Originally Posted by Semaphore Sam
The DC-10 was rushed to market, under-engineered (example Souix City, Paris Turkish, and many others)
I have heard this opinion many times. I wonder what it is supposed to mean.
Nobody seems to worry too much about, say, the Boeing 787 being "rushed to market", despite Boeing announcing at the beginning that it was to be a very short development time (which got somewhat stretched, as these things will).
The accident history of the DC-10 may be viewed at, for example,
Aviation Safety Network's DC-10 Hull Loss page. There have been 30 hull losses. There have been nine accidents with significant fatalities:
1974 Turkish Bois d'Ermenonville
1979 AA ORD
1979 Western Air Lines Mexico City
1979 ANZ Mt. Erebus
1982 Spantax Malaga
1989 United Sioux City, IA
1989 Korean Tripoli
1989 UTA Temere Desert
1999 AOM French Guatamala City
Of these, the accidents which had anything to do with engineering are 1974 Turkish, 1979 AA and 1989 United.
1979 Western landed off-centerline with gear in the grass. 1979 Mt. Erebus was a data-entry management thing. 1982 Spantax Malaga was an RTO above V1 (indeed, above V_R). 1989 Korean Tripoli was a crash short, in v. poor visibility without a functioning ILS. 1989 UTA was a bomb. 1999 AOM was a runway overrun on landing. None of these had to do with the airplane engineering.
1974 Turkish was the result of a weakness discovered during certification testing (pressurisation tests) which through very poor regulatory practice was allowed to continue into production aircraft. After the Windsor incident, some bargaining went on to avoid issuance of an AD, and Turkish slipped through the cracks.
All large airplanes have such engineering issues. The Boeing 777 had low-frequency fuselage oscillations which gave aircraft-pilot coupling problems. The Boeing 787 had weaknesses mating wing to wing box. The Boeing 777 had a configuration problem with its fault-tolerance SW for the ADIRUs, which arose in-flight in 2005. And so on. Airplanes are very complex beasts and such things are to be expected. The difference nowadays is the much more rigorous handling on both sides, manufacturer and regulator, of engineering issues which arise during certification, partly as a result of this accident and its history.
1979 AA was largely a result of non-standard and non-approved maintenance practices. There was an airplane issue, in that slat position was not directly shown to the crew. A similar issue arose recently with Boeing 747 aircraft, in which high-lift devices retract automatically upon sensing thrust-reverser unlock, which required a finely executed escape manoeuvre by a BA crew on takeoff out of Johannesburg.
1989 Sioux City is well-known to all as a textbook example of common-cause failure. It could be argued that certification standards (still) do not deal very well with common-cause failure. Another, more recent, common-cause failure issue has arisen with the most venerated of sensors, the pitot tube, first at low altitude in heavy rain with A320-series aircraft; later with apparent ice-particle icing at cruise altitudes in A330/340-series aircraft.
None of this comes anywhere near justifying a judgement of the DC-10 as
Originally Posted by Semaphore Sam
under-engineered death traps
But it appears almost impossible to shake a reputation derived from one momentous screw-up. Which observation also gives the lie to any suggestion that, for example, airlines
Originally Posted by Semaphore Sam
can absorb financial losses due to crashes and deaths of crew, because of long-term financial pluses....
PBL