It is my feeling that Air France, Airbus, and BEA have spent so much money in an attempt to find the recorders and the wreckage in order to determine the root cause of the accident in order to make all airplanes safer in the future. Will recovery of the root cause open up something like the Applegate memorandum? For those who don't remember, during the trial regarding the first wide body crash with massive loss of life, this memorandum from an executive of Convair, manufacturer of the DC-10 fuselage, came to light:
“My only criticism of Douglas in this regard is that once this inherent weakness was demonstrated by the July 1970 test failure, they did not take immediate steps to correct it. It seems to me inevitable that, in the twenty years ahead of us, DC-10 cargo doors will come open and I would expect this to usually result in the loss of the airplane. This fundamental failure mode has been discussed in the past and is being discussed again in the bowels of both the Douglas and Convair organizations. It appears, however, that Douglas is waiting and hoping for government direction or regulations in the hope of passing costs on to us or their customers.”
An executive writing a memo predicting the accident in the exact way it would happen - could there actually be such a "smoking gun" in the archives of the manufacturer, any of the suppliers, or the airline? I only hope we don't find that something happened to the aircraft early in the event that cut off data delivery to the recorders that hampers finding the root cause of the accident. Walkingthe site of the TK 981 flight crash site near Senlis, France, many times and adding parts of the aircraft I discovered to the collection that is always surrounding the memorial never made me reluctant to fly in DC-10s. I actually felt safer knowing the aircraft in which I was flying was safer due to findings and improvements as the result of its mishaps. Having made over 100 trans-Atlantic crossings in DC-10s before NWA switching, then dozens of those same transits in A-330s before I retired, I look forward to Airbus/Air France/BEA being able to find enough information to make any further transits safer. Already we have the improved procedures the flight crew should follow if they see questionable data, plus the hardware changes. Instead of coverups and downsides, I look at the efforts being put out as making air travel safer for us all.