The DC-10’s worst accidents came early. A cargo door that could look locked when it was not caused a near-disaster over Windsor, Ontario, in 1972 and the loss of Turkish Airlines Flight 981 near Paris in 1974. In 1979 an engine and pylon separated from American Airlines Flight 191 at Chicago, and the FAA suspended the type’s certificate. Most of the type’s lessons were about design weaknesses and maintenance practices that were then fixed.
This guide follows each DC-10 accident through to the fixes that came after it, and what the type’s record looked like once they were in place. The videos are on the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 page.
The DC-10 and its reputation
The McDonnell Douglas DC-10 was a three-engine wide-body airliner, with one engine under each wing and one in the tail, the same layout as its rival, the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar. Its early accidents are the reason people still ask whether it was safe. This guide sets out what the investigations found.
The cargo door: Windsor, 1972
On 12 June 1972 American Airlines Flight 96, a DC-10 climbing out of Detroit, lost its rear cargo door at about 11,750 feet over Windsor, Ontario. The cabin decompressed explosively. According to the BEA, none of the 67 passengers and crew on board was killed.
The door was recovered almost intact. Its latches had not closed properly and the locking pins were not in place. The sudden loss of pressure in the hold disrupted the cabin floor, and the control cables to the tail run beneath that floor. The NTSB issued safety recommendations about the door. The French investigators later wrote that the Windsor accident “had provided evidence of the grave risks” of sudden decompression of the hold, and that “no efficacious corrective action had followed.”
Turkish Airlines Flight 981, Paris, 1974
On 3 March 1974 Turkish Airlines Flight 981, a DC-10 from Istanbul, left Paris-Orly for London. Many of the passengers had been rebooked because of a British Airways strike. About 10 minutes after take-off, near 12,000 feet, the rear cargo door on the left side opened. The cabin floor collapsed into the hold, severing the control cables, and the aircraft crashed in the Ermenonville forest. The BEA gives the toll as 346 dead.
The French Commission of Inquiry found that the door had not been properly latched and locked, and that the cockpit warning light had gone out too early because a switch was wrongly rigged. A support plate meant to stop the locking handle being forced closed on an unlocked door had not been fitted, although the aircraft’s records said it had. The person who closed the door said he did so as usual and noticed nothing wrong.
What changed. According to the FAA, after the Paris accident the FAA required cargo doors to be addressed, cabin floors to be reinforced, and venting to be improved, so that an aircraft could survive a major decompression.
American Airlines Flight 191, Chicago, 1979
On 25 May 1979 American Airlines Flight 191, a DC-10, was taking off from Chicago O’Hare when its left engine and pylon, with about three feet of the wing’s leading edge, separated and fell onto the runway. The aircraft climbed to about 300 feet, then rolled left and crashed into a trailer park near the airport. All 271 people on board and two people on the ground were killed.
As the engine tore away it damaged the left wing’s leading edge, and the left outboard slats retracted without any command from the crew. The NTSB’s probable cause was an asymmetrical stall and roll caused by the uncommanded retraction of the left outboard slats and the loss of the stall warning and slat disagreement warning (NTSB-AAR-79-17).
The pylon had failed because of damage done during maintenance. To save time when replacing bearings, American Airlines had developed a procedure that removed and refitted the engine and pylon as one unit with a forklift. The maintenance manual did not provide for this. The forklift procedure damaged the pylon’s structure. The shortcut is explained in American Airlines Flight 191: The Forklift Shortcut and the Slats.
The grounding of 1979
Inspections of other DC-10 pylons found nine more with cracked mounts. On 6 June 1979 FAA Administrator Langhorne Bond suspended the DC-10’s type certificate by emergency order, which grounded the type in the United States. The certificate was reinstated on 13 July 1979 after a review of the certification process (FAA Lessons Learned).
American 191 is also one of the main cases in our guide to plane crashes caused by maintenance errors.
United Airlines Flight 232, Sioux City, 1989
On 19 July 1989 United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10 flying from Denver to Philadelphia via Chicago with 285 passengers and 11 crew, lost its tail engine. The crew found that all hydraulic pressure and quantity gauges read zero. The DC-10’s flight controls were hydraulically powered, so the pilots had no normal way to steer.
An off-duty United DC-10 training check airman, travelling as a passenger, came to the flight deck to help. He took the throttles of the two wing engines, and the crew steered the aircraft by changing their thrust, the only means of control left. Air traffic control directed them to Sioux Gateway Airport in Sioux City, Iowa. The aircraft could not turn left easily, so the captain continued to runway 22, which was closed, rather than try for another runway. Just before touchdown the right wing dropped suddenly, and the aircraft crashed on landing. There were 111 fatalities; 185 people survived. See United Airlines Flight 232: Steering a DC-10 With the Throttles.
The NTSB traced the engine failure to a fatigue crack in the stage 1 fan disk, which grew from a metallurgical defect that United’s engine overhaul facility had not detected. The probable cause was the inadequate consideration of human factors limitations in the facility’s inspection and quality control procedures. The NTSB also wrote that the crew’s interaction “during the emergency” was “indicative of the value of cockpit resource management training.” That story is part of What changed after Tenerife.
Was the DC-10 unsafe? The record after the fixes
Boeing’s Statistical Summary, which now covers McDonnell Douglas types and leaves out sabotage, hijacking, terrorism and military action, gives these figures for the DC-10 and the later MD-11:
| Type | Hull losses | Hull losses with fatalities | Rate per million departures (fatal hull loss / all hull loss) |
|---|---|---|---|
| DC-10 / MD-10 | 28 | 12 | 1.28 / 2.98 |
| MD-11 | 11 | 6 | 1.86 / 3.41 |
| L-1011 TriStar (1959–2018 edition) | 4 | 3 | 0.56 / 0.74 |
The DC-10’s rate is higher than the L-1011’s, which our L-1011 guide discusses. Several of its worst losses, though, came from problems that were found and fixed: the cargo door, the floor’s resistance to decompression, and the maintenance practice that cracked the pylons.
The MD-11 has its own entry on this site: Swissair Flight 111, an MD-11 lost to an in-flight fire off Nova Scotia in 1998. The TSB found the fire most likely started with wire arcing above the cockpit ceiling and spread through flammable insulation. The MD-11 topic page lists it.
Table: the DC-10 accidents in this guide
| Date | Flight | What happened | Outcome | Investigating body |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Jun 1972 | American Airlines 96, Windsor | Rear cargo door opened in flight; cabin floor disrupted | No one killed | NTSB |
| 3 Mar 1974 | Turkish Airlines 981, Ermenonville | Rear cargo door opened; floor collapsed and severed controls | 346 killed | Commission of Inquiry (France) |
| 25 May 1979 | American Airlines 191, Chicago | Engine and pylon separated after maintenance damage; slats retracted | 271 on board and 2 on the ground killed | NTSB |
| 19 Jul 1989 | United Airlines 232, Sioux City | Fan disk failure; loss of all hydraulic power | 111 died, 185 survived | NTSB |
For where these accidents rank in the wider history, see Deadliest plane crashes by decade.
Watch in the library
- American Airlines Flight 191: The Forklift Shortcut and the Slats
- American Airlines Flight 191: The 1979 Crash That Grounded DC-10s
- United Airlines Flight 232: Steering a DC-10 With the Throttles
- United Airlines Flight 232: The Crash Landing at Sioux City, 1989
Every video on this subject is on the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 page.
Sources
- FAA (summarising the French Commission of Inquiry report). Lessons Learned: Turkish Airlines Flight 981, Ermenonville (TC-JAV), including the American Airlines Flight 96 Windsor accident Source
- BEA (France). Histoire de l’accident du DC-10 TC-JAV Source
- AAIB (UK) / French Commission of Inquiry. Report No 8/1976, Turkish Airlines DC-10, TC-JAV, Ermenonville Forest, France, 3 March 1974 (English edition) Read the report
- NTSB. NTSB-AAR-79-17, American Airlines DC-10-10, N110AA, Chicago O’Hare, 25 May 1979 Source
- FAA. Lessons Learned: American Airlines Flight 191 (N110AA) Source
- FAA (summarising NTSB/AAR-90/06; NTSB PDF URL not verified). Lessons Learned: United Airlines Flight 232, Sioux City (N1819U) Source
- TSB Canada. Aviation Investigation Report A98H0003, Swissair Flight 111 Read the report
- Boeing (manufacturer’s data). Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents, Worldwide Operations 1959–2025 (April 2026) Source