Thirty year anniversary of AA 191

And I can’t believe a company with as much experience as Douglas had with jets in the late 60s, would mess up a design that badly.

Douglas philosphy was that aircraft design should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The DC-10 uses a scaled up DC-9 designs for the leading edge slats and the trailing edge flaps. The fuselage structural design is similar to the DC-9 but scaled up to the DC-10 size. Many other systems and design features of the DC-10 follow this same pattern.

Did they mess up the design, they sold more than the “revolutionary” L-1011? Was the design safe, there are still many DC-10 flying?

I like to compare the DC-10 to a car. Say you were Volkswagen and you wanted to make a car as big as a Cadillac. You surly would not want to start with the “Beetle” and just make it bigger. Will that is basicly what Douglas did with the DC-10.

Well I remember it, along with the other DC-10 accidents up to that date which did give the aircraft a bad rep in the UK media. As far as I remember, it wasn’t just the use of a forklift to raise the engine on to the pylon, but also the excessive use of hammers to get the pins in, leading to metal fatiuge which was the cause of this disaster.

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And I can’t believe a company with as much experience as Douglas had with jets in the late 60s, would mess up a design that badly.

Ahem… MD11?

So bad, it bankrupted them.

I figured someone would point out the Concorde numbers…..

I appreciate that…I didn’t point that out seriously….but rather to make a point about statistics, charts and figures…
As a journalist, special interest groups were always trying to get you to parrot their talking points & numbers.
As a result, I’m a bit weary of them.
And from university, I know stats are like a survey, it’s how you ask something which will determine what you come up with.

I’m not saying the DC-10 is perfect, but it’s far from the death trap some would have you believe. Again, look to the USAF fleet…

Yes, the DC-10 has a higher accident rate than the L-1011, by looking at gross numbers can’t be disputed.
But we’re not discussing gross numbers here…thew point was previously made that in their opinion, the DC-10 was a “bad” airplane. For a plane to be “bad” I’d expect to see a very high number of airframe related crashes…i.e. the plane broke. The gross numbers don’t tell us that.
And I can’t believe a company with as much experience as Douglas had with jets in the late 60s, would mess up a design that badly.

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[B]I’m not sure its fair to lump the Chicago and Souix City crashes together.
Niether one was the fault of the airframe….bad maintenence procedures on an engine change….

I would like to emphasize the PROCEDURES part of your statment. The mechanics performed the engine change per the procedure designed by AA engineers. The Douglas engineers never created or approved that procedure IIRC. These are the details, among others, that the AA management team attempted to hide when they shredded the internal report they created. In the aftermath of the accident, the pressure was so great that the lead mechanic that was in charge of the engine change crew committed suicide.

Sadly, the engineer who created the procedure was not only not disciplined, but was allowed to progress in his career and eventually became the CEO or President of Valujet/Air Tran. A sad ending to a sorry episode, IMHO.

I figured someone would point out the Concorde numbers…..

The chart clearly says it is per million departures, thus a small fleet with one or two crashes will have a disproportionally larger crash rate (due to the low number of departures.) Please note that only 250 L1011’s were built, (vice 386 DC-10 IIRC) yet the DC-10 accident rate is much higher, in fact roughly 3 times as high. For the record, the two L1011 accidents that I clearly recall when large numbers of the airplane were in service was the thunderstorm/microbust encounter in Dallas and the one in Saudi Arabia where some guy was cooking in the cabin with some strange device and the S/O did not get the cabin depressurized upon landing.

It is not my chart, I believe it is a Boeing product, and I want to say that terrorism/hijack was excluded, but I can’t prove it now.

Graphic evidence of the poor safety record of the DC-10/MD-11 versus it’s competitors.

If I read your chart correctly, it still looks safer than Concorde….:dev2:

Which illustrates my point….an accident record doesn’t mean a great deal in the context of this thread since it doesn’t differenciate between aircraft design problems and other causes of crashes.
I’m not sure it’s fair to blame the aircraft when a pilot botches an approach in weather, or when in the case of the DC-10, a cargo door is left unsecured or there is an uncontained failure of an engine.

BTW: Does the chart make allowances for hijack/murder?
If not, the 747 (Air India, Lockerbie, etc) and the 757/767 events of 9/11 would look considerably different.

Graphic evidence of the poor safety record of the DC-10/MD-11 versus it’s competitors.

I guess most people on this forum are a bit young to remember this

Well I for one was eight years old at the time and don’t recall watching the news back then. I’ve also seen the Discovery Networks reconstructions and it’s a real shocker. Of course, events of recent days are just as shocking and make me wonder just how far safer commercial aviation really is nowadays.

Also, I believe the requirement for a stickshaker was only on the Captain’s yoke at that time….the stickshaker wasn’t even installed on the FO’s yoke, and he was flying the airplane.

When the No1 engine departed,not only did it take the hydraulics with it, it also disabled the stall warning system. The crew had sufficient airspeed to remain flying but when trading airspeed for altitude the left wing had a higher stall speed as a result of the slats having retracted and no stall warning system. I think procedures were amended to reflect this ‘worst case’ and increase the minimum speeds after the loss of an engine.

I recall that horrible image of the jet in a 90 degree bank.
Back then, in the pre-camera phone/video recorder/surveillance camera world, the sight of a plane crash was rare.

I’m not sure its fair to lump the Chicago and Souix City crashes together.
Niether one was the fault of the airframe….bad maintenence procedures on an engine change, and a bad engine casting…both caused hydraulic failures, but they weren’t related. You could argue that a major rupture effected the entire system…not enough back ups…but that was the standard of the time.
The type was approved by aviation authorities the world over.
To sit back now and say “they weren’t smart enough…they should have known” could be applied to any aircraft after a crash.

The other memorable DC-10 disasters…Paris, Antarctica…weren’t the plane’s fault either.
After all, look at the USAF KC-10 fleet…how many zillion hours must it have…and no crashes.

Indeed. What a horrible record the DC-10/MD-11 has. There are always those who defend the design, but the record is pretty compelling. Compellingly bad, that is.

Also, the design of the airplane played a role. The slats should have been “locked out” in the deployed position and designed to stay that way even in loss of hydraulics or flight control cables. Had that been the case, they wouldn’t have retracted.

It wouldn’t be the last time the design of the DC-10s hydraulics would claim lives either!
United 232 for example. I think that incident finaly brought about changes to the hydraulic systems.

Didn’t AA Flight Operations policy also play are role?

At that time, I believe they were taught in an engine failure scenario to fly the airplane in a way that favored climbing over maintaining airspeed, for terrain avoidance. Thus, the FO continued to hold the pitch high, right to the limit of the stalling speed. Unfortunately, the stall speed was below that required for the wing that had the slats retracted. Had he lowered the nose and flown faster, even the wing with the slats retracted would have continued flying.

Also, the design of the airplane played a role. The slats should have been “locked out” in the deployed position and designed to stay that way even in loss of hydraulics or flight control cables. Had that been the case, they wouldn’t have retracted.

As always, many factors combine in an accident scenario. Breaking the chain in any one of them might have saved the flight.

The part I have always found bone chilling, and rarely reported, is the part about the internal investigation done by AA. It was apparently so damning that the few copies produced were shredded in an attempt to hide the failings. It’s a shame that people could be so wanting in basic ethics that they could do such a thing.

Fair enough.

Of course, that comment is in reference to the known facts not what might of happened.

With the information they had and the situation they found themselves in, they had no chance.

There was no need to reiterate. My point was more intended to highlight the fact one tiny piece of information could well have saved the flight and its passengers.

Paul

Of course, that comment is in reference to the known facts not what might of happened.

With the information they had and the situation they found themselves in, they had no chance.

The pilots didn’t have a chance.

They would probably have had a very good chance were it not for the fact they had no indication the left flaps were retracting. Had they known this, they’d have kept the speed up and it’s quite probable they could have gone around and landed safely.

A very tragic incident indeed. I was -2 years old when it happened but I’ve read quite a lot on it and it’s good to remember it from time to time.

Paul

I recall seeing a TV show on this crash, either ACI or Seconds From Disaster.

191, the unlucky number in aviation. According to Wikipedia, there have been 4 other fatal plane crashes with this number.

But how many flights with number 191 have not ended up in fatal accidents…. ?

Yes, AA191 seems so long ago now. At least the cause was traced, and (hopefully) flight safety has improved as a result – thats the best we can ever hope in such tragic cases…