A 35-year-old Mystery Solved

I recently read a book titled Airframe, written by the late Michael Crichton. It is a work of fiction, but Mr. Crichton used some factual incidents to highlight his fictional story. One of those concerned AA191, a DC-10 that crashed with total loss of life shortly after takeoff from O'Hare Airport in Chicago enroute to Los Angeles in May of 1979. 

When I read that chapter, I was transported back thirty-five years and learned in the space of three pages the final NTSB findings on the causes of the accident.  Until this week, I had never known what those findings were.

Do I believe author Crichton was writing the accurate story?  Since the book is a work of fiction, I can't say for certain, but I do know that he was known for his very thorough research of factual matters so, yes, I do believe his account.

So, what brought down not only American flight 191, but also the company that built the airplane?  That's right, according to Crichton, McDonnell-Douglas never sold another DC-10, nor any other wide-body airliner after that accident, and the production line was only ten years old at the time. I don't want to plagiarize, but I will try to summarize the accident.

Since I am not a pilot, I am not sure that my terminology will be correct.  For instance, the cockpit controls are sometimes referred to as the console, panel or pedestal, and that steering wheel the pilot and first officer use can be the yoke, the column or the stick.  I believe the terms are interchangeable, but if I'm wrong about that, I trust you jet jockeys will forgive my error.

Initially, the accident was blamed on poor maintenance procedures by American Airlines in that the company ignored warnings and advisories from the manufacturer about the removal of engines with the pylons attached. Pylons are those vertical structures that hold the engine to the wing.  Continental Airlines had  discovered cracks in the pylons when their mechanics removed the engine-pylon assembly as a unit.  This was reported to AA, but it was never acted upon to change the procedure.  That fact was critical, but not fatal.

When the left engine-pylon separated from the wing, it immediately shut off power to the Captain's side of the flight console.  It also disabled the audible stall warning system and the stick shaker, a visual warning that the airplane is going into a stall attitude.  The Captain then became a spectator to the subsequent events.

This is where is got weird.  The DC-10 was built with redundant systems, so it should have been able to withstand the catastrophe and the crew should have been able to gain control, turn the plane around and land back at O'Hare Field. The secondary cause of the accident was an event cascade of errors and wrong choices.  None of those backup systems was activated by the crew, and the First Officer even worsened the odds for survival.

The Flight Engineer, the third man in the cockpit, could have thrown a switch on his panel and restored power to the Captain's pedestal, but for some reason, he didn't do that. Of course, the whole sequence from rotation (liftoff) to impact took only about thirty seconds, so maybe there just wasn't enough time to diagnose the problem and react.

The First Officer did not have a stick shaker, it was an optional item on the left side of

the console which American Airlines had turned down, so he was unaware of the true situation.  He didn't have visual perspective on the engine separation, so he did the exact opposite of what he should have - he decreased power instead of increasing it.  That boosted the stall effect and the plane banked into the lighter left wing, rotating a full 180 degrees onto its back before it impacted the ground.  The results were catastrophic!  273 passengers and crew perished that day.

American immediately grounded all DC-10s.  The final National Transportation Safety Board report was not released until seven months later after extensive investigation. The fact that it was released just four days before Christmas on December 21st only added to the mystery, because few people if any paid any attention to the accident summary.  Until this past week, I was completely unaware of it.

The final chapter on this story is that the DC-10 was phased out of all commercial service over the next few years.  It was still used extensively by Fedex for freight transport and by the USAF as a mid-air fueling platform, but as a passenger plane, it was finished by the middle of the next decade. 

I must confess that I rode in the DC-10 on many occasions, and it was a beautiful aircraft not deserving of the fate that befell it due to a single accident that was no fault of the manufacturer, but rather attributable to a series of poor choices over a thirty-second span.  The DC-10 was built to withstand the events that occurred that fateful day, but for unknown reasons, the action to prevent the crash was never initiated.  It cost dearly in lives and spelled the beginning of the end for McDonnell-Douglas.