History's A Disaster
Bloody history and bloodier crimes. Andrew takes a weekly look at all things bloody. From natural disasters to man made atrocities
History's A Disaster
American Airlines Flight 191
The sky was clear on May 25, 1979, as American Airlines Flight 191 accelerated down the runway at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Seconds after liftoff, the unthinkable happened—the left engine tore free from the wing, flipping over the top before crashing onto the runway. What followed was a desperate 31-second battle as the pilots fought to control an aircraft that was rapidly becoming uncontrollable.
This catastrophic failure, claiming 273 lives, wasn't just bad luck. It was the culmination of dangerous maintenance shortcuts and overlooked design vulnerabilities that turned what should have been a survivable emergency into one of America's deadliest aviation disasters. American Airlines, along with several other carriers, had developed a money-saving maintenance procedure using forklifts to remove entire engine assemblies—a practice never approved by the manufacturer that damaged critical components over time.
The investigation revealed multiple shocking findings: hydraulic lines severed during the engine separation, warning systems that went silent precisely when needed most, and eight other DC-10s flying with similar damage. Most tragically, the pilots followed their training perfectly but were doomed by circumstances they couldn't possibly understand in those final moments.
Beyond the human toll, Flight 191 permanently altered aviation safety regulations and maintenance protocols. The McDonnell Douglas DC-10, once the pride of American aviation, never fully recovered its reputation despite subsequent design improvements that made it statistically one of the safest aircraft in the sky. Some still fly today in specialized roles—from firefighting to a flying eye hospital helping prevent blindness in developing countries.
Listen now to understand how this preventable tragedy unfolded, what changes it sparked, and why the lessons of Flight 191 remain critically relevant in today's aviation industry where the pressure to cut costs still battles with the mandate for absolute safety.
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Despite having a slight fear of heights, I love flying. I love looking out the windows and watching the ground shrink away during takeoff and looking out over whatever city I'm flying into on landing. Not so much a fan of looking out and seeing nothing but clouds, that's just a little unnerving, especially during turbulence. But hey, at least we made it off the ground, which is more than could be said for American Airlines Flight 191. They barely made it over 300 feet in the air and traveled less than a mile before the plane flipped on its side and came crashing down. So what happened? I'm Andrew and this is History's A Disaster. Tonight we are taking a look into the American Airlines Flight 191 crash. I wanted to say taking a dive there, but the plane already did that. And tonight's episode is brought to you by Shaky Rick's Forklift Rentals. If you need it forked or lifted, they got the forklift for you. Don't let your job stall out. Call Shaky Rick's today.
Speaker 1:On Friday, may 25th 1979, the day before Memorial Day weekend and the airport is packed. People are flying across the country to celebrate the long weekend. On American Airlines flight 191, captain Walter Lux was supposed to be off but decided to work to help a buddy out and let him have the holiday off. So he took his flight from O'Hare Airport in Chicago, heading to Los Angeles. It would be the worst mistake of his life. Captain Lux, along with co-pilot First Officer James Dillard, both of them highly experienced and familiar with the aircraft, would be piloting the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. Being one of the first jumbo jets, it was extremely popular with the airlines. It's distinctive three engine design also made it one of the most recognizable on the tarmac. I'm sure it also was a little cheaper to fly with three engines versus the four engines of other jumbo jets, but that's a whole other story. They would be flying out of O'Hare with a full plane of 258 passengers and a total of 13 crew members. During the flight, the airline was also trying out something new. They had a camera installed in the cockpit looking out the windows. The camera pumped in a live feed to a screen in the cabin so the passengers could watch and see what the pilot sees during takeoff and landings Kind of like an airline dash cam.
Speaker 1:At around 3.04 in the afternoon the plane started accelerating to takeoff speed Within seconds of hitting rotational speed the speed at which lift begins and the nose of the plane lifts off, the plane shakes with turbulence. As they start to climb, they lose power to the number one engine on the left wing of the plane. Captain Lux's instrument panel goes dead. He's flying blind, believing they had just lost power to the engine. The DC-10 is perfectly capable of flying with only two engines. They just needed to rely on their training. Training at this time says, with the loss of one engine during takeoff, to climb, get as far away from the ground as possible, and that's what they did.
Speaker 1:They pushed the nose higher, increasing their ascent and clawing desperately for every foot of altitude. As they climbed, their airspeed dropped. With airspeed lowering, the left wing dipped towards the ground. Captain Lux and Dillard fought the plane, applying full power to the right ailerons to bring the plane back level. They were barely over 300 feet in the air as they fought the plane, unsuccessfully. The left wing continued to dip until the plane was flying completely sideways. The passengers were terrified and had to watch helplessly as the image on the screen showed the plane tilting towards the ground, a hangar near the end of the runway growing larger on screen as the ground rushed up to meet them. The left wing struck the ground first, slamming the nose down.
Speaker 1:The fuel tanks were full and an explosion and fire started as soon as the plane hit. Fiery debris was spread across the tarmac. Some of it was launched far enough away to set a trailer ablaze in a large trailer park that lay just beyond the airport. Firefighters and rescue crews were on scene quickly. They managed to get the fires out. Smoke and the smell of jet fuel hung in the air. There was hardly anything recognizable as an airplane left, a landing gear strut here and an engine over there. What was horrifyingly recognizable was the bodies and body parts spread through the debris. As they searched through the debris, desperately looking for survivors, they would find none. 273 people were killed in the crash 271 from the plane and two workers in the hangar died when the plane hit the ground.
Speaker 1:The NTSB was on hand quickly and an immediate investigation was launched. During the beginning of the investigation, the plane's number one engine was found 2,000 feet before the end of the runway. A broken bolt was found further down, which led the investigators to believe the bolt was the first thing to fall from the plane and the likely cause of the accident, and that was what they released to the press during a press conference just two days after the crash. They should have waited. When the metal expert, michael Marks, looked at the bolt and examined it, he found no signs of stressing and cracking, so he told them nope, guess again. Most likely the bolt broke during the accident. So they were left with nothing to do but dig deeper. They were facing immense pressure to get this investigation done not only right, but right now. They had to find the reason for the crash. The plane should have been able to fly with the engine missing Within just a few days of the accident.
Speaker 1:The FAA ordered all DC-10s grounded and no international flights involving DC-10s would be allowed into the country, which left the airlines with 138 of their planes grounded and losing money daily. The investigators would go on to recover the badly damaged black boxes from the debris, which ended up being not much help in the investigation, which ended up being not much help in the investigation. The boxes were powered by the number one engine, so when it went out, they quit recording. During an examination of some of the wreckage, michael Marks came across a broken piece of the pylon. Now the pylon is the piece that hangs under the wing and is strong enough to attach the 10,000 pound engine to the wing of the plane. These pylons are incredibly strong and can withstand more of a load than an engine would place on it during its lifespan. So finding a piece that was broken the way it was threw up red flags for the investigators.
Speaker 1:The next step check the maintenance logs and according to the logs, the left engine had just been removed for service, 8 weeks prior to the accident. So they now had to pay a visit to the maintenance crew and check up on procedures and shit like that. And they got there just in time to watch them reattach the engine to the wing with a forklift, which isn't really the fucked up part, because how the hell else you gonna get a 10,000 pound engine up there. No, what was fucked up was they weren't following McDonnell Douglas established procedures on the removal and replacement of the engine. According to established procedures, they are supposed to remove the engine from the pylon, which means pulling off hatches and unbolting everything, and there was hundreds of bolts in there and cramped and hard to get places before being able to lower the engine. It was a slow and labor-intensive process, taking around 24 hours for a single engine removal. Well, american Airlines and several others didn't really like that too much, so they found a faster workaround for that. The pylon was attached to the wing by three large bolts. So they put a forklift under the wing and just removed the engine and pylon as one whole unit, making it a hell of a lot quicker. They saved hundreds of man, hours and labor doing it this way.
Speaker 1:Now, taking them down Not the real problem, putting them back up is If you've ever driven a forklift and tried to put anything in a specific area, you know forklifts aren't exactly a precision instrument and they're using them to try to put the pylons back on with hardly any margin for error. And that shit's not going to happen on the first try, or at least not very often Things are gonna get banged around, dented and broken, and that's what happened on flight 191. After finding the rest of the pylon pieces and examining them, they found an indentation they believed came from using the forklift to put it back on. This dent led to a crack in the pylon and during the eight weeks of flying around the crack kept getting bigger and bigger until the pylon eventually failed completely, causing the engine to come loose and flip over the wing and fly off. It was designed to do this little flip over the wing thing. It's to keep it from flying into the tail of the plane and cause more damage in situations like this.
Speaker 1:So now they know pretty much why the engine came off, but that still doesn't really explain the crash, since once again the plane should have been able to fly with two engines and the wreckage wasn't helping them out at all. It was not revealing any more clues and they were getting desperate for answers. Fortunately, one of the investigators happened to look at a newspaper. There's a very famous photo from right before the crash showing the plane flying completely sideways. But as the investigator looked at it, he happened to see something funny in the picture and put out a request for original copies of the photo.
Speaker 1:They had the photos blown up to look at the wings, to see if maybe the pilots fucked up and the ailerons were out of position. They were not. They did see, however, what looked like hydraulic fluid spraying from the left wing, and if the plane lost hydraulics, that would explain why they couldn't control it. When they checked the plane's diagrams, they found the hydraulic lines ran right where the wing was ripped open. When the engine went, it had taken sections of the hydraulic line with it, and when the hydraulics went out, the wing slat retracted, and these wing slats are absolutely critical to flying the plane at low speeds, like during takeoff. When they're extended they change the shape of the wing and create more lift during slow speeds. But with the slats retracted, it changed the stall speed of the plane from 124 knots to 159, which is a huge, significant difference. Now they had a working hypothesis. They just needed to test it, and for that they need a flight simulator and a pilot to test the conditions.
Speaker 1:As the pilot put the simulator in the air, the left engine and hydraulics were cut to simulate the conditions of flight 191. When the left wing started to stall out, a warning system violently shook the control stick to warn of a stall. The system was most appropriately called the stick shaker. During a potential stall, the correct response to it is to lower the nose and increase power to the engine. This will allow the plane to fly out of it by increasing airspeed, and that's exactly what the pilot and the sim did, and he successfully pulled the plane out of the stall and saved it.
Speaker 1:So now it was back to the drawing board for the investigators, and that's when they found another serious design flaw in the plane. Every single warning system in the plane was powered by the number one engine. So when it went away, not only did it fuck up the hydraulics, but it fucked up electrical systems too, which would have led to the loss of instruments in the cockpit. It was determined that at the time, the flight crew would not have known they were stalling, and back to the simulator they went, this time with a new pilot behind the stick and unknown to the pilot. All warning systems were disabled.
Speaker 1:This time, when they went into takeoff without the stall warning, the pilot assumed they had just lost power to the engine and followed the proper procedure for what to do when an engine is lost during takeoff, and that is to put the plane into a climb and get away from the ground, which means pointing the nose up and reducing speed to the minimum safe flying speed the exact opposite of what you want to happen in a stall. This just made everything worse and caused the simulator to roll on its side, dooming the flight. With this, the NTSB concluded the pilots were not at fault for the crash. However, the FAA was partially to blame for not enforcing correct procedures, as well as American Airlines for their fucked up maintenance practices. The FAA would go on to issue a mandate that shake stickers be installed on both pilot control columns, not just one, which just seems like common sense to me. But whatever, I'm not an aerospace engineer.
Speaker 1:The DC-10 would go through some design changes as well. The electrical systems were now required to be powered by more than one engine in case of a failure, and the hydraulic lines in the wings had special plugs put in them to prevent slats and other control surfaces from retracting if the lines were cut. And it's a shame the entire hydraulic system wasn't completely redesigned. This could have potentially avoided the crash of United Airlines Flight 232 10 years later. Had they done that and I did a whole episode on that crash. If you haven't listened to it yet, it's in the feed. American Airlines also decided after this that maybe putting a camera in the cockpit wasn't such a good idea, so they discontinued it. Also, during the grounding of every DC-10, they were all inspected and 8 out of 138 in service were found to have similar damage to the pylon as flight 191 had. So it was just a matter of time before this happened.
Speaker 1:The crash would also go on to have an extremely negative effect on public perception of the DC-10. This was the third major crash in the last five years. The first two crashes were caused by a faulty cargo door opening during flight, causing the cabin to experience explosive decompression that led to the crashes and the loss of hundreds of lives. So people were afraid to fly in them and often canceled or switched flights to not have to go on one. By 1983, mcdonnell Douglas announced that, due to the lack of orders, production on the DC-10s would be stopped and production would eventually come to an end in 1989. And despite public perceptions, after numerous redesigns the DC-10 would have a long safety record, just as good, if not better, than similarly sized planes, and it was a good thing McDonnell Douglas got these redesigns in place.
Speaker 1:In 1997, mcdonnell Douglas was bought out by Boeing, and I think we all know they don't exactly have the greatest track record in keeping planes in the air right now. Anyways, the DC-10 would remain in service before being retired from the airlines in 2014. However, there is still 10 of them still in service. Four of them are being used in a firefighting role, as aerial tankers, two are being used to conduct aerial refueling, three of them are being used as cargo planes and the last one was heavily modified and serves as a fully functioning teaching hospital specializing in eye surgery, and both state-of-the-art teaching facilities, including a classroom, operating room and recovery room.
Speaker 1:Orbis International, the owner of the modified DC-10, has been in over 80 countries helping to improve eye care and prevent avoidable blindness since FedEx donated the plane in 1982. Since FedEx donated the plane in 1982. And that was the crash of American Airlines Flight 191. Thanks for listening and if you liked the show, please consider leaving a rating or review on your app of choice, and you can reach out to the show at historiesofdisaster at gmailcom with questions, comments or suggestions, as well as following the show on social media like Facebook or Instagram and a few others, tiktok and YouTube and whatever. Think I've got a Tumblr now too and share the episode. Your friends will love it and take care of yourself out there. Chase that dream. Live for today, because tomorrow is never guaranteed. Thanks and goodbye.