Originally Posted by
aterpster
AAL almost lost one over Detroit for the same reason.
Well, that was the *reason* for the Gentlemen's Agreement, wasn't it? I seem to recall reading that the only reason that one didn't end up as a smoking hole was because the Captain in that case was a senior training pilot for AA and was alarmed when told by MD that the DC-10 had no manual reversion in case of total hydraulic loss, leading him to practice differential thrust control and landings in the sim. I'd be willing to bet money that he was the only line pilot that knew how to do that at the time.
Ironically, that it didn't end up as a smoking hole was the fact that allowed MD to persuade the head of the FAA, against the recommendations of Chuck Miller and the NTSB, that an AD wasn't required to fix the problem (they had a very real fear that an AD that early in the aircraft's service life would sink the aircraft, and MD with it).
Legend has it that Miller was so incensed when he saw the same damage pattern on the THY cargo door that he essentially told an investigative journalist to look at the Windsor Incident DC-10.
Then, there is the UAL DC-10 that landed upsite down killing over 100 folks. It would have been a total wipe-out except for a captain willing to listen to a very sharp deadheading pilot.
That wasn't specific to the DC-10 though, tail damage of that magnitude also brought down the JAL 747. However AA191 revealed that despite the most glaring factor behind the crash being the non-approved engine change procedure, another supposed DC-10 failsafe (hydraulic slat retraction) was not failsafe, and the designers had failed to consider that failure mode too.