following faa protocol advises parents to place lap children on the floor. those are kids under 2 years old without paid seats. she s about to announce that passengers should brace for impact when captain haynes overrides her on the p.a. there was an announcement that this is going to be a seriously difficult landing. he said, i won t kid you, it s going to be rough. do the best you can. the plane is traveling at 247 miles per hour. 100 miles an hour too fast for a dc10 to land. without hydraulic fluid, the controls that would normally slow the plane down don t work, and because they can t be properly configured, the ground proximity warning system doesn t realize that the pilots are trying to land. it begins to sound, adding to the chaos in the cockpit.
pull up. pull up. the left wing was coming up and we want the left wing down so we said left, left, left, left, left. i never thought it would be fine because we was going too fast and the original descent was too big and i knew something was going to happen. at exactly 4:00 p.m., 44 minutes after the problem began, a violent impact. as the right wing hit the ground, the tail snapped off. the entire tail of the plane broke off just as if it were a toy and went rocketing down the runway at 250 miles per hour. i heard explosions and loud noises and flashes of light, and it had to be with the plane breaking apart. al could have kept telling us that it would have been rough, but i could never in my wildest dreams have imagined smashing into the earth the way we did. as the jumbo jet careens out
the plane has run out of fuel and is coming in fast over a wooded residential area. captain mcbroom heads towards the only unlit spot he can see below between the housing. the plane barely clears an apartment building. i thought we were landing at the airport. i was very delighted, and then the delight turns to fear because i had no idea what was going on. it just felt like it was never going to stop. as the plane tears through the trees the front section violently rips away. it wasn t until after we had stopped moving that i really grasped the enormity of what had just happened. the aircraft is destroyed. ten people, all sitting in the front section that separated, die from the impact trauma. the rest of the passengers are dazed. it was so cold.
although when you re running on adrenaline you don t really notice those sorts of things, but we walked off the plane, and then we were in this neighborhood. nobody knew where we were. we just were milling about, like what do we do now? the four-engine plane went down five miles southeast of the airport. it missed a large apartment complex but smashed through two vacant houses. once on the scene, ntsb investigators quickly determine there s no fuel leak, no broken fuel gauges, no problem at all with the airplane, so why did the well run dry? the answer comes from the plane s cvr, the cockpit voice recorder. when i played the cvr for the first time, i realize that we ve got some explaining to do and this is an accident that never should have happened. dr. al diehl, at the time the human factors specialist with the ntsb, can t help but notice
troubleshoot the problem. the pilot got on the p.a. and said we re having a little trouble with the landing gear, going to be in the air just a little bit longer, that is pretty common problem, don t worry about it. captain mcbroom was a very experienced pilot. had tens of thousands of hours including over 5,000 hours as a captain on the dc8 he was flying that night so this was mr. dc8 expert, and that may have convinced him that if he just studied a little bit more in the manuals and talked to the people in the maintenance center he was going to figure out whether or not this landing gear was going to collapse. by 5:14 p.m., air traffic control knows united 173 has a problem. portland approach control clears the plane to enter a holding pattern which it does for the next hour. during that time the captain maintains close contact with the cabin crew. what he kept asking from the flight attendants what was the status?