Jerry Schemmel can remember July 19th, 1989 like it was yesterday - on that day he survived the crash-landing of United Airlines Flight 232, in which 112 people were killed.
Schemmel, a sports broadcaster who has been the play-by-play announcer for the Denver Nuggets in the NBA and Colorado Rockies in Major League Baseball, says it doesn't feel like 31 years since the accident.
He was 29 at the time and working with the Continental Basketball Association. In fact, his friend and Commissioner of the organisation, Jay Ramsdell, was seated several rows behind him and died in the crash.
In an interview with Shane Hannon for OTB Sports, Jerry recalls how he wasn't even supposed to be onboard the plane that day.
"It was a crazy day because I wasn't supposed to be on that plane originally. I was supposed to fly at seven o'clock in the morning from Denver to Chicago, got out to the airport about six o'clock or so and found out that my flight was cancelled.
"I got re-booked on four consecutive flights that were all full, so I finally got on the fourth standby flight, which turned out to be United Airlines Flight 232.
"I wasn't supposed to be on that plane, I had a chance to go on an earlier flight but my boss said 'Let's travel together', so we ended up being delayed by about six hours and really were not supposed to be on this airplane.
"We got the last two seats aboard United Flight 232."
The early portions of the flight were routine. But a catastrophic explosion on the tail-mounted engine caused damage to the flight controls - something that would prove fatal for many.
Jerry says that immediately thoughts of death came into his head.
"It's about a two-hour flight from Denver to Chicago, so we were about halfway there, I think one hour in or just short of that.
"Out of nowhere came this explosion. I could hear it first and then I could feel it kind of come from the back of the plane to the front of the plane, you could feel the reverb from the blast.
"The first thing I thought was a bomb has gone off, I honesty did. I thought a terrorist had planted a bomb... we started to drop.
Got to say goodbye today to Captain Al Haynes at his memorial service in Seattle. The Captain of UA Flight 232 was a true hero. RIP my friend! pic.twitter.com/IMfPL7AYvI
— Jerry Schemmel (@jschemmel6) October 5, 2019
"This is crazy because Pan Am Flight 103 had been downed by a terrorist bomb over [Lockerbie] in Scotland about six months before our crash, and I thought 'Wow, the same thing is happening on American soil, this is crazy.'
"We started to drop and I thought 'Well, this is it for everybody.' I don't know if you'd call it eerie or strange, but a couple of questions popped into my mind as this is happening.
"Number one was, 'How many people are onboard this plane?' I wanted to know how many people were going to die in the next couple of moments when we hit the ground. The thought in my mind was 200 for some reason, and I was almost 100 off, there were 296 of us.
"And then the question that hit my head was, 'How long does it take a DC-10 to drop 37,000 feet?' And I had no idea on that one. We came out of that drop and after about a minute or two, we felt like we were flying normal again, we had kind of levelled off.
"It didn't seem completely normal, the sound of the engines were different, but we weren't dropping anymore. Some of the panic that had taken over the cabin subsided a little bit."
Ultimately though the pilots informed the passengers of the gravity of the situation. They were going to perform an emergency landing in Sioux City, Iowa, and it wasn't going to be a landing at a normal, safe speed.
"He said 'I want everybody in their seats, you can't get our of your seat in any circumstance, this is going to be rougher than anything you've ever been through. We're not going to land this plane and walk off this thing safely.'
"He knew [and] the cockpit crew knew that we were in trouble, and he wanted us as passengers to understand that as well, and I think he did a great job at doing that."
Thoughts of death and the afterlife entered Jerry's head in the minutes before the plane crash-landed, but he was also keen to be alert and not in a panic if he did survive, so he could help other passengers.
"A normal DC-10 landing is about 120 miles an hour when you hit the ground, we hit at 255 miles an hour. We're having airspeed that's twice what it should have been because they couldn't control that plane.
"We dropped three times faster than we were supposed to, so that impact was just absolutely incredible. It was like we just dropped out of the sky and hit the ground, which is I guess kind of what we did."
Jerry recalls with great clarity the immediate moments after the plane hit the ground.
"Everybody around me in that crash perished."
Sports broadcaster Jerry Schemmel survived the crash-landing of United Flight 232 31 years ago today.
112 people died. He spoke with @ShaneHannon01 for an exclusive OTB Sports Radio interview.
7pm this evening on our new app 📱 pic.twitter.com/t2qVXTA5Ee— Off The Ball (@offtheball) July 19, 2020
"The first couple of seconds after we slammed down, bodies are being thrown about inside the plane, some were still strapped in their chairs and their chairs had given and people were thrown in their chairs still strapped.
"[There was] smoke and fire and debris, all in the first couple of seconds after we hit down. For all the thoughts of what it was going to be like, I don't think anybody was ready for how hard we hit, and how much craziness there was as soon as we hit.
"I remember thinking to myself maybe ten or 15 seconds after we hit the ground 'Alright, this is bad, there are some people that aren't going to survive this, there are a lot of people going to be hurt. But maybe we'll coast to a stop and I'll just assess things then.'
"We hit the ground, we bounced a couple of times... we bounced on our nose, and then we started sliding and I thought 'Alright, we'll just slide to a stop and I'll assess things then.'
"About the time I had that thought we flipped over frontwards, we kind of cartwheeled end to end and the nose dug into the runway and we flipped over that way.
"That's where it really got crazy, I slid upside down and backwards for almost a mile off the runway and into a corn field next to the airport."
Read Part Two of our interview with Jerry Schemmel tomorrow on otbsports.com - where he discusses saving a young passenger from the wreckage, and dealing with survivors' guilt.
