Word: wings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cockpit, however, Haynes was describing a far more dangerous situation to regional air-traffic controllers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. One minute after the explosion, he radioed that his craft had developed "complete hydraulic failure." That meant the crew could no longer control the rudder, elevators, wing flaps and ailerons that steer the jet. Too massive to be manually manipulated, these control surfaces are normally powered by fluid pumped by pressure from the jet engines through a series of stainless-steel tubes that snake throughout the aircraft. Since each of the plane's three redundant hydraulic systems is powered...
Back in the passenger areas, the mood remained relaxed. Some travelers noticed the wide turn to the southwest and heard the thrust in the two wing engines change, alternately increasing and decreasing. Haynes was apparently relying on a technique that pilots call "porpoising," adjusting the thrust of his two remaining engines in a desperate effort to control the plane. Passenger Kathleen Batson joked that the engine problem would get them priority-landing rights in Chicago. "We won't be circling O'Hare," she quipped...
...voice on the intercom shouted, "Brace! Brace! Brace!" Four minutes later, some ten seconds short of the runway, the DC-10's right wing dipped, slicing into the dirt to the left of the asphalt. The plane plowed into the ground and flipped over twice before finally landing on its back. In a cloud of dirt, smoke and flying metal, the plane broke into ever smaller pieces as parts of its fuselage hurtled across the runway and into a cornfield...
...finding two rows of three seats each that had been flung from the aircraft. A woman in the middle of one row was barely bruised. Her husband, seated beside her, and two passengers in the row behind her were dead. Along with most passengers in the rows near the wing, a handful of those at the rear were also alive. The three-man cockpit crew had to be cut free of the tangled and wrecked flight deck, but all survived. Of the eight attendants, only one died...
...Turkish Airlines DC-10 lost an improperly secured cargo door as the plane left Paris. The resulting pressure change buckled the cabin floor and broke the hydraulic tubes passing under it. All 346 occupants died. In a 1979 crash in Chicago, 279 were killed after an improperly installed wing engine on an American Airlines DC-10 tore away on takeoff, - ripping hydraulic lines and causing the pilot to lose control...