The Worst U.S. Air Crash

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 (its cabin is 136 ft. long and 19 ft. wide) 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 (heading 320DEG, roughly northwest).

As soon as the plane lifted off ("rotated," in pilot's jargon), 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.

The huge jet reached an altitude of about 500 ft. But it began dropping. Captain Lux fought to get the craft under control. On Touhy Avenue, near Interstate 90, Chicago Patrol Officer Michael Delany was working with a dog at the police canine center. He turned to look up at the crippled airplane. "We could see all the fuel was spouting out the left side where the engine would be," he said. "And then as he got over our compound, the other engine shut off. So there was complete silence in the air. And then the plane turned, perpendicular to the ground, with the left wing facing down and the right wing facing up." As the stricken plane kept descending, the wing slashed a trough through the field, like a farmer driving a plow. Then the craft disintegrated.

Rich Dusek, manager of a gas station about 100 yds. from the crash site, heard "a big explosion" and saw flames shoot up 400 to 500 ft. in the air. "Then we felt the concussion," he said. "About five seconds later we felt a blast of heat. It was like sitting in front of a fireplace." The first rescue units were on the scene within three minutes. One aircraft engine still was flaming, and the aircraft fuel had ignited, starting fires in several nearby house trailers. Most of the plane was smashed into small scraps of metal. Many of the passengers, who had no chance of survival, had been hurled against a chain link fence.

The Oasis Mobile Home Park, which contains 1,200 homes, would have been devastated if the plane had not broken up so quickly. Donna Freer, 33, was baking a pecan pie when her mobile home was rocked by the explosion just 150 yds. away. She ran outside to see an elderly couple, John and Mary Bielski, standing in their underwear just outside their flaming house. They were shaken but unhurt. Two other residents of the park were burned, one critically.

Once again the National Transportation Safety Board dispatched a skilled accident investigation team to determine precisely what had happened. They first wanted to know why that engine had broken away from the plane. The most obvious possibility was that it had ingested a flock of birds or airport debris and thus exploded. This had happened to another DC-10 and its General Electric engine (the CF6) on takeoff at New York's Kennedy Airport in 1975, when a number of seagulls had been caught in its internal blades. But the crew was able to abort the takeoff without injury. Another possibility was that the engine fan assembly had disintegrated in flight. That had happened to a DC-10 near Albuquerque in 1973, ripping a hole in the fuselage. One passenger was sucked out a window to his death.

Whatever the cause of the engine's breakaway, some investigators doubted eyewitness reports that all of the plane's three engines had gone silent. They theorized that the breakaway of the engine at a moment of maximum thrust, and with the plane fully loaded, had unbalanced the weight at a critical moment. Investigators also suspected that what some witnesses thought was fuel escaping from the wing might have been hydraulic fluid, which would have deprived Captain Lux of critical controls to maintain flight.

The tragedy was the seventh major accident involving the DC-10, including the Paris crash, which was later attributed to the loss of a cargo door while in flight.

That problem, which caused depressurization and buckling of the cabin, has been corrected. Last week it seemed tragically possible, however, that the engine problems have not been solved. There are more than 200 of the DC-10s in service.

They have logged some 4 million flight hours in the past eight years.

One of the passengers on last week's fatal flight was Author Judith Wax, 47, who was flying with her husband Sheldon Wax, 51, managing editor of Playboy magazine. In her last book, Starting in the Middle, she wrote lightly and amusingly about incidents in her life. In retrospect, one of her lines acquired new meaning. "When the job required travel," she wrote, "I developed such a fear of airplanes my head trembled from takeoff to landing."

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