‘We Were the Last Thing She Was Holding Onto’

NEED TO KNOW

• They called it a “Miracle in the Cornfield,” when United Airlines Flight 232 went down in Iowa in 1989, killing more than 100 people

• Spencer Bailey, 3, was one of the survivors along with his big brother and his rescue was captured in an iconic photograph

• In a rare interview, Bailey is looking back at the crash and its aftermath and his life now

Spencer Bailey, then not quite 4, was immortalized by a photo of a National Guardsman carrying his tiny, limp body away from the 1989 United Airlines Flight 232 crash in Sioux City, Iowa, that killed his young mother and 111 others.

Now, as Bailey nears 40, he made time to return to what remains of Runway 22 at the city airport, where the plane first went down before sliding into a nearby cornfield.

The asphalt is not really tended to these days, and weeds grow up through the cracks. That’s as it should be, Bailey tells PEOPLE.

“There’s sort of a beautiful metaphor that quite literally reflects the sort of scars and the temporal nature of lingering trauma,” he says. “But also being able to grow past it.”

Bailey thinks a lot about time. A journalist and author, who now lives in New York City, he co-founded media company The Slowdown and has a podcast called Time Sensitive. His 2020 book, In Memory Of: Designing Contemporary Memorialsexamines different kinds of tributes, like the one in which he is featured: a statue based on the photo of his rescue, which was unveiled a few years after the crash.

And this particular moment in time — this moment, right here — has special meaning for him.

“My mom was 36, so this year marks the amount of time she spent on Earth,” Bailey says. “Obviously I carry my mom with me. I’m so grateful for those three years and 11 months we had together, but I have no memory of them.”

Nor does Bailey remember the titanium fan disk in the passenger jet’s engine breaking at 37,000 feet in the air, causing an explosion above the Iowa cornfields on a flight from Denver to Chicago.

In the unfolding chaos, he didn’t know that the spiraling debris sheared through the plane, cutting all of the hydraulic lines needed to steer the craft.

And he was unaware of the 44-minute battle being waged in the cockpit as Captain Al Haynes and his crew struggled to make an emergency landing at Sioux Gateway Airport.

Of the 296 people on board, 184 lived.

Bailey’s older brother, Brandon, who was 6, later told him how their mom, Frances, draped her arm around them as the aircraft’s tail section ripped off — ejecting their bank of seats as the plane slid to a stop, upside-down.

Brandon, legs broken, was severely injured. Spencer suffered brain trauma and went into a five-day coma. Frances “Francie” Lockwood Bailey, a wife, teacher, artist and children’s clothing designer, died protecting her boys.

“There’s a sense that she’s always been looking over us. It’s incredible for me to think (we) were the last thing she was holding onto,” Spencer says. “I wonder, had she not put us down into the brace position, had she not put her arms over the backs of us, would either of us not be here?”

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Spencer’s twin, Trent, and their dad, Brownell, were not on the flight. After learning of the crash, Brownell raced to get to his sons. He knew Brandon was at the hospital, and a relative told him about a photo they’d seen — that was already spreading in the news — that they believed was of Spencer.

Spencer says the crash left “our family broken,” with a single dad struggling to raise three boys after losing the love of his life.

Brownell, 71, never remarried. He became his sons’ primary caregiver until they all left for separate New England boarding schools.

Though Spencer and Brandon were both survivors, it was Spencer who became linked, forever, to the tragedy.

“I never really saw myself in that image,” he says, remembering the day in 1994 when the family returned for a memorial in Sioux City and the statue was unveiled.

“It felt unworldly. It felt like something that was foisted upon me, a small form of celebrity I never asked for,” he says.

Public interest in the crash spurred a 1992 TV movie, A Thousand Heroes — also known as Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232starring Charlton Heston — as well as documentaries and books, including Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival by Laurence Gonzales, published in 2015.

Spencer says he didn’t participate in the Gonzales book but learned a great deal about what happened to him that day through the interviews.

He discovered that a woman on the plane, Lynn Hartter, was the one who originally found his body in the wreckage.

She handed him off to Lt. Col. Dennis Nielsen, who had been part of the National Guard unit training that day at the airport and was helping get the survivors to safety. “God saved the child. I just carried him,” Nielsen later said of Spencer.

Spencer’s own memories of that time are largely incomplete. He remembers waking up in the hospital after the crash, but that’s it. In that sense, he says, his conscious life started then — so he thinks of himself now as 36, not 40. All previous memories had been wiped away.

Oddly enough, Spencer says he’s never been afraid of flying, crediting the “resilience of being a 4-year-old and having no memory of it,’’ he says.

But then last summer, when returning from a honeymoon in Japan with his wife, Emma, they experienced a horrific return flight.

About 45 minutes after takeoff, passengers began feeling some light turbulence, which got to the point where the plane was consistently experiencing 10 to 15 foot drops in the sky — which lasted for three hours, Spencer says.

“This experience, even talking to you right now, I feel it in my body and it brought up some very, very deeply buried whatever (that) I experienced on July 19, 1989. I felt some semblance of it on this Delta flight back home,” Spencer says. “Other passengers were screaming and crying and vomiting, and my wife and I managed to keep our cool. But when the plane landed in Minneapolis … I was still shaking.”

And in a Forrest Gump-like coincidence, Spencer had moved to N.Y.C. early in his media career and was working at Esquire on the 21st floor of the Hearst Tower when he saw another miracle landing, of Capt. Sully Sullenberger on the Hudson River.

After his own plane crash experience, he says “to experience from that vantage was very, very strange.”

“I feel these different markers of time allow me a moment to process and think. And anyone who goes through something like this — if you’re not always processing it, you’re fooling yourself,” he says. “I know I will be processing this for the rest of my life.”

With time, his small family has gotten bigger.

His dad is the grandfather of four: Spencer’s brother Brandon, an entrepreneur, has two daughters and Trent, an artist, has a son and daughter. One of the grandkids nicknamed Brownell “Big Da.”

“I think for him it’s been so rewarding to watch us grow up and each of us build our individual lives, to be at our weddings, to be at our graduations, to celebrate those moments together,” Spencer says.

“It feels like my mom is still here in some sense,” he adds. “Her legacy lives through my brothers and me in the ways that we see and the ways that we engage the world.”

Recently married, Spencer has another summer memory he’ll never forget: the beautiful day on July 18, 2023, when he asked Emma Bowen to be his wife.

“For so long, every time July 19 would come around, it was a well of emotion. And now, every time July 18 comes around, it’s also a well of emotion — but it’s the birth of this new life and this new love,” Spencer says. “And there’s something really poetic to me in the fact that these two dates now sit side by side.”

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