SIOUX CITY -- Al Haynes, who guided a crippled jumbo jet to a crash landing at Sioux Gateway Airport on July 19, 1989, helping save the lives of 184 passengers and crew, died Sunday.
Haynes, who passed away in a hospital in his hometown of Seattle following a brief illness, was a week shy of his 88th birthday.
At age 57, Haynes served as captain of United Airlines Flight 232, which was bound from Denver to Chicago. After the DC-10 jet suffered a catastrophic failure of its tail-mounted engine over Northwest Iowa, resulting in the loss of all the hydraulic power and many other flight controls, Haynes and his crew were forced to make an emergency landing at the Sioux City airport. The jet stayed afloat while the pilots made a series of 360-degree turns to the right as it approached the airport.
On the final impact, the aircraft's right wing broke off, causing the fuselage to cartwheel in a fiery ball before sliding to a stop upside down in a corn field at the end of a secondary runway.
Miraculously, 184 of the 296 people aboard survived, many due to the heroic actions of the crew, local emergency responders and medical staff.
Haynes was celebrated nationally for keeping his cool in a crisis and overcoming a nearly impossible situation. But he never considered himself a hero, choosing instead to give all the credit to his co-pilots and crew, said Woodbury County emergency management director Gary Brown, who served in that capacity at the time of the crash and grew to consider Haynes a "great friend."
"He was the most humble man I've ever met in my life," Brown said late Sunday night.
In a 2010 interview with The Journal, Haynes noted "the captain gets all the credit, like a quarterback on a football team who won the big game. But, it's a team effort. That's what I stress."
Brown said Haynes never forgot the 112 people who died in the crash.
"I feel guilty about 232," Haynes said in the 2010 interview. "You didn't do the job the company paid you to do -- to get from Point A to Point B."
To honor their memory, he worked tirelessly over the next three decades to help prevent future air disasters. He traveled the world, speaking at various conferences that focused on lessons learned from Flight 232 and making corresponding changes in the industry.
"You can't get over any type of trauma or tragedy without talking about it. I have given over 1,500 talks and it has helped me accept what has happened," Haynes said in the 2010 interview. "Every time I gave a talk in the beginning, it was like therapy. ... I tell people to be proud of what you did. You can learn from it. Don't do it again."
https://siouxcityjournal.com/news/al-haynes-pilot-of-flight-dies-at/article_d0c5ea59-ff8e-555d-95d2-6f9d9fe9176e.htmlThe webpage from the Sioux City Journal has pictures.
