So fiction gives you a lot of room to make believable, educated reasons for your story to work. You don’t have to have cargo wizards and fuel warlocks like I mentioned earlier.
Boeing has kits for the 737-200 and 727 to operate from unpaved surfaces. It’s entirely plausible that Douglas Co. would have had a team investigating suitability of the DC-10 or MD-11 for similar roles before ultimately abandoning the project. (As far as I know this never actually occurred, but fiction gives you room to make your alternate timeline.).
Last edited by Elevation; 07-26-2018 at 09:21 PM.
Reason: Wrote too much.