![]() ![]() "It's heart-wrenching after 25 years," said Brown, now 73. She is haunted by the memory of a 22-month-old lap child who died in the crash. Jan Brown, the lead flight attendant on Flight 232, has led an unsuccessful campaign to get the Federal Aviation Administration to end the practice of allowing children under the age of 2 to travel on a parent's lap without a ticketed seat. Still, some of the safety changes sought by survivors have not happened. ![]() This weekend, survivors are gathering for the 25th anniversary memorial events at the Mid America Museum of Aviation and Transportation in Sioux City. And the efforts of the crew were remembered in movies and books. It also drew attention to the need for emergency preparedness. It changed the way planes were designed, ensuring more backup systems to prevent the kind of catastrophic hydraulic failure that made Flight 232 almost impossible to control. Al Haynes was hailed in much the same way as US Airways pilot Chesley Sullenberger, who safely ditched his Airbus A320 into the Hudson River in New York in 2009. ![]() "Everything was chaos."Ī quarter of a century later, the flight is considered one of the most impressive life-saving efforts in aviation history. "We're upside down and I'm alive," May, now a 55-year-old Chicago pastor, recalled of the landing. Of the 296 people on board, 184 survived. The crew used the remaining two engines to steer a winding course to Sioux City, where the massive plane crash-landed, cartwheeling down the runway and bursting into flames before breaking apart in a cornfield. The DC-10 was traveling from Denver to Chicago when it lost all hydraulic power after the rear engine exploded. That was back on July 19, 1989, when May was a passenger aboard United Flight 232. Everyone on the jet feared they were about to die. View Gallery: Archive photos: 1989 Flight 232 crash in Sioux CityĪs he sat in a crippled airliner, Ron May braced his head between his legs and prayed for his wife, who was seven months' pregnant with their first child. ![]()
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