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

Fine Dining In a Converted DC-10. Plus: Where in the World to Eat, and the Sad Confessions of a Non-Foodie.

January 20, 2016

I’M THE FARTHEST THING from a foodie. The very word foodie irritates me. It goes back to my childhood. I was raised in what was perhaps the must gastronomically unadventurous family in America. A “salad,” as I knew it when I was a kid, consisted of a bowl of iceberg lettuce doused with steakhouse dressing. We had our pizzas Margherita style, with sauce and cheese only. The idea of adding a topping was frighteningly exotic.

In sixth grade my little league coach took our team out for Chinese food. I cried and hid in my room because I didn’t know what Chinese food was or how to order it. Later, in the 1980s, friends of mine would often go for dim sum on Sunday afternoons. I always made excuses to stay home, because I had no idea what dim sum was, and would surely embarrass myself attempting to eat it. I was thirty before I could use chopsticks or knew what a burrito was.

Food, to me, was always a mundane, unexciting experience. I travel a lot, but to this day I consider dining out to be a chore. This is heresy to a lot of people, I know, but I’m perfectly happy with a burger from room service or some easy-to-grab street food.

Unless, that is, we’re talking about dinner inside a converted McDonnell Douglas DC-10. Now this is a restaurant to get excited about.

Welcome to La Tante DC-10 Restaurant, located just outside Kotoka International Airport in the friendly capital city of Accra, Ghana. For several years this venerable aircraft sat derelict next to a hangar, sans engines and wearing the sun-bleached colors of the defunct Ghana Airways.

The hulk was destined for the scrap pile when, in 2013, it was purchased by the Vindira Company. It was towed down an embankment to its current resting spot, and refurbished into a full-service restaurant with seating for 118 passengers — er, diners. It’s hard to miss, looming just behind the Marina Mall and painted a ghastly green (the color owes to a sponsorship from the locally brewed Club beer).

I love the repurposing of commercial aircraft. La Tante is one of several similar projects around the world, including a 747-turned-hotel outside the airport in Stockholm. There’s something about this idea, the recasting of the jet into a wholly unexpected role, that causes one to reflect on the astonishing capabilities of commercial aviation.

When you’re sitting on a plane at the airport, it’s easy to take for granted the fact that you’ll soon be soaring through the sky, en route to some exotic city halfway around the world, a feat that would have seemed unimaginable just a hundred years ago.

It’s different, though, when that plane becomes a restaurant, and you’re sitting inside and suddenly you think about how this place, this entire building — we think about it now as a building — once flew through the air at hundreds of miles per hour, calling port in London, New York, Johannesburg, and dozens of cities in between.

The main dining room is set in what used to be the economy class cabin. The outside seats are original, with tables installed in between. Conventional tables and chairs are used in place of the center rows. If you want, you can stow your extra belongings in the overhead bins.

 

The landing gear gardens are a cool if peculiar flourish.

 

The washrooms are all but unchanged, except for a conventional “land” commode in place of the blue-water toilets.

 

La Tante’s menu isn’t terribly sophisticated. It’s your basic Ghanaian food. But it’s wholesome and inexpensive (at the moment it’s about 4 Ghana cedi to the American dollar). Here I kept it simple and ordered the Jollof rice with chicken, a Ghanaian staple. It was good, if unexceptional. Just the right amount of spicy. My normal Ghanaian favorite is the “red-red,” a stew made with black-eyed peas cooked in palm oil, but La Tante offers it only with fish, not with chicken or beef, and I don’t enjoy the fish version. The waitresses (yes, they dress like flight attendants) are friendly and the food came promptly.

 

There’s a bar/lounge in the forward section, in the space once occupied by first class.

 

The Ghana Airways tail livery remains. Notice the kitchen annex built into the right side of the fuselage.

If there’s one thing La Tante is lacking, it’s a little history. I wish the owners would put up some framed photographs of the place from its flying days. In addition to its work for Ghana Airways, the jet flew for the U.S.-based World Airways, which sent it on charters all over the globe. Many restaurants have long and storied histories, but usually just in one place. Here’s a restaurant that has literally been everywhere.

 

UPDATE: June, 2018: A recent visit to Ghana confirms that yes, the La Tante restaurant has lost its Club beer sponsorship and is no longer doused in the sickening green paint seen in the photos above. The DC-10 is now mostly white.

 

As much as I enjoy La Tante, it’s not my favorite eating spot in Accra. That honor belongs to Tandoor, an Indian place in the Cantonments neighborhood. Tandoor might be my favorite restaurant anywhere. Established in 1993, it’s one of the oldest Indian restaurants in the city, with a gigantic menu concentrating on Mughlai specialties, plus all of the standard Indian entrees, and then some.

I order either the coconut-chicken kebab (not spicy) or the chicken Madras (where’s the fire extinguisher?). The menu includes approximately four thousand varieties of naan and roti. Seating is inside or outside, garden-style on heavy wooden benches and tables. The atmosphere is very laid-back, though you might hear Harry, the owner, berating his staff when the service gets too slow.

Dining out just isn’t my thing, but I do have my spots. La Tante and Tandoor are two of them.

Speaking of West Africa, if you’re in Senegal, I recommend a Lebanese place called Le Layal, near the Place L’independance and within walking distance of the Pullman hotel. It’s nothing fancy — which is partly why I like it — with good prices and good food. Once you get past the “Testicles With Garlic and Lemon,” and the “Homos with Chopped Meat,” the menu is both coherent and tasty. Le Layal’s mezze is the best I’ve had in Africa. (They’ve gotten around, those Lebanese. I dare you to name a big city anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a decent Lebanese restaurant or a Lebanese-run hotel.)

Down in Mexico City, meanwhile, you might find me at Fonda el Refugio, an historic restaurant on Calle Waterloo in the Zona Rosa that dates to 1954. “Historic” implies pricey, but the entrees here are well within the average traveler’s budget. The waitstaff is attentive to a fault, and the food arrives quickly. My regular dish is the carne asada a la tabasqueña. Get there early to avoid the crowd.

And let’s not forget Abou Tarek, in Cairo. Everybody in Cairo, if not in all of Egypt, is familiar with Abou Tarek, a four-story building on a grimy street full of tire and muffler shops, just off the eastern end of 6 October Bridge, a few blocks in from the Nile. It’s been there since 1950, founded and (still) owned by Youssef Zaki. Zaki is maybe Cairo’s closest thing to a celebrity chef, a sort of Colonel Sanders of Egyptian fast food, whose portrait stares down at you from the walls. On my last visit, Zaki himself was on the premises, shaking hands.

Walk in, take a seat, and within thirty seconds you’re dining on the restaurant’s sole entree, that most delectable of Egyptian treasures: a steaming bowl of koshary — a carbohydrate bomb of noodles, lentils, chickpeas and fried onions, topped with a spicy tomato sauce and however much chili you can handle. All for the equivalent of about $1.50. Abou Tarek is not fine or formal dining by any stretch, but it’s tons of calories and tons of fun.

The best meal I ever had, though, was an impromptu feast from a streetside take-out joint in the city of Van, in eastern Turkey. It was a kebab plate, with succulent hunks of meat and slabs of tomato and onion, all wrapped fish-and-chips style in newspaper. I was starving at the time, which is maybe why I remember it so fondly. I think I paid about two dollars. I have no idea what the name of the place was.

There, just like that I’m a food blogger.

 

ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

Related Stories:

FAREWELL DOUGLAS.
YAK HUNTING IN LIBERIA.
LETTER FROM GHANA. WELCOME TO ROOM 420.