I know yesterday was Travel Thursday, but I think it’s time for some more planes. Specifically, some big jet airliners.
(If you haven’t seen it, “Genghis Blues” is a swell documentary, and is available on Amazon Prime.)
Where were we? Oh, yes, planes. Specifically, the DC-10. I think, like the Electra, this is another example of a good plane ruined by bad publicity. Though to be fair, the cargo door problem is one that should have been caught and fixed before people died: it wasn’t a little known phenomena, like whirl mode on the Electra.
But I suspect what really killed the DC-10 was American Flight 191, and that seems unfair. It wasn’t that the plane was bad: it was that the airline decided they were going to experiment with maintenance shortcuts on a passenger aircraft, and that came back to bite them good and hard.
Today’s feature video: “The Making of a DC-10”, from our friends at McDonnell Douglas.
Bonus: “The Ten Takes Flight”, a slightly longer video about the design and construction also from McDonnell Douglas.