Alfred C. Haynes, the United Airlines captain widely regarded as a hero for guiding a crippled McDonnell Douglas DC-10 to a crash landing at the Sioux City, Iowa, U.S., airport after an uncontained engine failure and the loss of hydraulic flight control systems, has died at age 87.
Haynes died Sunday at a hospital in the Seattle area.
On July 19, 1989, Haynes was captain of United Flight 232, which suffered an uncontained failure of its no. 2 engine while cruising at Flight Level 370 (approximately 37,000 feet). As the engine broke apart, it destroyed all three of the DC-10’s hydraulic flight control systems.
As Haynes said in an article published in the June 1991 issue of Flight Safety Foundation’s Accident Prevention, the hydraulic systems failures “left us … with no ailerons to control roll, no rudders to coordinate a turn, no elevators to control pitch, no leading edge devices to help us slow d…
