A Repair Shortcut Caused America's Worst Plane Crash

On May 25, 1979, a DC-10 lifted off from Chicago O'Hare bound for Los Angeles. It was airborne for thirty one seconds. 273 people died. Within twelve days, every DC-10 in the country was grounded. It is still the deadliest aviation accident in United States history. The engine that fell off the left wing was not the beginning of this story. It was the end of it. The DC-10 was built by a company that had been weeks from bankruptcy in 1967, under one priority: get a wide body into service before Lockheed could finish theirs. Three decisions made under that pressure would matter years later. Its cargo door could appear locked when it was not, and the warning light in the cockpit was wired to the handle rather than the pins. Its wing slats were held out by nothing but trapped hydraulic fluid. No mechanical latch, no backup. Boeing and Lockheed both fitted locks. McDonnell Douglas did not. And each engine hung from three small bearings, the rearmost one mounted in a thin plate called the aft bulkhead. In 1972, an American Airlines DC-10 lost a cargo door over Windsor, Ontario. The floor collapsed, the control cables were cut, and the only reason anyone lived is that the captain had paid out of his own pocket for simulator time teaching himself to fly the aircraft on engine thrust alone. The FAA drafted an emergency directive to force a redesign. It was never issued. A phone call that summer between the head of the FAA and the president of Douglas Aircraft replaced it with voluntary service bulletins, so the fix would not be mandatory and the DC-10's sales position against Lockheed would not be harmed. Fifteen days after Windsor, an engineer at the company that built the fuselage sat down and typed a memo. The door had been a known problem since ground testing in 1970. Given enough time in service, it would fail again, and the next time the airplane would be lost. His supervisor agreed with every word. Then wrote back that raising it would expose the company to liability. He called it an interesting legal and moral problem. The memo went in a filing cabinet. Twenty months later a Turkish Airlines DC-10 fell out of the sky outside Paris with 346 people on board. Same door. The crash at Chicago was something else again, and it started in a maintenance hangar in Tulsa on the night of March 29, 1979. American had worked out a shortcut that saved 200 man hours per aircraft, lifting the engine and its pylon off the wing in one piece on a forklift instead of separately. McDonnell Douglas said it did not encourage the procedure. The FAA was never told at all. That night, the shift removed the rear bolt and went home, leaving the engine resting on the forklift. The forklift bled down under the weight. By morning, the metal was touching metal that should never have touched. Nobody reported it. The aircraft flew for eight more weeks. What happens after the engine leaves the wing is the part that stays with you. The crew did everything correctly. The first officer flew the exact climb speed the book gave him for an engine failure, and that speed was below the stall speed of a wing whose slats had just retracted. His stall warning was dead. His slat disagreement light was dead. The captain's flight director and the radio were dead. All of it ran off the bus the missing engine had powered. They had no way to know. In the tower, a controller watched it start to roll and said, he's gonna lose a wing. Chapters: 00:00 Thirty-One Seconds 00:31 Built to Beat Lockheed 04:01 Windsor, 1972 05:35 The Phone Call and the Memo 06:53 Ermenonville 08:10 The Forklift Shortcut 11:17 May 25, 1979 14:51 The Field at Ravenswood 16:19 Grounding the Fleet 19:14 Names on a Wall