Rick Umali wrote:
Last night I watched a fascinating documentary on the History Channel,
titled (I think) "Flight 191". This is the American Airlines DC-10 crash on
March 25, 1979, in which 270+ were killed, after the No. 1 engine blew off
its wing. (I was only eleven when this happened.)

In the last part of the program, the subject turned to the recovery
procedures used by the pilots. I'm not a pilot, so I'll have to paraphrase,
but essentially the plane could have still been flown with its missing
engine if the pilots recognized they were in a stall (the pilot in question
didn't have a "stick shaker" to warn him of this).

I don't doubt it's possible to still fly a DC-10 with one engine missing,
but a lot of things have to go right to turn it around and land, yes? Can
anyone recall a commercial aircraft recovery from a blown engine?
--

No stick shaker in a DC-10? I find that hard to believe, I thought all
transport category jets built in the last 35 years had that system, but
I'm not a jet pilot.
I don't know that it IS possible to fly that plane with a missing wing
engine considering there was probably a major hydraulic system failure
when the engine tore off its mounts. Countering the asymmetric thrust
condition without rudder would make that impossible I'd think. A
similar thing happened in 1989(?) in Sioux City when Capt. Al Haines
landed (more or less) a crippled DC-10 when the tail mounted #2 engine
had an uncontained fan disk failure that took out all three hyd systems
leaving differential engine thrust as the only method of control. The
fact that anybody walked away from that crash was amazing - That the
majority of passengers did qualifies as a miracle.