![]() ![]() In contrast, many cargo doors are placed on the outside of the fuselage, closing against a sealing flange by use of various leveraging approaches. Through various pivoting schemes, they can sometimes swing outside the airplane when open, but when closed they’re pressed against the fuselage from the inside which means they cannot open in flight. ![]() To make matters worse, the Federal Aviation Administration failed to act after the Ontario incident - apparently due to a conversation between the airframe manufacturer’s president and the Administrator of the FAA.įinally, like a Greek tragedy, the DC-10 story also had a hero: an engineer who tried to do the right thing.ĭoors in the passenger compartments of virtually all the worlds’ jet airliners are of the plug variety. ![]() Within the fabric of that macro, there were several micro areas of the DC-10’s design that were sufficiently deficient to result in “loss of the hull” - an aerospace industry euphemism for a crash.īut it was the design shortcomings of the cargo door that was most troubling because clear warnings showed up both in testing and during a nearly fatal incident over Windsor, Ontario. None of the certification rules existing at the time were broken but that’s more an indictment of the way the rules were written then a pat on the airframe manufacturers back. Of all the airliners certificated over the years by the Federal Aviation Administration and its predecessors, the DC-10 stands out. The Cargo Door Fiasco - American Airlines Flight 96: Prelude to a Catastrophe. ![]()
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