That accident was almost a successful landing, right up to
the point that they dropped the gear. They had a stabilized
approach to a belly landing, the change in drag with the
gear dropping required major adjustments to power. Had they
landed gear up and there was one death, you can expect that
the lawyers would have sued the pilot and airline. When you
get a first time event, with not previously flight test
procedure, the pilot should be given a medal and a writ that
bans a suit against the pilot, no matter what happened.


"Kingfish" wrote in message
oups.com...
|
| 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.
|