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He was on his way home for the weekend. Fitch had first noticed Murray when she served his lunch. He had heard her lilting southern accent as the three chatted pleasantly.
    Fitch was the oldest of eight siblings, and as such he had developed what he called “people radar.” He could spot a distressed person at a hundred yards, as he liked to say. Now he saw that Murray looked grave and worried as she rushed past. Fitch reached out, touched her arm, and stopped her. Murray leaned down. “Don’t worry about this,” he told her. “This thing flies fine on two engines. We just simply need to get to a lower altitude, and we’re gonna be fine.”
    She leaned in closer and fixed him with a penetrating gaze. According to Fitch’s account, she said, “Oh, no, Denny.” She spoke softly so as not to be overheard. “Both the pilots are trying to fly the airplane, and the captain has told us that we have lost all our hydraulics.”
    Fitch stared at her for a moment. He knew that wasn’t possible, but as he later put it, “ A flight attendant is not a pilot .” She could not be expected to know anything about airplanes. “DC-10s must have hydraulics to fly them. Period.”
    “Oh, that’s impossible,” Fitch told Murray. “It can’t happen.”
    “Well, that’s what we’re being told,” Murray said.
    “Well, there’s a backup system.”
    “We’re being told that that’s gone too.”
    Fitch thought about that for a moment and said, “Well . . . I don’t think that’s possible, but . . . would you go back to the cockpit. Tell the captain there’s a DC-10 Training Check Airman back here. If there’s anything that I can do to assist, I’d be happy to do so.”
    Fitch watched Murray go forward as quickly as she could without alarming passengers. Fitch had been on full alert for a while now, and this new development was baffling and more than a little alarming. When the explosion occurred, he had finished his lunch and was having that second coffee that Susan White, tongue in cheek, had asked a nonplussed Jan Brown about far in the back of the plane. “The whole fuselage went very sharply to the right,” Fitch recalled. “That coffee cup is now empty. Its contents are in the saucer, and it’s all over the table linen. And my rear end, which is sitting in the middle of a leather seat, is now up against the arm rest to the left. It was abrupt and violent.”
    As a Training Check Airman, or TCA, Fitch had conducted five days of training with a group of DC-10 pilots in Denver during the past week. When the engine exploded, he turned to Peter Allen and said, while mopping up coffee, “It looks like we lost one.” Fitch then felt the plane begin making a series of strange excursions across the sky, first up, then down and to the right in long, loopy spirals, and up and down again and again, like a boat on uneasy seas. With one engine out, they were supposed to be going down, not up. The right turns made it seem to him as if the number three engine on the right wing had failed, causing drag on that side. But the announcement said that number two quit. As a TCA, Fitch was exposed to every conceivable emergency, week in and week out, yet nothing he saw or heard made sense.
    More than twenty years after Fitch had sent Jan Murray to the cockpit to offer his services, she described her experience there. “I went to the cockpit, knocked on the door. It flew open.” As she tried to describe the horrifying scene in there, she stuttered and stammered with the pain of remembering. “Th-th-the pilots were struggling so, it was just, it was incredible, the struggle that they were—just the visual of it was just— so frightening . It was like they were struggling to hang onto the controls. So I just hollered in there, I said, ‘You have a Training Check Airman back here if you need him.’ ”
    Haynes didn’t turn around. He called out, “Okay, let him come up.”
    “Immediately I closed the door, and trying to be