Memorial Day weekend usually means barbecues and road trips. But for anyone who follows aviation history, May 25, 1979, is a date that sits heavy in the gut. On that Friday afternoon, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 took off from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. It didn't stay in the air long. Only 31 seconds, actually. When American Airlines Flight 191 slammed into a field near a trailer park in Des Plaines, Illinois, it became the deadliest aviation accident on U.S. soil. It still is.
Total chaos. That's the only way to describe the scene.
You’ve probably seen the photo. It’s grainy, terrifying, and iconic. A massive wide-body jet is tilted 90 degrees, wings vertical to the ground, just seconds before impact. 271 people on board died. Two more on the ground were killed. It’s a tragedy that fundamentally changed how we fly, how mechanics touch airplanes, and how the FAA looks at "time-saving" shortcuts.
The Engine That Just... Fell Off
Imagine you’re sitting in 15A. You hear the roar of the three General Electric CF6-6D engines. Suddenly, a massive bang. The left engine—the number one engine—literally rips itself away from the wing. It doesn't just fail; it cartwheels over the top of the wing and falls onto the runway.
Physics is a heartless thing.
When the engine tore off, it didn't just take the power with it. It severed the hydraulic lines. These lines controlled the slats on the leading edge of the left wing. Without hydraulic pressure, those slats retracted. The right wing still had its slats extended, creating lift. The left wing? It stalled. At that low altitude, with the plane climbing, the pilots had almost zero chance to recover. Captain Walter Lux and First Officer James Dillard were flying a plane that was technically becoming a brick on one side and a glider on the other.
Maintenance Shortcuts: The Smoking Gun
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) didn't take long to find the "why." Usually, these things are a chain of ten different failures. This time, it was mostly one big, bad decision.
American Airlines had developed a "clever" way to save time during engine maintenance. To save about 200 man-hours per aircraft, they used a large forklift to remove the engine and the pylon (the part that connects the engine to the wing) as a single unit. McDonnell Douglas, the manufacturer, explicitly told them not to do this. They said it was too risky because the tolerances were so tight.
It was like trying to put a needle through an eye using a bulldozer.
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Every time the forklift operator moved just a fraction of an inch the wrong way, the pylon would strike the wing attachment point. It created a microscopic crack. Over time, with the vibration of flights, that crack grew. On the afternoon of May 25, the metal finally gave up. The pylon snapped. The engine departed.
Basically, a desire to save money and time killed 273 people. It’s a harsh reality that the industry had to swallow. Continental Airlines was doing the same thing, by the way. They found similar cracks in their fleet during the grounding that followed.
The Cockpit Nightmare Nobody Knew About
There's a detail about the American Airlines Flight 191 crash that makes it even more haunting. The pilots didn't know the engine was gone. Because of the way the DC-10 was wired, the loss of that engine also killed the power to the Captain’s instrument panel. They lost their stick shaker—the thing that vibrates to warn you of an impending stall.
They also lost the slat disagreement warning.
From the cockpit, they likely thought they just had a simple engine failure. The standard procedure for an engine failure on takeoff is to climb at a specific speed ($V_2$). But $V_2$ was too slow for a wing with retracted slats. If they had known the slats were in, they might have pushed the nose down to gain airspeed. But they followed the manual. They did exactly what they were trained to do for a "normal" engine failure, and in this specific, freak scenario, that was the exact wrong move.
A Legacy Written in Blood
Aviation safety is almost always reactive. We don't fix things until they break in a spectacular, horrific fashion. After the smoke cleared in Des Plaines, the FAA grounded every DC-10 in the United States. It was a PR nightmare for McDonnell Douglas, a company that never quite recovered its reputation before eventually merging with Boeing.
We got several critical changes out of this:
- Pylon Design: The way engines attach to wings was completely re-evaluated to ensure a single failure couldn't take out critical hydraulic systems.
- Maintenance Oversight: The FAA got a lot stickier about "unauthorized" maintenance procedures. You follow the manual, or you don't fly. Period.
- Redundancy: Warning systems were re-wired so that losing one engine wouldn't blind the pilots to the state of their wings.
What You Should Take Away From Flight 191
It’s easy to look at a crash from 1979 and think it’s irrelevant. It isn't. Every time you board a plane and see the ground crew or the mechanics working, you are seeing the result of the lessons learned from American Airlines Flight 191.
If you're a professional in any high-stakes industry—tech, medicine, engineering—this story is the ultimate warning against "process hacking." When experts tell you a shortcut is dangerous, believe them. The "we've done it this way fifty times and it was fine" mentality is exactly what led to the crack in that pylon.
To honor the memory of those lost, the best thing we can do is demand absolute transparency in safety reporting.
Actionable Steps for the Modern Traveler and Professional
- Check the NTSB Database: If you're curious about the safety record of a specific airframe or incident, the NTSB's public records are the gold standard for unbiased data.
- Report the "Small" Things: If you work in an environment where safety is a factor, never let a "near miss" go unreported. The AA191 pylon cracks were seen before the crash, but they weren't treated as the existential threats they were.
- Support FAA Funding: Safety oversight requires boots on the ground. Advocacy for robust aviation infrastructure ensures that "time-saving" shortcuts are caught before they become headlines.
- Visit the Memorial: If you’re ever in Des Plaines, Illinois, there is a formal memorial in Lake Park. It’s a quiet place. It’s a reminder that these aren't just statistics; they were people heading home for the holidays.
The DC-10 eventually became a very safe airplane after these fixes were implemented. In fact, many are still flying today as cargo carriers (the MD-10/11 variants). But the shadow of Flight 191 will always be there, reminding the industry that in aviation, the price of "good enough" is far too high.