Originally Posted by
casablanca
I flew the MD11 for 11 years...it was a tank! Yes the gear came through the wings but normally on the 3rd bounce with over 9g’s, which would probably happen to anything
Every crash was very similar in the fact that all started with a bounce, followed by pushing the nose down, unloading the wing and the plane would bounce very hard of nose wheel, followed by a 5g then a 10g touchdown....got ugly very quickly
The vertical stab was 40% smaller than the DC10 and any type of crosswind technique or cross control would often result in high sink rate, coupled with fact that autothrottles would retard at 50 feet, regardless of what speed was, so often needed to add thrust or block the thrust levers from coming back for few seconds
Despite all this , 99% of pilots who flew her still will say it was their favorite airplane
It’s very obvious the horizontal stabilizer is significantly
smaller on the MD11 than the DC10
But I don’t see what you’re saying about the vertical
stabilizer as being accurate, there’s no difference in
size between the two variants