Traces of 43 Sought at Site of Crash : Little Hope Held for Missing in Wreck of Airliner in Iowa

SIOUX CITY, Iowa —  National Guard troops and police combed the airport and a nearby cornfield today, looking for traces of 43 people still missing in the wreckage of a United Airlines DC-10 that crashed Wednesday while attempting an emergency landing.

Though the crippled jetliner skidded and rolled across the runway at the Sioux Gateway Airport before bursting into flames, at least 176 of the 293 people on board survived the impact and many of them managed to walk away with only minor cuts and bruises.

Still, 59 people had been admitted to area hospitals with injuries ranging from broken bones to extreme head trauma. Doctors said two of those crash victims died overnight and a few others were in critical condition and not expected to survive. And officials held out little hope that any of the missing would be found alive.

Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board were on the scene and organizing the investigation into the cause of a tail engine explosion and hydraulic failure that preceded the crash, according to agency spokesman Ted Lepatkiewicz.

The flight data recorder and voice data recorder, instruments that could give clues to what went wrong, have been recovered, authorities said.

Iowa Gov. Terry E. Branstad toured the crash site and described it as a “gruesome scene . . . a whole lot of people haven’t been accounted for yet. . . . We assume there are still bodies in the burned-out fuselage.”

Branstad also visited local hospitals where he talked privately to Al Haynes, the Seattle-based pilot who grappled for 45 harrowing minutes with the controls of an aircraft that was virtually impossible to steer. The pilot, Branstad said, was “very coherent but quite emotional.” Though Haynes did not discuss his ordeal in detail, Branstad said the pilot acknowledged that he was not sure “whether they could get to the airport . . . (instead of crashing) right in the heart of Sioux City.”

The Rev. Jack Heckart, a Baptist minister, said he visited with co-pilot William Records in the intensive care unit of Marian Health Center in Sioux City. “If we’d had 10 more seconds we could have put it down (safely),” Heckart quoted Records as saying.

Fred Farrar, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the plane experienced “complete hydraulic failure” as it flew over Iowa en route from Denver to Chicago. Farrar said pieces of the plane broke off in mid-flight, some of them landing more than 50 miles away from the crash scene.

Though the cause of the apparent explosion and power failure is still unknown, passengers on the 15-year-old aircraft said it experienced problems earlier in the day. Ruth Dinsmore, of Mt. Laurel, N.J., told the Associated Press that she took the same DC-10 from Philadelphia to Denver in the morning. As it began to taxi at Philadelphia International Airport “everything sort of shut off,” Dinsmore said. She said it taxied back to the terminal, where it sat about 15 minutes for repairs.

Similarly, Jerry Milford, an Indianapolis accountant who survived the crash, said the plane was 20 minutes late leaving Denver. “The captain said there was an electrical short,” Milford said.

Dr. David Greco, the director of the emergency department for Marian hospital, said most of the survivors appeared to have been sitting in rows 9 through 19 of the jumbo jet--toward the front of the plane’s main fuselage. Greco, who watched the crash from a helicopter that had been dispatched several minutes before the DC-10 went down, said dozens of emergency personnel were on the scene within seconds.