The May 1979 tragedy of American Airlines Flight 191 remains the United States’ deadliest plane crash. The disaster occurred when an engine fell away from the aircraft as it was taking off from O’Hare International Airport, resulting from undetected issues following prior work on the aircraft’s engines. A total of 273 people were killed when the aircraft couldn’t be brought back under control and crashed 31 seconds into take-off. Flight 191 was a DC-10-10, and sadly, wouldn’t be the only one lost in such a disaster.
In November of that same year, Air New Zealand’s Flight TE901, another DC-10, crashed into Mount Erebus during an aerial tour of Antarctica. This tragedy, reportedly resulting from difficult conditions and confusion with the flight path provided by the instruments, resulted in 257 deaths. Such disasters contributed to a negative outlook on the DC-10 early in its life, to the extent that the model had to stop being manufactured in 1988.
Though maintenance work and the release of subsequent models in the DC-10 family aimed to address problems such as faults with the electric actuator used in the cargo doors, there’s no doubt that the family’s image in the industry would have been adversely affected by these awful events. Nonetheless, various takes on the DC-10 were released.
