Denny Fitch, the off-duty United Airlines DC-10 instructor who worked the throttles in the crash landing of Flight 232 at Sioux City, Iowa, on July 19, 1989, died of brain cancer on May 7. Fitch, along with 184 others, survived in a legendary feat of airmanship credited with initiating the now-standard concept of crew resource management. "Nobody had a right to walk away from that," Fitch told the Sioux City Herald just after the accident, in which 111 people died. Fitch was deadheading from United's training center in Denver to his home near Chicago when he heard the bang that signaled shards of turbine blades on the tail-mounted No. 2 engine slicing through lines supplying all three hydraulic systems on the aircraft. As the engine shook itself to a final smoking death, the only controls left were the power settings for the wing-mounted engines. After reassuring a flight attendant that everything would be all right, Fitch headed for the cockpit.
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