Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

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.

"Journalist Gonzalez (Deep Survival) finds grace amid tragedy in his searing study of the fiery 1989 crash of United Airlines Flight 232: 184 of the 296 passengers survived, and the drama unfolded over 44 nerve-wracking minutes while the pilots wrestled the plane towards an airport after an explosion destroyed the hydraulic controls, a catastrophe that should have rendered the huge DC-10 jet unflyable. Working from extensive interviews with survivors and rescue workers, Gonzalez presents a engrossing, cinematic account of the crash and the ordeal that preceded it as crew and passengers prepared themselves for almost certain death. There's heroism here, and dumbfounding twists of fate that allowed the lucky to step straight from flame and carnage into a sunlit Iowa cornfield with barely a scratch. Along the way, Gonzalez presents an absorbing account of the delicate machinery of flight — and the titanic forces it must withstand — and of the investigation that traced the disaster to a tiny flaw therein. Gonzalez's gripping narrative shows us people at their most vulnerable, and admirable. Photos. (July)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A dramatic and extraordinarily rare survivors’ view of a major air crash, twenty-five years after the tragedy.

Twenty-five years after the catastrophe, a dramatic and extraordinarily rare 360-degree view of the crash of a fully loaded jumbo jet.

As hundreds of rescue workers waited on the ground, United Airlines Flight 232 wallowed drunkenly over the bluffs northwest of Sioux City. The plane slammed onto the runway and burst into a vast fireball. The rescuers didn't move at first: nobody could possibly survive that crash. And then people began emerging from the summer corn that lined the runways. Miraculously, 184 of 296 passengers lived.

Laurence Gonzales is the author of the bestseller Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. He has won two National Magazine awards and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.