Rockies Announcer Jerry Schemmel Shares How Plane Crash Changed His Life

Jerry Schemmel is one of the nation’s most well-known sports announcers. He’s the current play-by-play man for the Colorado Rockies, and his resume is stacked with previous broadcast experience with NBA teams like the Minnesota Timberwolves and Denver Nuggets, among others.

Although he may be even more well known as a hero and survivor from one of the most shocking commercial airline crashes in American history — United Airlines Flight 232 — which in 1989 took 112 lives during a gruesome emergency landing in Sioux City, Iowa. 

On impact, the airplane broke apart like a ceramic dish, as major segments of the DC-10 spun apart in fiery cartwheels across the runway and into surrounding corn fields. 

Thirty-six years later, those images remain vividly seared in Schemmel's memory. 

After discussing the incident last week on Cowboy State Daily radio with John Baggett, we followed up for a more detailed account in which Schemmel offered a play-by-play of both the crash and its aftermath, while explaining how the experience has come to guide his decisions in the decades since.

“Everybody has a plane crash,” Schemmel said, speaking figuratively, and explaining how Flight 232 wrought havoc on his wellbeing long after that day. “It’s important to share these stories and share how we get back up.”  

In a time when tragedy feels pervasive around the globe, his story is both timely as well as timeless, because it offers an example of how some find hope in the aftermath of grief and hardship. 

Jerry Schemmel

Schemmel was a college baseball player with dreams of the major league. But when his athletic eligibility expired at Washburn University, his prospects for the pro league were dim, so he settled for what he said was the next best thing — sports commentary.  

He rose quickly in the world of sports, and by age 29 he earned a job as the deputy commissioner for Continental Basketball Association (CBA), a sort of minor league to the NBA in that era.

It was only two months into that role when his life was turned upside down – in more than one sense.  

On July 19, 1989, after getting bumped from four previous standby flights, Schemmel along with CBA commissioner, Jay Ramsdell, finally squeezed onto flight 232 to Chicago, destined ultimately for Columbus, Ohio, for the annual CBA draft the following day.

It was business as usual for the first hour. The plane reached cruising altitude, attendants served an in-flight meal, and passengers like Schemmel lazily perused the sports section of the daily news before dozing off into a midflight nap.

‘Thought It Was A Terrorist Attack’

About 1 hour and 7 minutes after takeoff, passengers were jolted by a massive explosion. 

The cabin shuddered violently, and the plane began to plummet. Passenger screams filled the cabin. The plane plunged for around 30 seconds, but to Schemmel it felt like 30 lifetimes.

His first thought was that it’s a terrorist act. His second thought was that everyone on board was destined to die. 

“First thing I thought was that terrorists planted a bomb, and it had been detonated. It was so surprising and so violent that I thought… everybody's gonna die,” he said.

The plane at last leveled out, and Capt. Al Haynes got on the speaker to announce their itinerary had changed: prepare for an emergency landing. But the captain himself didn’t yet know where the landing would be, and he was still trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

What Went Wrong With Flight 232?

The cause of the accident is nearly unprecedented in aviation history, according to the investigation and final report from The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which detailed the ways a fatigue crack on a single fan disk brought down the DC-10. 

A cracked titanium fan disk in the tail-mounted engine shattered and caused the engine to explode. The explosion tore through three separate hydraulic pressure systems, leaving the pilots unable to adjust rudders, ailerons — hinged surfaces on the trailing edge of aircraft wings that control roll — and elevators. The plane was virtually impossible to steer.

"We don't have any controls," said Haynes, minutes after the explosion, according to transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder. He then asked his co-pilot for a readout of the “hydraulic quantity.” The co-pilot responded that the quantity was zero. 

“On all of them? Quantity is gone?” said Haynes, who then hurriedly deployed the landing gear and began dumping fuel.

The captain instructed passengers to stay in their seats. But there was one man who defied the order, because he happened to be a DC-10 check airman, trained to inspect this precise model of airplane. He rushed to the flight deck to assist.

“Get this thing down. We're in trouble," the check airman said to the captain.

The airman's coincidental presence was a divine grace, Schemmel believes, because he would perform a decisive role in helping control the wing engines, whose throttles needed to be manipulated manually to produce intermittent surges in order to steer the plane.

Back in row 23, Schemmel was doing his best to comfort a young mother and her 18-month-old boy sitting in the row ahead of him. Though they only interacted during that 40-minute descent, Schemmel will remember the boy's face for the rest of his life.

“The boy was supposed to be on the floor when we hit, and he did not want to cooperate. He did not want to sit down, so I tried to calm her and help her as best I could.”

The Crash

About 30 seconds before they touched down, the captain’s voice came through the speaker system with a three-word command. 

“Brace, brace, brace,” Haynes said.

Schemmel wrapped his arms around the seat-back in front of him and pulled in tight.

“I remember what I was focusing on those last few moments before we hit. I was telling myself, all right, if we hit down and I'm not dead, I'm not going to panic. I'm going to stay calm and try to help other people,” he said. 

“There was an eerie silence in that plane before impact, and I don't think anybody was prepared for how hard we hit, because we came in so hard and so fast,” he said.  

“There were bodies being thrown about. Some were being thrown in their chairs because the chairs had given out. Others were thrown from their chairs. There's smoke and fire and debris being whipped around inside the cabin all the first couple seconds after we hit down.”

The plane's broken segments tumbled more than half-a-mile down the runway. Schemmel had the sensation of traveling backwards and upside down. 

When it finally came to a stop, he was dangling upside down, engulfed in a billow of hot, dark smoke. He was so disoriented he wasn’t certain which plane of existence he was in.

“When we came to a halt, I had to ask the question: Am I alive or am I not? I honestly wasn't sure. I thought, man, am I still here or not? And then I felt some pain in the back of my right hand. It was fire shooting from the wall. I felt that pain so figured I must be alive,” he said. 

He dropped out of his seat and started to make his way away from the direction of the fire, helping others as he went. But his personal charge – the 18-month-old boy — could not be found in the wreckage.

He tried to convince the mother to escape, but she told him, “‘I’m not leaving without my boy,’” he said.

He emerged from the smoke into a forest of 7-foot-tall corn stalks. His senses were so jumbled that he wasn’t thinking so much as reacting. 

But even as his brain was discombobulated, the logic of his heart was clear and comprehensible, which is how he came to save the life of an 11-month-old baby girl.

“I got outside the plane, and I’m thinking this thing is going to blow up, get away as quickly as you can. But then I heard a baby crying back inside the plane,” he said.

During the crash, a child had been thrown into an open overhead bin, which then shut closed and locked her in. With little more than the sound of her crying to lead him, Schemmel found the girl, released her from the bin and escaped back off the plane.

“I didn't think it through. I didn't weigh any risk. I didn't think that if I went back in the cabin and might not find my way back out. I just happened, and next thing I know, I'm back inside the plane on all fours over top of the crying sound.” 

But there were others he couldn’t have saved, including the baby boy in the row in front of him, along with his travel partner and friend, CBA Commissioner Jay Ramsdell. 

Schemmel took another emotional hit nearly 19 years after the crash when Sabrina Michaelson, the girl he saved that day, died of a drug overdose.

"Tough day today," he posted to X on July 8, 2022. "It's the 14th anniversary of the death of Sabrina Michaelson, the baby I carried out of UA Flight 232. Please keep her family in your prayers. I can't even fathom what they go through today."

Cause Of Crash: ‘Human Factors’

The NTSB report concluded that, “The probable cause of this accident was the inadequate consideration given to human factors, limitations in the inspection and quality control procedures used by United Airlines' engine overhaul facility.”

“Of the 296 persons aboard the airplane, 110 passengers and 1 flight attendant were fatally injured. Autopsies revealed that 35 passengers died of asphyxia due to smoke inhalation, including 24 without traumatic blunt force injuries. The other fatally injured occupants died of multiple injuries from blunt force impact. Of the remaining 185 persons onboard, 47 sustained serious injuries, 125 sustained minor injuries, and 13 were not injured,” the report says. (An additional passenger died of crash-related complications in the months after.)

Nightmares

Even as Schemmel knew he was fortunate to walk away physically intact, the incident caused him to psychologically fall apart. 

After the incident, he was promoted to commissioner to replace Jay Ramsdell, but he quit the CBA only months later. He was wracked by sleeplessness and nightmares, spinning out in a whirl of survivor’s guilt, post-traumatic stress disorder, and wearying existential thought. 

“I'd look in the mirror expecting to see the luckiest guy in the world. I survived this crash where almost everybody around me died. But then I think about that little boy in front of me just two feet away. He dies but I survive. It just felt so unfair. He had his whole life in front of him. I would have swapped my life for his,” he said.

“That's where the struggle was. Asking those questions over and over and over. Why did I survive but the little boy in front of me dies? Why couldn’t we both survive?”

Cause For Conversion

Around a year later, the trauma's shadow began to lift.

He was sitting in silence on a hardback chair alone in the living room of his Denver apartment, when out of nowhere he felt compelled to do something he'd never done before: He said a prayer.

“I had no spiritual foundation whatsoever. But for the first time in 30 years, I was knocked down in a way that I couldn’t get up from by myself. So I just said a simple prayer: ‘God, will you please come into my life and give me some relief from this crash.’” 

In ways small and large, Schemmel said, the prayer was answered and thus began a new life. He writes about this conversion experience in his book “Chosen to Live.”

He returned to his passion, sports broadcasting. In recent years he’s become an endurance cyclist who organizes charity cycling events. He’s now also a motivational speaker with a reputation for moving audiences, including people like Cowboy State Daily’s John Baggett. 

During his Oct. 4 radio show, “Baggs” recalled the impression he felt after the first time he heard Schemmel speak. 

“One of my best friends…came up to me after and said, ‘Boy, we gotta stop whining about our little problems.’ You really put life into perspective,” Baggs said. 

Schemmel reiterated what’s become the central theme of his life. 

“Everybody has a plane crash. It might not be as bad as what I went through. It might be worse than what I went through,” he said. “I think anytime that we can bring those stories out and learn about others' experiences – how people get knocked down and how they get back up – people need to know that, because if they haven't been knocked down, they're going to. Life is going to knock you down.”

Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.