A United Airlines pilot who saved more than 100 passengers and crew after crash-landing 30 years ago died Sunday at age 87.
Al Haynes was the captain of United Airlines Flight 232 from Denver to Chicago when it experienced catastrophic engine failure on July 19, 1989.
In a 2009 interview, Haynes, who was 57 at the time, said he thought to himself, “‘How are we going to keep this thing in the sky?’ You don’t train or drill for something like this, because it’s just not supposed to happen.”
The pilots were able to fly the plane without many of its systems working for 45 minutes before trying to land at the Sioux City airport.
“I’m not going to kid you,” he recalled telling the passengers. “We’re going to make an emergency landing in Sioux City, not Chicago. It’s going to be a very hard landing, harder than anything you’ve been through. Please pay close attention to the flight attendants’ briefing, and we’ll see you in Sioux City.”
The pilots landed the plane without brakes or the landing gear. The right wing caught the ground and the plane rolled over. Of the 296 people aboard, 184 survived the crash.
“It was very hard to get past the guilt of surviving,” Haynes said in 2009. “My job had been to get people from point A to point B safely, and I didn’t do it. I felt that I had killed them. I had a lot of psychiatric help at the hospital and afterward.”
Haynes died at a hospital in his hometown of Seattle following a brief illness, according to the Sioux City Journal.
