Oct 17 1976
From The Space Library
Two recently published books on "the worst disaster in aviation history-the crash of a Turkish Airlines DC-10 outside Paris that killed at least 346 people in March, 1974-" alleged that the disaster was not only preventable but was predicted in detail years before it happened, the Washington Post reported. Destination Disaster, by an investigating team from the London Sunday Times, aimed at inspiring another congressional investigation into "corporate and governmental interworkings that contributed to the disaster," the Post said; The Last Nine Minutes, by Moira Johnston, was a more subjective and personal account of the same crash.
Senate and House hearings in the summer of 1974 had revealed that a technically similar accident in June 1972 had exposed an error in the design of the DC-10: a faulty locking system for the door of the large cargo compartment. The 1972 mishap had resulted in a "gentlemen's agreement" between the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration and the president of the Douglas Division, McDonnell Douglas, that the lock would be fixed but that FAA would not issue a public and legally binding "airworthiness directive" mandating the repair. After the agreement was reached, the director of product engineering for the Convair Division of General Dynamics, subcontractor to McDonnell Douglas for the fuselage (including the door), wrote a long memorandum expressing concern about the door. Neither this memo nor another Convair memo on the question of liability for the cost of modifications ever reached McDonnell Douglas, the authors said, although :evidence existed that McDonnell Douglas was fully aware of the problem nevertheless.
Turkish Airlines, which was responsible for maintenance after the DC-10 was delivered, was sharing in liability settlements with McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics, and the FAA, according to attorneys, who said total liability from the crash would probably set a single-accident record. The Post noted that FAA had issued 147 airworthiness directives in 1973; in 1974, year of the crash, the number was 299; in 1975, the number rose to 445.
Private consultant Charles 0. Miller, former chief of the Nad. Transportation Safety Board's bureau of aviation safety, who had gone to Paris to assist in investigation of the Turkish Airlines crash, said in a recent interview that the Convair memoranda and other documentation that provided background to the technical decisions had been turned up by the liability lawyers rather than by the crash investigators or by congressional investigators. (W Post, 17 Oct 76, A-1, A-12)
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