View Gallery: Archive photos: 1989 Flight 232 crash in Sioux City Dozens of wounded passengers could be seen walking out of the nearby cornfields. 'He was the most humble man I've ever met in my life,' Brown, who became close friends with Haynes, told the Sioux City Journal on Sunday. Haynes rejected the title of hero and deferred credit to the flight attendants, whom he believed did not receive enough credit for saving lives in the crash's aftermath, and to Gary Brown, the Woodbury County emergency management coordinator. 'On my mind forever will be the thoughts of the 112 who did not survive,' Haynes said in an email to the Des Moines Register in 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the crash. He spent the past three decades remembering those who died in the crash. Haynes died Sunday in Seattle at age 87 after a brief illness. The efforts of Haynes and his crew in the air and the unprecedented coordination of emergency services on the ground by Sioux City-area disaster personnel were credited with preventing an even greater catastrophe 30 years ago. Haynes worked with air traffic controllers to find a place to put the plane down, eventually deciding on Sioux City’s Gateway Airport. The plane crashed and exploded 112 people died, but 184 lived. “Al” Haynes, the crippled aircraft’s pilot, and his crew eventually found a crude steering mechanism to keep the plane aloft by alternating thrust to both engines, keeping it in a slow, circling descent for more than 40 minutes. Shrapnel sliced all the DC-10’s hydraulic lines, critical for flight control.Ĭapt. 2 engine above the tail of United Airlines Flight 232 exploded on July 19, 1989. Watch Video: Remembering United Airlines Flight 232

Sioux city airport crash