On July 19, 1989, one of the nation’s worst aviation disasters — and one of the best under-the-circumstances success stories of heroism and emergency response — happened in Sioux City. The Argus Leader and AP have stories on the anniversary and remembrance of United Flight 232.
National Geographic created a “Seconds from Disaster” episode about the crash. It’s 46 minutes long with survivor interviews and re-creates events leading up to it (although not quite late-’80s accurate).
This introduction from an interview with Capt. Al Haynes reinforces the crew’s actions against all odds:
That’s when a 12″ pie-shaped section of fanblade cut all three independent hydraulic systems on a DC-10 with 296 souls on board. They don’t cover that in recurrent simulator training because it’s mathematically impossible. After it happened, the NTSB replicated the data of Flight 232 and not one of the 57 crews they tested in the simulator could control the airplane all the way to the ground.
Two years after the crash, Haynes said: “Enough redundancy was built into the system to where the odds were placed at 1 to 10^9th power, or a billion to 1, that complete hydraulic failure would occur. … On July 19th, Murphy’s Law caught up with us, and we did lose all three systems.” (The link goes to a long transcript of a presentation in California.)