The View from the Tower

Faith doesn’t remove the turbulence; it teaches us to trust the One who sees the whole horizon.

You’re the pilot of a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, and there’s a sudden thump, a shudder and the instruments go crazy. What do you do?

On July 19, 1989, United Airlines Flight 232 left Denver bound for Chicago. It was supposed to be an ordinary flight, the kind thousands of travelers take every day without much thought about what keeps an airplane aloft. Families settled into their seats. Business travelers unfolded newspapers. Flight attendants moved through the aisle offering drinks. Nothing about the departure hinted that this flight would soon become one of the most studied aviation emergencies in modern history.

About an hour into the flight, the unthinkable happened 37,000 feet above Iowa. The aircraft’s tail-mounted engine — a General Electric CF6 — exploded without warning. Fragments from the explosion tore through the aircraft’s hydraulic lines. Within seconds, all three hydraulic systems failed.

For pilots, that kind of failure is nearly...