Word: ordered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After vacillating for twelve days, Federal Aviation Administrator Langhorne Bond last week issued an "emergency order of suspension" that indefinitely lifted the design certificate of the DC-10s in the U.S. The grounding was voluntarily followed by all but one airline outside the U.S. (Venezuela's Viasa, which uses five DC-10s). A total of 41 airlines that normally carry 60,000 passengers a day on the $40 million plane built by the McDonnell Douglas Corp. had suddenly lost key portions of their fleets. The initial result was confusion and tedious delays in airport terminals as travelers scrambled...
...grounding order had been personally handed to McDonnell Douglas President John C. Brizendine at an unusual meeting in his Los Angeles office at 3:48 a.m. Both he and the bearer of the news, Regional FAA Director Leon C. Daugherty, had been called from their homes to keep their rendezvous. The key passage of the order declared that the engine-and-pylon assembly "may not be of proper design, material, specification, construction and performance for safe operation...
McDonnell Douglas angrily attacked the FAA for making what it called an "extreme and unwarranted" decision. The company protested that the order grounded all DC-10s when, in fact, the defects have only shown up on the earlier, shorter-range (2,700 miles) No. 10 series. The later series 30 and 40 aircraft (4,000-to 4,600-mile range) are used mainly on transoceanic flights. The engine-and-pylon assembly, however, is almost identical on all three models...
Bond's final order grounding the DC-10 was sweeping, but there were critics who wanted him to go further. Most notably, the Air Line Pilots Association demanded that the entire DC-10 aircraft be re-examined from nose to tail. Declared ALPA President John J. O'Donnell: "The fight against FAA lethargy is just beginning." Bond was scheduled to be grilled by a House subcommittee this week on all aspects of his agency's handling of the DC-10 crisis...
...mainly Congressmen anxious to bring jobs and business to their districts, gently prod top FAA officials to expedite the process of approving a new plane's design and flight results. Another is what Daugherty calls "peer pressure": company engineers seeking to impress FAA examiners with their expertise in order to nudge a project along a shade faster than might be wise...