Hero pilot's daughter gets transplant help
By Stuart Eskenazi
Seattle Times staff reporter
KEN LAMBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Al Haynes is helping his daughter Laurie Arguello to raise money for a bone-marrow transplant and aftercare she needs to survive aplastic anemia. They're shown here together last month in SeaTac.
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Laurie Arguello of SeaTac is learning that having a father who saved so many lives is a godsend in the effort to save her own.
On a summer day 15 years ago, her father and his flight crew piloted their failing United Airlines DC-10 away from certain doom and onto an Iowa runway. The emergency crash landing was fiery, but not fatal for 184 of the 296 people on board.
Now Arguello, 39, who has aplastic anemia, a potentially fatal blood disease, is managing her own trick on fate.
With her father, retired pilot Al Haynes of SeaTac, as emissary, Arguello has raised more than $256,000 for a bone-marrow transplant — much of it coming from survivors of Flight 232 who have come to revere Haynes not just for saving their lives but for his support in the months and years that followed.
"He has always had time for anyone connected with the crash," said Jerry Schemmel, a survivor who has gone on to become the radio announcer for the NBA's Denver Nuggets.
How to help
To make a tax-deductible donation to the medical fund for Laurie Arguello, or any of the other 500-plus patients on the National Foundation for Transplants registry, visit:
www.transplants.org
To contribute by mail, write:
NFT for Laurie Arguello
P.O. Box 7781
Covington, WA 98042
For more information:
www.friendsforlauri.com
"I've become more impressed with the man that he has become since the crash than the man he was in the cockpit that day."
Haynes guided Flight 232 to the Sioux City airport 45 minutes after an engine exploded and the steering was all but gone. He credits the teamwork of the flight and ground crews in averting a far greater disaster.
"How do you pay someone like that back? Well, the truth is, you can't," said survivor Joan Leonard Wernick of Colorado.
Word of Arguello's illness traveled fast, starting with a humble solicitation letter Haynes sent friends in late fall and spreading through national and local media coverage.
An official with the National Foundation for Transplants said she never before has seen a transplant patient raise so much money, so fast.
Many of the donations have come from those in the airline industry who regard Haynes' calm leadership in the cockpit as an act of heroism — although he has always demurred from such a characterization.
Pilot Al Haynes, shown in an undated file photo, is considered a hero by many of the passengers he saved after an engine exploded on a flight, damaging the plane's controls.
"My definition of a hero is someone who voluntarily puts his or her life in jeopardy to benefit other people," said Haynes, 72. "There's no way that we (the crew) voluntarily put ourselves in jeopardy. We just did our job and tried to get people on the ground."
Arguello, who is married and has a 9-year-old son, has two potential bone-marrow donors lined up, both strangers. A transplant could take place this spring.
"Whoever is her donor, now there's a hero," Haynes said. "That person is voluntarily doing something to save a life. Donors aren't necessarily putting themselves in jeopardy, but they could be."
Nothing is certain in bone-marrow transplants. The $256,000 that Arguello set as her fund-raising goal covers the transplant and after-care, but assumes an unlikely scenario that no complications will arise. As a result, she continues to raise money.
About 2,500 have contributed online, and she has a big shoebox filled with notes sent by donors through the mail. "I read a letter from someone whose friend didn't survive Flight 232," she said. "They made a donation in that person's name, which made me cry."
UPI, 1989
Sioux City, Iowa, police stand guard over the fuselage of United Airlines Flight 232 after it crashed-landed en route from Denver to Chicago.
Before she became ill, Arguello was working as a customer-service representative for a janitorial-services company in Sodo. In December 2001, she thought she was suffering from a bad case of the flu. Two weeks later, she was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, which occurs when bone marrow stops making enough blood cells. She has undergone more than 60 blood or platelet transfusions, but doctors say her best hope is a bone-marrow transplant. Her medical insurance is paying $100,000 toward a transplant, but she has to cover the minimum balance of $156,000 plus another $100,000 for after-care.
Arguello registered with the National Foundation for Transplants, which represents more than 500 patients across the country who are raising money for transplants. Before she even had her first official fund-raising event, a community garage sale and bake sale on Feb. 21, she had raised more than $256,000.
"Laurie understands that she's very blessed," said Nancy McGlocklin, a patient advocate for the Memphis-based transplant foundation. "She will be taken care of financially, but she is one out of 1,000."
Some patients die before raising enough money for a transplant, she said.
Arguello hopes her story inspires people to become organ, bone marrow and blood donors. McGlocklin said some who have visited the foundation's Web site to donate to Arguello have read the stories of other patients and contributed to their funds. Patients on the foundation's registry raised about $3 million last year.
"Laurie already has been a wonderful influence," she said.
But Haynes has been the instigator.
Since the accident, he has become a bit of a celebrity in the airline industry. A widely viewed training video highlights the experience of Flight 232.
The story of the flight also was adapted into a movie, with Charlton Heston playing Haynes. It was aired on television as "Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232," and released on video as "A Thousand Heroes."
Haynes returned to work as a pilot for two years after the crash and kept in contact with many of the survivors. Wernick said Haynes helped her conquer a fear of flying that followed the crash.
"He really reached out to all of the passengers and tried to help them get on with life. I just think that's the mark of a real hero," said Wernick, who was on the plane with her husband and young son, then 6 and now a student at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Since retiring in 1991, Haynes has given hundreds of motivational talks a year, using his experience on Flight 232 to instruct businesses and others on the importance of teamwork.
He has directed royalties from his talks into scholarship funds — two in memory of United employees who did not survive the crash. It was only after Arguello got sick that he considered tapping into his Flight 232 experience to benefit his own family.
"At first, it was a little hard," Haynes said. "I felt like I was taking advantage of a crash for my own benefit — and that's not right.
"But if you really look at it, something positive can come from that incident to help someone else, which is what I've been doing in raising money for scholarships. It's just another form of need."