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his own seat and Peter Allen’s. Allen would eventually escape from the wrecked aircraft by the seemingly impossible maneuver of going through a broken passenger window. In fact, he wasn’t the only one who attempted that. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, a young police officer named Pat McCann, who happened to be training at the airport that day, saw a man who had managed to get the upper half of his body through his window before the lower half was incinerated inside the plane.
    Fitch passed down the aisle into B-Zone. What he saw through the window only deepened his dread. He crossed to the port side and looked out at the left wing to confirm what he suspected. He rushed back through A-Zone, passing row 9, where Upton Rehnberg, who wrote technical manuals for the aerospace giant Sundstrand, sat in the window seat. Helen Young Hayes, an investment analyst from Denver, sat next to Rehnberg, on the aisle. A young woman with Chinese features, Hayes was fashionably dressed in a miniskirt and blouse. Across the aisle from her sat John Transue, forty. Rehnberg and Hayes would soon share adjacent rooms in the burn unit at St. Luke’s Hospital. Transue would save Jan Brown’s life. Fitch reached the cockpit door and knocked. No one answered.
    On the other side of the door, Haynes was saying, “We’re not gonna make the runway, fellas. We’re gonna have to ditch this son of a bitch and hope for the best.” Fitch knocked again, louder, and Haynes shouted, “ Unlock that fuckin’ door! ”
    “Unlock it!” echoed Records.
    Dvorak opened the door, and Fitch stepped into the cockpit. He’d been gone less than two minutes. He said, “Okay, both inboard ailerons are sticking up. That’s as far as I can tell. I don’t know.”
    The extreme stress was still affecting Haynes’s thinking. He responded, “That’s because we’re steering—we’re turning maximum turn right now.” Ailerons always move in opposite directions, up on one wing and down on the other. Both of them can’t be up at the same time unless they’re floating from lack of hydraulic power.
    “Tell me what you want,” Fitch said, “and I’ll help you.”
    Haynes said, “Right throttle. Close one, put two up.” He was under so much stress that he had simply misspoken. In reality, he was trying to tell Fitch to reduce power on the left engine (one) and increase it on the right (three, not two, which had obviously quit). “What we need,” Haynes said, “is elevator control, and I don’t know how to get it.”
    Fitch was confused but willing. “Okay, ah . . . ,” he said. He stood between the two pilots, took the handles in his hands, and began to move them in accordance with instructions from Haynes and Records, surfing this 185-ton whale five miles in the sky at 83 percent of the speed of sound.
    Dudley Dvorak was known as an unflappable guy. He had started his career in the Air Force as a navigator and flew back seat in F-4 Phantoms in Vietnam. He had been a flight instructor and examiner in numerous aircraft during his military career. Dvorak retired from the Air Force in 1985 and joined United with two decades of experience. Haynes could not have asked for a more competent pilot. Despite that, as Dvorak talked to SAM in San Francisco, he was under so much stress that he was having trouble saying what he meant to say. “Roger, we need any help we can get from SAM as far as what to do with this, we don’t have anything, we don’t—what to do, we’re having a hard time controllin’ it, we’re descending, we’re down to seventeen thousand feet we have . . . ah, hardly any control whatsoever.”
    In the meantime, Haynes suggested to Fitch that they try the autopilot, and Fitch said, “It won’t work.” Then Haynes began coaching Fitch concerning how to steer against the constant and uncommanded climbing and descending. “Start it down,” he said. Then, “No, no, no, no, no, not yet . . . wait a minute till it levels off . . .