Originally Posted by
BearX220
There was an excellent account of the DC10's flawed design process published with an unfortunately lurid title, "Destination Disaster." The book is better than you'd think. It's built around the THY / Ermenonville crash but harks back to horrible, criminal corner-cutting during design, when McDonnell-Douglas was desperate to beat the similar Lockheed L-1011 to market and the gung-ho slogan on the McD-D factory floor was "Fly before they roll." They skimped on hydraulic redundancies and installed poor, slapdash components from subcontractors like the rear cargo door latch, and the rest was tragic history.
There was also one other contributing factor. I read a long investigation in The Sunday Times in subsequent years. THY sent their crews to the USA to be trained. They were all ex-Turkish Air Force. The instructors said - and this was repeated to more than one BCAL pilot - that not one of them would have got a job with a US airline. What was so shocking was that this problem was known before the Windsor incident . It had been found that a similar set of conditions, which had caused the failure of an aircraft floor following explosive decompression of the cargo hold, had occurred in ground testing in 1970 before the DC-10 series entered commercial service. A memo from the fuselage's manufacturer, in which the series of events that occurred on both flight was foreseen. Indeed it stated that if these events occurred it would probably result in the loss of the aircraft. In spite of this warning, they did nothing to correct the problem.