Memorial Day
May 27, 2024
IT WAS THE FRIDAY of Memorial Day weekend, 1979. I was in seventh grade, and a diehard airplane buff. It was a warm and sunny afternoon, and I was sitting in the dining room of the house I grew up in when the phone rang. It was a friend from school. He told me to turn on the television.
It had been a sunny day in Chicago, too, when just after 3 p.m. American Airlines flight 191, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 with 271 people on board, roared down runway 32R at O’Hare International Airport, headed for Los Angeles. Just as the plane lifted off, its left engine broke loose. The entire engine, which weighed about eight thousand pounds, together with its connecting pylon and about three feet of the wing’s leading edge, flipped up over the wing and slammed back onto the runway.
As the engine ripped away, it severed hydraulic lines, releasing the hydraulic pressure that held the wing’s leading edge slats, deployed to provide critical lift during takeoff, in place. The slats then retracted, causing the left wing to stall. The plane rolled sharply to the left and plunged to the ground, disintegrating in a trailer park just beyond the airport perimeter.
Everybody aboard was killed, along with two people on the ground. With 273 fatalities, the crash of flight 191 was, and remains, the deadliest air disaster in U.S. history.
Descriptions of the accident are jarring enough. But we can see the horror, too, quite literally. Because a man named Michael Laughlin captured what might be the most haunting aviation photographs ever taken: a sequence of pictures showing the stricken jet literally sideways in the sky, in the throes of that ghastly twist to the left. And then the explosion. I don’t have permission to republish the photos here, but Google will oblige your queries.
When pylon cracks were found in several other DC-10s, the entire U.S. fleet was grounded for five weeks by the FAA. American, United, Northwest, Western and Continental were forced to pull all of their DC-10s from service. Foreign carriers were banned from flying DC-10s into the country.
NTSB investigators would eventually lay most of the blame on faulty maintenance practices and FAA oversight thereof. American — and other airlines, too — had been using a workaround procedure that caused unseen cracks to form in the engine pylon. But design flaws played a role as well. Unlike other planes, the DC-10’s wing slats were held in the extended position by hydraulic pressure, not by a mechanical lock. When the detached engine sheared the hydraulic lines, the slats retracted and the left wing essentially ceased flying.
The stall warning system also lacked a critical redundancy. It was powered only from the left-side electrical system, which had failed when the engine broke away. Thus, the pilots never realized their jet was stalling. Had captain Walter Lux and his crew understood, aerodynamically, what was happening, it’s very possible — likely, even — the catastrophe would’ve been averted.
I’d flown with my family on an American DC-10 on a vacation to Bermuda only two months before O’Hare. In the photo below you can see my mother (in pink), my sister (yellow), and my grandmother (gray), climbing the airstairs on the Bermuda tarmac. It’s possible — who knows — this was the same jet that would plummet to earth on May 25th.
The DC-10 had a checkered past even before O’Hare. In 1974, the horrific crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 outside Paris was caused by a defectively designed cargo door and a poorly reinforced cabin floor. McDonnell Douglas, in a race wtih rival Lockheed to produce a three-engined widebody jet, had hurriedly built a plane with a door that it knew was unsound; then, in the aftermath, they tried covering the whole thing up. It was reckless, maybe criminal.
The plane’s reputation was such that some people refused to ride on one. This included one passenger booked on AA 191 who, learning that he’d be boarding a DC-10, switched his travel plans at the last minute, effectively saving his life.
After the 191 crash, American began swapping out the “DC-10 Luxury Liner” decals from the plane’s nose, replacing them with a more generic “American Airlines Luxury Liner.”
So where am I going with this? I’m not sure, to be honest. But here on the 45th anniversary of flight 191, on Memorial Day no less, the story feels important.
And it hardly needs saying that what happened to the DC-10 reminds us in no small way of the ongoing drama of Boeing’s 737 MAX. The similarities are uncanny: multiple crashes, a grounding, a manufacturer accused of negligence and shoddy design.
In the case of the DC-10, fines were paid, lawsuits were settled, technical fixes were put in place. (Among the lawsuits was one against McDonnell Douglas filed by the family of Captain Lux.) The plane soldiered on and Douglas regained the public’s trust (mostly; the 1989 United crash at Sioux City was another black eye). Time works wonders that way. The Clash would even shout out to the DC-10 on “Spanish Bombs,” from the London Calling album.
How things will pan out for the MAX, and for Boeing, remains to be seen.
For a thirteen year-old airplane nut in Boston, the most exciting thing about the FAA grounding in ’79 was a temporary influx of exotic airplanes into Logan. For a month carriers would substitute other types. United’s DC-10 to Chicago became a 747 — the only 747 I’d ever seen in that carrier’s livery. Swissair brought in DC-8s, Lufthansa sent 707s. And so on. New planes, new colors. I couldn’t get to the airport fast enough.
You can always count on a kid, I guess, to find a silver lining in something so awful as a plane crash.
The DC-10 wasn’t the prettiest plane of its day, lacking the grace of its main competitor, the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar. Both were three-engine widebody jetliners with room for around 250 people, and both were built with a center engine mounted in the tail. But the TriStar was the sleeker by far, with that center engine integrated into the rear fuselage through a sexy, S-shaped intake duct. Douglas just jammed the engine through the base of the fin, like they didn’t know what else to do with it. For the same reason, there was no mistaking it. Few planes had a more distinctive profile.
DC-10 PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR
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42 Responses to “Memorial Day”
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Grateful for DC10’s in recent operation in Wyoming!
https://www.wyomingnews.com/house-draw-fire/image_ab2c740a-60d5-11ef-a232-8fd86be6b4f0.html
And speaking of flights out of DEN in the late 1980s (Patrick would recall this), I used to go to Boston a lot, and United ran an ancient 4-engine DC-8 on that route. Like the Boeing 707, but perhaps a bit larger. UA had to be the last carrier in the US operating those 1960s-vintage wonders, but I recall it being a nice ride, quiet and powerful. Probably a fuel hog though.
I lived in Denver in the mid-80s and loved flying the United DC-10. Stapleton had few international non-stops in those days, so you never saw a 747 there, which left the DC-10 as the only real widebody. It was incredibly spacious and comfortable compared to the usual 737s and those awful UA and CO 727s, which had such a shallow climb angle from the Mile-High City that it seemed like 10 minutes after takeoff you were still 500 feet above the plains.
I flew the DEN-ORD route regularly for business, and usually on a United DC-10. When UA 232 crashed in Iowa in 1989 after the tail engine blew, I remember my mom calling me in a panic to make sure I wasn’t on it. Didn’t really scare me off, though; I continued to seek out the plane in preference to narrow-bodies. I guess I figured then, as now, when your number is up, doesn’t matter if you’re on a plane or crossing a street and getting hit by a bus. No sense worrying about things you can’t control.
I was 9 years old and living in Chicago when that plane crashed. I think the Sun-Times carried a headline the following day that was just “Pilot: ‘Damn'”
A few months later, my family took me on my first airplane flight, from Chicago to Cleveland. The plane was a DC-10, and our left engine flamed out a few seconds after takeoff. I soon came to understand that we were never in especially serious danger (though dozens of fire trucks awaited us on our emergency landing about 10 minutes later)… But my fear of flying was pretty well kindled that day.
Fourteen years later and it had been years since I last flew. As a Christmas present my parents bought me a spot in the American Airlines “AAirBorne” fear of flying class. And you can presumably guess what aircraft we got on our return “graduation flight” 🙂 That said, I made it, and although I am still a nervous flyer I have flown 20-50K miles every year since.
I was a high school student in Chicago when the DC10 crash occurred and one of the pictures was the front page of Newsweek that showed the front of a DC10 with the headline: “How Safe”
I’d paid a premium to fly with BA for a visit to my sister in Canada. All as expected outbound. But getting to the gate at Toronto for the return, I was horrified to see an ageing Air Canada DC-10 waiting for me. I was very familiar with all the DC-10 crashes and problems. So, waiting 4 hours to board because of ‘technical problems,’ I was relieved the breakdowns were on the ground rather than in the air.
It was not a relaxed flight back to London.
This plane was a disaster from start to finish. All should have been grounded after the first crash.
Well, for the record, Air Canada never flew the DC-10.
BA flew them for a while in the 1990s — inherited from British Caledonian Airways.
I was on a Continental DC10 from Houston to LAX on that day. I was looking out the window and noted to my business associate that the engine was swaying in the wind. He said “what would you do if it fell off?” I joked back and said “I would not jump out and get it”. Later on, after we landed at LAX, my brother noted that he had walked by American and said that he learned of the American 191 crash and saw all the distraught people down there. I asked what happened and he explained that the engine had torn off…… Suddenly our joking from a few hours earlier wasn’t so funny anymore…. I returned to Houston after the weekend on a DC10 and it was a very empty flight. Within a few days, all DC10’s were grounded.
I was on the way to O’hare from E.Wacker Dr. on that Friday to catch a flight to DCA. I noticed a large column of dark smoke blowing back toward the airport. From the color of the smoke and some time spent around PHL, I knew what petroleum fire smoke looked like. I thought, ‘Gee, that’s a lot of smoke and it’s blowing back to the departure end of the airport’. As a relatively new pilot, I suspected the worst, and my expectations were exceeded, to say the least. At about that time emergency vehicles passed us on the shoulder with sirens on. The airport was closed for several hours as inbound flights were landing all over the region due to fuel limitations. I finally got the last seat on a 727 that landed at DCA well after the curfew. I remember hearing someone at a pay phone calling their office in LA to try to figure out if any of their colleagues were aboard the DC-10. I was working at Boeing at the time, back when Boeing was known for engineering and large program management expertise, mostly.
To answer Jamie:
The commercial airports are required to run emergency drills monthly and should be able to reach any spot on the airport within two or three minutes of notification. They are randomly checked annually by the FAA to ensure their compliance. The faux fuselages are for the crews to practice their fire-fighting including entry via ax, power saw or hydraulic means. They generally will throw foam on a set blaze to keep their skills intact. The last several years, the AFFF (foam) the firefighters use have been found to cause cancer with a lot of exposure, so most of the firepits have been removed and the area remediated.
Like countless others, that afternoon is forever etched in my memory. Happened just after 8th grade track practice while at Junior High in Elmhurst. Huge header of smoke, and you knew it was not just ‘a fire.’ Being an avgeek/ORD junkie made it all the more intense and dramatic. I’ve provided links to 2 recordings, one from the ORD tower and one from Elk Grove Village FD dispatch (nearby suburb on the border of where it came down). You can hear the call takers becoming overwhelmed. CFD and Air Force reserve base fire crews (was a unit a ORD at the time) responded immediately as well, but aside from controlling the fire, there was little else to do. During my tenure as a Chicago suburban fire fighter we studied this incident with respect to large incident management. Haunting.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7jIP5xxBu40
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f_C1MR_gHXs
The Boein 737 Max was brought to us by the same clowns who developed the DC-10. Once again in a hurry. When Boeing and M Donald Douglas united, the top dmin offices went to former McDonald players.
It is the same leadership that today runs Boeing after the merger with McDonnell Douglas. The 737 is a safe workhorse of a plane. But the MAX series is an inherently unbalanced aircraft based on the original 737, but stretched out to carry more passengers. This elongation of the plane required moving larger engines into a position that caused asymmetrical vertical thrust upon takeoff, with a hidden computer activated clfligjt control system to mask the problem. The crashes occurred when the system failed. Pilots were not made aware of the system, and therefore had no means to counteract it.
I flew on L1011s a lot as a TWA passenger through St Louis from JFK and back. I don’t remember them as particularly noisy, although perhaps it’s the case they were not as quiet as the DC10. It was a comfortable airplane. I’m a bit surprised by the negative appraisal of the L1011 as I’d always heard it was quite respected by the crews that flew it.
I was working in Des Plaines at the corner of S Wolf & E Oakton that day. We heard, felt it, and suspected we knew what happened. Walked out the back door to discover we were right.
I flew the DC10 at a major carrier.. Unlike the Boeing 727 which I had previously flown the leading edge slats when extended were not locked in position. They needed hydraulic power to keep them extended. When the engine came off hydraulic pressure was lost the slats retracted and the wing stalled. After the accident we flew the aircraft level after take off in order to achieve VMC crit as soon as possible.
Thanks for the story! I used to fly the “Death Cruiser” DC-10 back in the day – beautiful cockpit – fully carpeted, huge windows, quiet, electric seats – quite an upgrade from the more utilitarian Boeing cockpits. But, the airplane had a lot of maintenance issues, plus the sketchy hydraulic system.
Back in the mid 70s, I used to travel weekly from Kansas City to Colorado.
Coming home on Friday nights, I would sometimes stay late in Denver to take a Continental DC-10 and arrive home around 10 pm. Never a packed plane, I could lie down in the middle rows, fold the armrests up and have a restful nap on the way home, because the DC-10 was the quietest plane in the air with the 747, no matter if you sat in front, middle or rear. I also took a chartered one to London in the 70s. If the L-1011 was safer, it was still far noisier, and was so under powered, that one I was on barely cleared a fence taking off from Orlando !!! Of course, look at how the McDonnell Douglass combination with Boeing has ruined that once great name.
I flew Swiss air’s DC-10 in 1986 from Karachi to Zurich on my way to Salzburg. The flight originated from Colombo, which made a stop over in Karachi. I also have this DC-10 safety instructions card.
On that day, I was in a shuttle van on the way to O’Hare to catch a flight to Omaha. I was looking out the window away from the airfield when someone said, “That plane is going down.” I will never forget the horror of seeing that fireball.
I was enjoying the read until this:
“Douglas just jammed the engine through the base of the fin, like they didn’t know what else to do with it.”
I worked for McDonnell Douglas (as an Engineer) at the Long Beach plant for many years and they didn’t just “jam” and engine on the tail section.
A sympathetic and well written tribute, Patrick. Who could ever forget the image of that beautiful jet, side on and only metres above the ground as she plummeted to earth. Awful. I worked for Air New Zealand at that time and we had our own disaster with the DC-10 in 1979. But one that thankfully wasn’t due to a problem with the aircraft, the DC-10 was such a great aircraft as a passenger. I may only have one eye open but I feel that in the Air New Zelanad livery at that time, the DC-10 was one of the most beautiful aircraft in the sky.
Yes, that 80s era ANZ livery was a beauty.
When I flew for Wings West I used to jumpseat on AAs DC-10s and they always put me in First. One time LAX-MIA there was only me in First and the FA dropped off a whole bottle of champagne! Years later when I flew with Patrick in Boston I would jumpseat on NWAs DC-10s and had to ride in the cockpit.
The cockpit windows in that plane — the ones on the sides — were enormous. In the jumpseat, the glass would extend from your knees to above your head.
For a very thorough walk though of that crash, Admiral Cloudberg comes though again: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/rain-of-fire-falling-the-crash-of-american-airlines-flight-191-e17ffc5369e5
Cloudberg’s writeups are very good. His one about the Delta crash in Boston in ’72 is my favorite.
That day I was working a summer factory job for college money at 103rd and Cottage Grove Avenue in Pullman. My shift ended at 3:30 PM. I walked out to the parking lot with the guy I carpooled with, lookng West you could clearly see a big black pillar of smoke. When we got in the car and turned the radio on, heard about what happened, it was all over the news. In later years after college, I flew a lot on DC-10s; unlike the Max, it was a comfortable, great-looking plane. The Flight 191 crash wasn’t caused by poor design, it was due to a time-saving improvised maintenance procedure where the engine and pylon were supported and removed using a fork lift instead of the factory-specified cradle designed for it. MD never authorized this hack which resulted in cracks in the spar where the pylon mounted.
I will never forget this day. I “graduated” from Kiddie Kollege in Wheeling, IL. When we exited the building, which sat on the northbound side of Milwaukee AVE and looking to the southwest we could see the dark gray/black clouds of smoke of the crash. I don’t know how we knew there was a plane crash (radio?) but all of the families and kids in attendance were pretty stunned and it’s an image burned into my brain. I suspect millions of others in Chicagoland saw this too, and hopefully most did not have a connection to this flight, but sadly many did. I live next to Logan airport now, and when they do fire drills (that they do at all airports it seems) I panic a little thinking maybe it is another crash, but I know it’s a controlled exercise. Same with a mild earthquake that happened here too – did something crash? Patrick – maybe you can talk about those fire drills they do at airports? with that fake steel airplane fuselage at the end of the tarmac?
Jessica, while I agree that faulty maintenance was the direct cause of this accident, I disagree about McD’s culpability. Plainly put, had the leading edge slats stayed in the extended position when hydraulics failed, the pilots would have been dealing with what was effectively a single engine power loss at takeoff … something they were trained for. The result would have been a Mayday and prompt return to ORD.
McDonnell Douglas was absolutely to blame for this accident. The DC-10 and its successor the MD-11 have proven many times (the AA incident in Detroit, the Turkish accident in Paris, the ORD crash, Sioux City, and the MD-11 FedEx in Tokyo) that design flaws in the aircraft led to accidents. The DC-10 was a shoddy design, rushed to market before it was fully developed. The MD-11 was hardly better, with horizontal stabilizers deliberately undersized in an effort to make up for disappointing fuel consumption figures. Oh yes, the main landing gear were also attached in a compromised way. Sadly, McD’s cavalier attitude toward safety alap infected Boeing post-merger.
“The similarities are uncanny: multiple crashes, a grounding, a manufacturer accused of negligence and shoddy design.”
And a manufacturer that is the successor of Douglas.
It’s hard to objectively measure company culture; harder still to measure its persistence and effects years after mergers and buyouts. But I have Boeing lifers in my family and among my friends, and ever since the MD merger I had been hearing about how they could feel the shift from an engineering-first culture to one of accountancy-first.
Brings back so many memories to me. I was a 28 year old travel agent in a Chicago suburb. I was also heavily pregnant with my oldest child and had stayed home that Friday. I handled a mix of corporate and leisure travel and had often booked AA191 for clients. I was watching TV and the news was broken in that a plane had crashed at OHare. It was first announced as a freight flight but I knew #191 all too well.
I didn’t have anyone on the flight that day, nor did anyone else in my office. But as the years passed, I’d talk to other agents, and the question “did you have anyone on 191?” And occasionally I’d meet someone who had clients killed that day. It’s still a touchy and sad topic for me, and I’m sure many other travel agents. Who wants to think of those lost that day.
Though the DC-10 did have some real problems, I think it’s important to note that this crash was caused not by defects in manufacturing or design, but instead in shortcuts taken by maintenance in their methods of removing and replacing the engines that damaged the attachment to the wing. Instead of removing the engine and then the pylon, they kept the two together to save time. When they used a lift to reattach the two they cracked the underlying structure that kept the engine in place. I’m no fan of McDonnell-Douglas, but, in this case, they were not at fault, as the improvised procedure was not in the manuals.
Well, depends how you look at it. The improvised maintenance hack is what damaged the pylon, yes. However, had the jet not been designed with that weird hydraulic lock to kept the slats in place, and had the stall warning system been engineered with a redundant power supply… it’s very likely the plane wouldn’t have crashed.
Well, depends how you look at it. The improvised maintenance hack is what damaged the pylon, yes. However, had the jet not been designed with that weird hydraulic lock to kept the slats in place, and had the stall warning system been engineered with a redundant power supply… it’s very likely the plane wouldn’t have crashed.
Well, it depends how you look at it. The improvised maintenance hack is what damaged the pylon, yes. However, had the flight control system not been designed with that weird hydraulic lock to keep the slats extended, and had the stall warning system been redundantly powered, the plane PROBABLY wouldn’t have crashed.
It’s no coincidence that the same culture of money over engineering that prevailed at MD transferred to Boeing when they merged (and MD management took over running the new Boeing). It’s just an ugly repeat of mistakes from the past, and hundreds of people have died. All to satisfy some bean counters need to save a penny.
I miss the DC-10.
I remember how spiffy it looked in Eastern colors. And I remember a whole row of them stacked up in KOAK (of all places, and so close to UA’s SFO hub) where I could see them lined up with their mighty no.2 engines facing the freeway on the way top the airport.
A roomy ride, a great sound, a beautiful bird, the feeling of heading into the future. There’s no denying Douglas’ criminal behavior and lack of proper FAA oversight (does sound a bit like Boeing and the FAA today — except the MAX is recycled garbage whereas the DC-10 was the future), but what an airliner the DC-10 was! And as much as I liked the MD-11 it was too little too late (missed the wing redesign). And somehow the proportions of the DC-10 always made it seem a bit more powerful, I guess that large stabilizer (it looks like about half the wingspan) really made a difference.
Gosh. I miss the DC-10. Last one I saw in flight was a refurbished “MD-10” flying for FedEx out of — of course — KOAK. 🙂
Awww…Nice tribute. Let’s not forget.
Humans have a nasty habit of forgetting (AKA the Max). Your Boeing similitude is striking.
Where’s the accountability ? No prison for criminals…AGAIN. AND bonuses for departing bosses etc.
Did you know that Lindsay Wagner (Bionic women) was at the gate for that flight and fell ill. She skipped the flight. Imagine that survival guilt ?
RIP
It was common at that time on DC-10s for the large screen TV on the forward wall of each cabin section to show the view out the front of the aircraft on take-off. One can only imagine how that added to the horror of the passengers.
This is true. The way I remember it, the camera was mounted somewhere in the back of the cockpit, and you could see all three pilots in action during the takeoff. It wasn’t the clearest view, but for me it was pretty exciting.
On the 24th of May 1979, Mom and Dad took us kids to Los Angeles. We traveled on AA Flight # 11, from Boston to LAX on a DC-10-10. The next day the crash of AA Flight #191 occurred. I often wondered if that same DC-10 we were on made its way from LAX to ORD on 24 May and operated Flight #191 on 25 May. Close call? Would be interesting to see if archived records exist of what particular aircraft operated Flight #11 on 24 May. And yes, AA Flight #11 was the flight that crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on the 11th of September 2001 (that flight operating with a 767-200ER).
In 1981 I flew BOS to LAX on AA11. It was a DC-10. That morning departure used the same number since at least the 707 days.
That photo. It captures something special.