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McDonnell Douglas DC-10

DC-10
McDonnell Douglas DC-10:Ghana.airways.1.arp.750pix
Ghana Airways DC-10-30
Type Airliner
Manufacturer McDonnell Douglas
Maiden flight 1970-08-29
Introduced 1971-08-05 with American Airlines
Primary user FedEx (89)
Produced 1968-1989
Number built DC-10: 386
KC-10: 60
Variants KC-10 Extender
MD-11

The McDonnell Douglas DC-10 is a three-engined medium to long-range widebody airliner, with two engines mounted on underwing pylons and a third engine at the base of the vertical stabilizer. The model was a successor to the company's DC-8 for long-range operations, and competed in the same markets as the Airbus A300, Boeing 747 "jumbo jet", and the physically similar Lockheed L-1011 TriStar.

Production of the DC-10 ended in 1989 with 386 delivered to airlines and 60 to the U.S. Air Force as air-to-air refueling tankers, designated the KC-10 Extender.[1] The DC-10 was succeeded by the related McDonnell Douglas MD-11 which entered service in 1990.


Contents

History

The design of the DC-10 began in 1967.[2] It became McDonnell Douglas's first commercial airliner after the merger between McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. It was built to a specification from American Airlines for a widebody aircraft smaller than the Boeing 747 but capable of flying similar long-range routes from airports with shorter runways. In some ways, the Boeing 747 was ahead of its time as several smaller airports could not accommodate it because of gate restrictions and runway length. McDonnell Douglas was able to capitalise on this with the DC-10.

The DC-10 first flew on August 29 1970 and entered commercial service in 1971, nearly a year before the Lockheed TriStar (which was built to a similar specification). The launch customers for the DC-10 were United and American Airlines. Both were Series 10s.

The first DC-10 version was the "domestic" series 10 with a range of 3800 statute miles (6,112 km). The series 30 had a typical load range of 6,220 statute miles (10,010 km) or a maximum payload range of 7,410 km. The series 40 (mostly ordered by Northwest Orient and Japan Airlines) had a typical load range of 5750 statute miles (9,265 km) or a maximum payload range of 7,520 km. The series 40 was powered by Pratt & Whitney engines, whereas the series 10 and 30 engines were from General Electric. One of the main visible differences between the models is that the series 10 has three sets of landing gear (one front and two main) while the series 30 and 40 have four (3 mains), as an extra 2-wheel main landing gear (which extends from the center of the fuselage) was added to compensate for the extra weight.

The 446th and final DC-10 rolled off the production line in December 1988 and was delivered to Nigeria Airways in early 1989.

Despite its troubled beginnings, the DC-10 ultimately proved a reliable aircraft, much loved by engineers and pilots. The original DC-10-10's notorious safety record continually improved as design flaws were ironed out and fleet hours increased. In fact, the DC-10's lifetime safety record as of 2003 is comparable to similar second generation passenger jets.[3] Increased inspections and modifications made the DC-10 among the safest aircraft for passenger travel. Nonetheless, because of its poor record in the 1970s, the DC-10 acquired an unfavorable reputation.[4]

The DC-10 was assembled at McDonnell Douglas's Douglas Products Division in Long Beach, California.

Variants

The DC-10 was manufactured in five different variants:

McDonnell Douglas DC-10:KC-10 Extender during refueling
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KC-10 Extender during refueling

McDonnell Douglas produced a larger variant named the MD-11, which entered service in 1991. The MD-11 used newer engines, plus a glass cockpit, which eliminated the need for the flight engineer position. In addition, DC-10s could be upgraded to a MD-10 designation by McDonnell Douglas. The MD-10 upgrade provides certain benefits of the more modern MD-11 cockpit, and more importantly, a common type rating. This allows companies such as Federal Express, which operate both the MD-10 and MD-11, to have a common pilot pool for both aircraft.

Safety record

The early DC-10s suffered a trying time during the 1970s when a string of notorious incidents and crashes snowballed into a brief grounding by the United States Federal Aviation Administration.

The DC-10 was designed with cargo doors that opened outward instead of inward, as inward opening "plug-type" doors used on smaller pressurized aircraft are not well-suited to the larger openings into the cargo hold necessitated by the increased baggage load of a jumbo jet. Outward opening doors rely on a heavy locking mechanism to secure the door against the outward force caused by the pressurization of the fuselage. In the event that the door lock malfunctioned, there was potential for catastrophic blow-out of the whole door. This sort of depressurization caused a failure of the rear floor of the passenger cabin because vents were not present to rapidly equalize the pressure between the cargo and passenger compartments. Cables running from the flight deck to the rear control surfaces are embedded in the floor frame and a collapse would lead to a compromise of the flight deck's ability to control the plane.

This problem was first identified in 1972, when American Airlines Flight 96 lost its aft cargo door after takeoff from Detroit, but fortunately the crew were able to perform an emergency landing with no further incident. Before Flight 96 took off, an airport employee had violently forced the door shut, weakening the locking pin and causing the door to subsequently blow-out as the plane reached altitude. McDonnell Douglas attempted to place the blame on the employee, whom they described as "illiterate", and deflected criticism of the aircraft design itself.

Although many carriers voluntarily modified the cargo doors and re-trained their ground crews, there was not yet a mandatory redesign of the system. Severe design problems still persisted with the aircraft's cargo doors, however. Two years after the American Airlines incident, an almost identical cargo door blow-out befell Turkish Airlines Flight 981, which crashed into a forest shortly after leaving Orly Airport in Paris on March 3, 1974. 346 people were killed in one of the worst aviation disasters of the twentieth century. The circumstances surrounding this crash were similar to those surrounding the previous accident; however, a modified seating configuration on the Turkish aircraft exacerbated the effects of decompression which caused the floor of the aircraft to collapse into the cargo bay. Control cables running through the floor of the plane were severed when the floor collapsed and this rendered the aircraft uncontrollable. In the aftermath of this crash, all DC-10s underwent a mandatory door redesign.

McDonnell Douglas DC-10:Northwest Airlines DC-10-30
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Northwest Airlines DC-10-30

In 1979, with the cargo door issues resolved, DC-10s (all series) around the world were grounded following the crash of American Airlines Flight 191, which killed 273 people. Flight 191 lost its number one wing engine after taking off from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, USA, May 25 1979. The engine loss damaged the aircraft's lift enhancement system on that wing and also damaged warning systems, causing it to lose control. As the engine separated upwards, it ripped through the leading edge of the wing, rupturing hydraulic lines causing the port wing slats to retract. Losing lift on one side, the plane rolled left and crashed before the flight crew could recover.

The United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) officials discovered that a maintenance procedure was the culprit: American Airlines mechanics had removed the engine and its pylon at the same time (rather than removing the engine from the pylon then the pylon from the wing, as recommended by McDonnell Douglas), using a forklift, and the forklift operator had inadvertently cracked the pylon in the process. The short-cut procedure, thought to save several man hours on maintenance, was not approved by McDonnell Douglas, but most major airlines used it. Although McDonnell Douglas was not at fault for the pylon separation, it redesigned the DC-10 to allow more redundancies in the hydraulic systems.

The Chicago incident also highlighted a major deficiency in the DC-10 design, due to its lack of locking flap mechanisms that are designed to maintain their position in the event of a hydraulic or pneumatic failure. Other widebody aircraft of the day carried such a feature, but it was omitted from the DC-10. Another deficiency highlighted in the NTSB report was the vulnerable placement of electrical wiring at the leading edge (front) of the wing. When the engine pulled up and over the wing, it tore out these electrical wires, thus rendering inoperable vital warning instruments in the cockpit. Other aircraft of this era typically placed this kind of wiring in the center of the wing, in a less vulnerable position.

In 1979, an Air New Zealand DC-10-30 flew into Mount Erebus in Antarctica during a sight-seeing trip. All 257 on board Air New Zealand Flight 901 were killed. The accident was caused by complex factors, centered around an un-announced flight plan change, and not related to the airworthiness of the aircraft.

McDonnell Douglas DC-10:The Sioux City Flight 232 DC-10 crash
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The Sioux City Flight 232 DC-10 crash

Perhaps the most infamous instance of a DC-10 crash was the Flight 232 disaster at Sioux City, IA, USA, in 1989. After the #2 engine (tail engine) suffered an uncontained fan disk failure in flight which ruptured critical hydraulic lines, the crew, led by Captain Al Haynes and assisted by an unrostered senior pilot flying as a passenger (Dennis E. "Denny" Fitch), performed an emergency landing by varying remaining engine power to substitute for the lost hydraulic power to the controls. Although the aircraft was subsequently destroyed with the loss of many lives, the crew flew the aircraft onto the runway in a partially controlled manner and over half of the passengers survived.

The Sioux City crash concerned investigators because the total loss of hydraulic pressure aboard the DC-10 was considered nearly impossible. The design, however, had lines from all three independent and redundant hydraulic systems in close proximity, directly beneath the #2 (tail) engine. Debris from the #2 fan disk separation failure penetrated all three lines resulting in total loss of control to the elevators, ailerons and the rudder.

Eventually, years later, the MD-11, a successor of the DC-10, built on a similar design, incorporated hydraulic fuses to prevent such catastrophic loss of control in event of a hydraulic failure.

The Air France Concorde crash of 2000 was attributed to a fragment of titanium metal that fell from a DC-10 that had taken off some four minutes earlier. Continental Airlines was the operator of the DC-10 in question.

Operators

Current operators

McDonnell Douglas DC-10:DC-10-30 with landing gear extended.
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DC-10-30 with landing gear extended.

The aging model is now largely being used as a dedicated freight aircraft: many mainline carriers have sold their obsolete DC-10 fleets to cargo carriers such as FedEx. Some aircraft have been moderized to MD-10s by adding a glass cockpit, which eliminates the need for a flight engineer. Other DC-10 aircraft continue in charter service with their three-person flight deck configurations.

Some passenger airlines, most notably Northwest Airlines (NWA), and Omni Air International, continue to operate the DC-10 on trunk routes. The Royal Netherlands Air Force has converted the aircraft to KDC-10 flying tankers. The Orbis International use a DC-10 as flying eye hospital.

In August 2006 a total of 174 DC-10 aircraft (all variants) remain in service. Major operators include: FedEx Express (85) and Northwest Airlines (17). Some 29 other airlines also operate smaller numbers of the type.[5] Almost all DC-10s remaining in passenger service are series 30 aircraft.

On October 31, 2006 Northwest Airlines stopped International service with the DC-10, and all flight operations with the aircraft are scheduled to end in January, 2007.

In November 2006, ATA Airlines announced they had purchased seven of Northwest's remaining DC-10s, to replace ATA's aging L1011 fleet.

Previous operators


Interesting Quotes

Regarding the retirement of Northwest's DC-10 fleet, Wade Blaufuss, spokesman for the Northwest chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association says:

"The DC-10 is a reliable airplane, fun to fly, roomy and quiet, kind of like flying an old Cadillac Fleetwood. We're sad to see an old friend go."[6]

Specifications

Specifications (DC-10-30)

General characteristics

Performance

References

  1. ^ History - McDonnell Douglas DC-10 on Boeing.com (Accessed Feb. 28, 2006)
  2. ^ "DC-10 History on dc-10.net"
  3. ^ "Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents (1959-2005)".
  4. ^ "I will survive"
  5. ^ Flight International, 3-9 October 2006
  6. ^ Northwest to Retire Its Last DC-10.

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<h3>Comparable aircraft<h3>

<h3>See also<h3>


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