would be hundreds of dead passengers--and then people started to walk out of the smoke, many survivors lived to tell the tale: July 19, 1989. While the crippled airliner—United Airlines flight 232—wallowed drunkenly over the bluffs northwest of the airport at Sioux City, Iowa, hundreds of fire and rescue workers were waiting. The plane slammed onto the runway, broke into pieces, and burst into a vast fireball. The rescue workers did not move; they stared: nobody could possibly survive that crash. And then people began walking out of the cornfield lining the runway. Miraculously, 184 of 296 passengers lived, and 138 of those came away without a scratch. Laurence Gonzales, a pilot himself, has interviewed dozens of the survivors of Flight 232. He takes us through the gripping detective work that found the fatal flaw in an exploded titanium fan disk. More powerful still is the heroism of this unforgettable narrative: pilots flying a plane with no controls; flight attendants keeping their calm in the face of certain death; passengers sacrificing themselves to save others. Now leading up to the 25th anniversary the author can track what went wrong (mechanically) and how these people lived through it (emotionally). The author has visited the town and met with many of the survivors and to them he is a hero. Gonzales has written three bestselling books on survival for WW Norton (investigating what kind of mindset enables a person to survive near-death experiences). One was called DEEP SURVIVAL and sold 345,000 copies; the next was called EVERYDAY SURVIVAL; and the sequel is called SURVIVING SURVIVAL--that is, a person survives a death-defying experience but then has lingering emotional issues which themselves are hard to survive-- published in September 2012. The author is a pilot, has written about flying, stunt flying, airplane crashes, and this is the book he was born to write.