Word: plane
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...look up at the crippled airplane. "We could see all the fuel was spouting out the left side where the engine would be," he said. "And then as he got over our compound, the other engine shut off. So there was complete silence in the air. And then the plane turned, perpendicular to the ground, with the left wing facing down and the right wing facing up." As the stricken plane kept descending, the wing slashed a trough through the field, like a farmer driving a plow. Then the craft disintegrated...
...later we felt a blast of heat. It was like sitting in front of a fireplace." The first rescue units were on the scene within three minutes. One aircraft engine still was flaming, and the aircraft fuel had ignited, starting fires in several nearby house trailers. Most of the plane was smashed into small scraps of metal. Many of the passengers, who had no chance of survival, had been hurled against a chain link fence...
...Oasis Mobile Home Park, which contains 1,200 homes, would have been devastated if the plane had not broken up so quickly. Donna Freer, 33, was baking a pecan pie when her mobile home was rocked by the explosion just 150 yds. away. She ran outside to see an elderly couple, John and Mary Bielski, standing in their underwear just outside their flaming house. They were shaken but unhurt. Two other residents of the park were burned, one critically...
Once again the National Transportation Safety Board dispatched a skilled accident investigation team to determine precisely what had happened. They first wanted to know why that engine had broken away from the plane. The most obvious possibility was that it had ingested a flock of birds or airport debris and thus exploded. This had happened to another DC-10 and its General Electric engine (the CF6) on takeoff at New York's Kennedy Airport in 1975, when a number of seagulls had been caught in its internal blades. But the crew was able to abort the takeoff without injury...
Whatever the cause of the engine's breakaway, some investigators doubted eyewitness reports that all of the plane's three engines had gone silent. They theorized that the breakaway of the engine at a moment of maximum thrust, and with the plane fully loaded, had unbalanced the weight at a critical moment. Investigators also suspected that what some witnesses thought was fuel escaping from the wing might have been hydraulic fluid, which would have deprived Captain Lux of critical controls to maintain flight...