Pilot who helped crash-land jet in 1989 dies..:Read how he did it.

CHICAGO — Airline pilot Denny Fitch was
hitching a ride home on a DC-10 in 1989
when he heard an explosion somewhere in
the back of the jet. He soon made his way to
the cockpit to see if the crew needed help.
Inside, he found three men desperately
trying to keep the giant plane in the air after
losing all hydraulic power needed to control
direction and altitude. Fitch took a seat in
the only space available — the floor — and
helped operate some of the only equipment
still working — the wing engines — to try
to land the aircraft carrying nearly 300
people.
Fitch, who died Monday at 69, used
everything he knew about flying to confront
an emergency that engineers never
imagined could happen to a modern jetliner.
When the crippled plane crash-landed in
Sioux City, Iowa, more than half of the
passengers survived — one of the most
admired life-saving efforts in aviation
history.
After the accident, aviation experts
conducted simulations in which test pilots
and trainer pilots tried to land similarly
stricken aircraft.
"I'm not aware of any that replicated the
success these guys had," said Mike Hamilton,
a United pilot who flew with Fitch. None of
the simulator pilots were able to make a
survivable landing.
"Most of the simulations never even made it
close to the ground," Hamilton said.
More than two decades later, the teamwork
of Fitch and the others on the flight deck is
still a model for the industry.
"To be one of those pilots, they are all
heroes, and he played in instrumental role in
saving all those lives," said Susan Callander, a
flight attendant on United Flight 232. "What
they all did, all working together as a team,
now for the rest of history will be part of the
training" of flight crews.
Fitch, who had suffered from brain cancer,
died at his home in the Chicago suburb of St.
Charles. His role began with a small,
seemingly meaningless decision he never
understood: to get on Flight 232 instead of
another flight scheduled to depart five
minutes earlier on July 19.
Sitting in a window seat in the last row of
first class, Fitch had just finished his lunch
and asked for a cup coffee.
Suddenly, the explosion spilled his coffee. As
an instructional pilot, he had just spent days
training fellow airmen for every conceivable
kind of problem — hydraulic failure,
immovable flaps, fires and more. He tried to
assure a worried flight attendant that
everything was going to be fine.
"She said, 'No, you don't understand, we've
lost control of the plane,'" Fitch's widow,
Rosa, said Wednesday.
The engine in the plane's tail had exploded,
sending chunks of metal into the jet's three
hydraulic systems. What the crew knew was
this: The only thing they could do was turn
right by using the engines to vary the
amount of thrust on each side.
So for more than 40 minutes, the aircraft
flew in circles as it aimed for the Sioux City
airport. Al Haynes, the captain who
understood as well as anyone the danger of
the situation, asked air traffic controllers to
keep the jet away from the city.
In an interview for a documentary about the
crash, Fitch talked about how his life,
anybody's life, can change in an instant.
"What makes you so sure you're going to
make it home tonight?" he said. "I was 46
years old the day I walked into that cockpit. I
had the world ahead of me. I was a captain
on a major U.S. airline. I had a beautiful
healthy family, loving wife, great future. And
at 4 o'clock I'm trying to stay alive."
High above the cornfields, the pilots knew
the difficulty of their task. Without the flight-
control systems, their landing would be
about twice the normal speed.
As the plane made its final descent, Fitch
recalled hearing and smelling everything.
"I've never been so alive in my life," he said
for a newspaper story marking the 15th
anniversary of the crash.
Just above the runway, the right wing
plowed into the ground, sending the jet into
a terrifying cartwheel and tearing the
fuselage into three chunks as it skidded
across the pavement into a cornfield — a
scene that was captured on video.
Most of those who were killed were in the
first-class area where Fitch had been seated
before he went to the cockpit.
Fitch suffered several broken bones, a
punctured lung and other injuries that
required nine operations, Rosa Fitch said.
The emotional scars were even deeper.
"To find out that 112 people didn't make it,
that just about destroyed me," he once said.
"I would have given my life for any of them.
It was a really tough time."
Fitch became a motivational speaker, who
advised others that they should let their
family and friends know how much they're
loved.
Fitch, whose first wife died of brain cancer
in the late 1990s, met Rosa in March 2000,
when the two were working — he as a pilot
and she as flight attendant — on an
overseas flight.
"When I got home, the phone was ringing
and it was him," she said. "He'd gone
through two years of recuperation from the
crash and two years of procedures for his
wife's illness, and he was looking for some
normalcy in his life."
Three months later, they were married, and
she said that her husband took his own
advice throughout their marriage.
"He couldn't pass me without hugging me
or telling me how much he loved me," she
said.
Besides his wife, Fitch's survivors include
three grown children, two stepchildren and
10 grandchildren.