New Qualms About the DC-10

By Jesse Birnbaum

If airline passengers during this busy traveling summer had qualms about flying aboard a DC-10, last week's drumbeat of new troubles gave them no consolation. Eight days after United Airlines Flight 232 crash-landed in Sioux City, Iowa, killing 111 of its 286 passengers and crew, a Korean Air Lines DC- 10 carrying 199 people plowed into an olive grove near Tripoli, Libya. As was the case in Sioux City, a majority of those aboard the KAL flight survived, but as many as 80 were killed. The same day in Los Angeles a United DC-10 had another close call: though the pilot reported a hydraulic leak, he managed to bring in his plane without incident. One day later in Toronto, a Canadian International Airlines DC-10 en route from Rio de Janeiro landed safely after losing one of its ten landing wheels.

Though the DC-10 had suffered no serious problems since a string of crashes in the late 1970s, superstitious air travelers were beginning to wonder if the plane was now simply too spooked to fly. No less troubled was the International Airline Passengers Association, a Dallas-based consumer group that claims 110,000 members. After the Sioux City crash, the I.A.P.A. demanded that the Federal Aviation Administration investigate possible design flaws in the DC-10 and ground the nation's fleet if necessary.

The I.A.P.A. pointed out that at least 17 DC-10s have been wrecked since the plane began flying 18 years ago; that amounts to 3.8% of the 445 DC-10s built by McDonnell Douglas, a higher percentage than that recorded by comparable superjets like the Lockheed L-1011 (1.2%). Both the FAA and McDonnell Douglas rejected the I.A.P.A.'s request. Said FAA spokesman John Leyden: "There's nothing that's come out of the Sioux City accident indicating a basic design flaw that would warrant such an action."

The Tripoli crash may not have been caused by a mechanical malfunction. Flight 803 left Seoul and made trouble-free stops in Thailand and Saudi Arabia. Approaching Tripoli's airport in a dense morning fog, the pilot decided to land, even though only an hour earlier an arriving Soviet Aeroflot jet had prudently detoured to Malta. The KAL plane missed the runway by more than a mile, cartwheeled and slammed into two cars and two farmhouses.

The Toronto and Los Angeles scares were the sort of mishaps that have always plagued air travel; pilot error, leaks, blown tires and engine shutdowns are frequent occurrences. But the Flight 232 disaster was of a different order altogether: a loss of all three of the plane's redundant hydraulic systems at the same moment, rendering it almost impossible to control. FAA investigators are combing a 16-sq.-mi. area of Iowa cornfields for pieces of a fan disk of the plane's No. 2 engine, which was mounted high on the DC-10's tail. They hope that examining the fan disk will help them determine what caused an explosion that sent shards of metal through the plane's tail section, severing all three hydraulic lines.

The nagging possibility of an inherent design flaw in the DC-10 remains. In 1979 an American Airlines DC-10 taking off from Chicago lost its left-wing engine, tearing out its hydraulic lines; the plane crashed, killing 273. The I.A.P.A. won a federal court order that forced the FAA to ground the entire DC-10 fleet for inspection. The planes were inspected and sent aloft again five weeks later.

With reporting by Michael Mason/Atlanta and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles