Captain Denny Fitch, 1942-2012

I once was sent on lead work up in the Dakotas. Upon completion I flew back via bugsmasher airlines to Sioux City, IA for a little layover before catching the bird back to Chicago O'Hare and home. With a little time to kill, and after having a couple of questions answered, I wandered across a parking lot at the Sioux City airport to get a look through the fence at the runway where this aircraft finally came down. I was at the identical spot where the famous film clip was made showing the aircraft wallowing down and finally cartwheeling along the runway, one wing in the air amid the flame. There was a withered bouquet of flowers stuck through the links of the hurricane fence. After a little while, I boarded my flight for Chicago and while we were taxiing to the EOR, we went past some hangars on the airport. Between the hangars was a pile of recognizable aircraft debris, in clearly distinguishable UAL paint and showing burn marks. This material was the DC-10's wreckage. It had not been disposed of yet at that time. I wish I could remember when I passed through the airport and saw this.
 
Back in the early 90's, I went to an FAA sponsored safety seminar in Raleigh, NC that featured Capt. Al Haynes. The presentation began with a detailed video account of the accident moment by moment and at the end, the crash. After the video concluded, the silence in the room was so that one could hear a pin drop. Capt. Haynes broke the silence with a strong and concise voice and said: "What you all have just witnessed was a non-survivable crash". He went on the speak about UAL232 in vivid detail and described systems and structural details at an Engineer's level. He gave all the credit to the outcome to Denny Fitch and the rest of his crew's professionalism who he named each of and tearfully including the name one of the Flight Attendants who died who was instrumental in preparing many of the passengers who had survived. All of us who were there at that seminar that day were quite lucky to hear Capt. Haynes speak and he made clear that his purpose in doing so was to reinforce the importance in keeping a cool head in emergencies and following procedure, and maintaining good Cockpit Resource Management which can help prevent accidents. Incidentally a few years later, myself and one of my friends who was at the same seminar were flying one afternoon and we were practicing maneuvers for the Commercial CR when we suffered sudden loss of power and lack of throttle response. It came down to a few seconds from declaring an Emergency/May-Day. We kept cool, I ran the ECL while my friend flew the plane and looked for a place to make an emergency landing(with few options). Since we had just done a couple of simulated emergency descents, I cycled the carb heat a few times vigorously and BAM, the engine responded!(after return there was a problem found with the Carb Heat linkage) We started climbing again at less than 500agl..... Good CRM and keeping cool save us from a forced landing in a salt marsh...
 
Captain Fitch was a superb pilot, his crew did one heck of a job maintaining a power status, and flying on throttles alone... not sure I could have done that.... But I still like to think I can RIP Skipper !
 
Capt. Al Haynes visited my place of work one time in the early 2000s (F/A-18 flight sim and training building, NAS Lemoore CA). I saw him in the hall way, but didn't get to speak to him.

RIP Capt. Fitch.
 
Denny's son Brian was my First Officer for a month back in the late 90's. He told me a number of things about the event that were amazing to hear about. RIP Captain Fitch.
 
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