Confidence Vote

The DC-10s rise again

At precisely 3:20 p.m. one day last week, a Swissair DC-10 with 125 passengers aboard lifted off from Zurich's Kloten airport for a flight that ended, uneventfully, 4% hours later in Tel Aviv. Almost simultaneously, many more of the U.S.-built, tri-engine wide-bodies were taxiing to runways all over Europe. By week's end 13 European lines, including such prestigious carriers as Lufthansa, SAS, Alitalia and KLM, had put their 58 DC-10s back into the air. Though their decision brought cheers from the plane's beleaguered manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, it was a blow to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. After the May 25 Chicago crash of a DC-10 that took 275 lives, the FAA had not only grounded all of the 138 planes owned by U.S. airlines, but barred U.S. airspace to foreign-owned DC-10s. Asked in House hearings whether the Europeans' decision meant that the FAA had erred, Agency Chief Langhorne Bond replied, "One or the other of us had."

The European action represented a sharp challenge to the authority of the FAA. In the past, European carriers have automatically obeyed FAA directives involving U.S.-made aircraft. When Washington withdrew the DC-10's airworthiness certificate on June 6, the Europeans promptly grounded their 10s too and undertook extensive FAA-required examinations of the engine pylons and wing attachment fittings, which National Transportation Safety Board investigators suspect may have had a key role in the cause of the U.S.'s worst airline catastrophe.

However, since the FAA showed no eagerness to lift the ban quickly, the European airlines became restive. Reason: they did not want to keep the plane on the ground, especially during the peak season of tourist travel. Although one of every three U.S.-owned DC-10s inspected had flaws in the pylon mountings (such as cracks, corrosion and serious stress in the attachment bulkheads), no similar problems were found on the European crafts. Furthermore, the European lines fly almost exclusively advanced, longer-range versions of the plane, known as the series 30 and 40, rather than the older, shorter-range series 10, which was involved in the Chicago crash. The Europeans claim that the pylon and wing attachments in the long-haul versions are sturdier than those used on the original model, although, in fact, they carry heavier engines than the ones used on the series 10.

At an emergency meeting in Zurich, the European airlines persuaded their national civil aviation authorities to allow the DC-10s to return to the air, even though the U.S.'s National Transportation Safety Board had not yet determined the probable cause of the Chicago crash. Even so, passengers showed little or no hesitance about flying in DC-10s again.

By defying the FAA ban and signaling what amounted to a vote of confidence in the DC-10, the European airlines increased the already intense pressures on Bond either to clear the plane for takeoff in the U.S. or spell out its faults and prescribe the cure. But U.S. investigators still have serious doubts about the plane.

Late last week, even as Douglas officials testified before congressional inquiry that the plane should be allowed back into U.S. skies, Bond flew to Los Angeles to confer with FAA safety experts searching for possible design flaws in the DC-10 at the Douglas plant. In his sessions with the FAA experts and safety board "crash detectives," Bond asked if the design and structure of the engine mounts in the 30 and 40 series were sufficiently different to justify clearing the bigger planes, of which there are 35 in the U.S. fleet. Not really, they replied. That left Bond with no choice except to continue the flight ban on all DC-10s.

"I regard the European thing as a difference of opinion," said Bond. "People look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions. I have tried not to be critical of them. But I guess there are still open questions in my own mind that have not been resolved yet."

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