Taking off from Chicago, a DC-10 ends in charred fragments At 3 on a sunny Friday afternoon, thousands of Chicago motorists lucky
enough to get off to a fast start on the long Memorial Day weekend
streamed out along Interstate 90. Brisk winds rippled the green field
between the crowded highway and O'Hare International Airport. Half an
hour later, the field was shrouded in black smoke, and firemen held
hoses on a flaming aircraft engine. Police and other emergency workers
stepped gingerly through scattered and smoldering wreckage, looking for
signs of life. They found none. The rescue workers carried colored metal markers on poles. With each
discovery of a body, or parts of a body, they stuck a pole into the
ground. As the wind fleetingly blew the smoke away, the eerie signs
could be briefly seen. Some bodies were pinpointed by red markers,
others by yellow, still others by black, or even wooden sticks. The
field became a multicolored jumble of signposts of death. In that field, which was an abandoned private airport immediately north
of the world's busiest terminal, 271 people had died. They had crashed
to earth in an American Airlines DC-10, which had taken off from O'Hare
at 3 p.m. on a four-hour, nonstop flight to Los Angeles. The huge
wide-body plane had flown
only half a mile. The crash was the worst in U.S. aviation history. The worst previous
accident occurred eight months ago when a Pacific Southwest Airlines
Boeing 727 collided with a private aircraft near the San Diego airport.
That collision killed 144 people. Worldwide, the toll had been exceeded
only in the collision of two jumbo Boeing 747 airliners on the ground
at Tenerife in the Canary Islands in March 1977, killing 583 people,
and the crash of another DC-10 near Paris in 1974, in which 346 died. What had gone wrong at O'Hare? The 120-ton DC-10 had arrived only a few
hours before on a flight from Phoenix. In Chicago it was designated
Flight 191 and it took on its capacity load of 258 passengers and a
crew of 13. Traffic was backed up at the airport, which averages some
two takeoffs and landings per minute. Captain Walter H. Lux awaited
clearance and was about eight minutes behind schedule as he got tower
approval to roll down Runway 32-R . As soon as the plane lifted off , a
controller in the tower knew that something was wrong. “Do you want to
come back?” he radioed the pilot. There was no answer. Captain Lux and
his crew were far too busy. The aircraft's left turbofan engine had
broken out of its moorings and fallen onto the runway. Normally the
loss of one engine's power would not have been fatal; the aircraft is
designed to function on just two engines even during takeoff.
