There was also Saudi Flight 162, where a tire exploded and penetrated the cabin; two people were "sucked" out of the airplane. In 1981, an Eastern L-1011 had a catastrophic #2 engine failure, and the crew had to land with half their control surfaces working (and use differential thrust). And, as you already mentioned, TWA 843.

 

Ain't that the truth! Had I had the opportunity, it would have been the L-1011....hands down!



atp

 

The Lockheed C-5 is an amazing flying machine. I loved it, and will always respect it. Lockheed was way ahead of its time in '69.

That said, having now flown the 757, 767, and 747-400, "If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going!" Nothing else compares.

 

Didn't know about the other Saudi incident. But the score is still L1011: 0 to the DC10: 2 (minimum)

Nice added details but a gear light, tire blow-out cabin penetration of debris, catastrophic failure of engine probably wouldn't be considered a system failure or engineering weakness of the airframe or controls.

Of course I forgot about the triple flame-out on a L1011 due to oil o rings being incorrectly installed on all engines. After drifting down to a fairly low altitude they got #2 started and into Miami. That doesn't count either. (Now you can tell I'm furloughed without a life...all this time lingering on this thread...)

 

TWA almost lost two for a systems type failure. One was a J Duct overheat they couldn't control and they just made it on the ground at SFO before a likely fatal fire broke out.

Another was an improper fuel line fitting (counterfeit part I believe) that caused an uncontained fuel leak on the No. 1 engine pylon. This was midway between LAX and HNL. They diverted to Hilo and landed with very little fuel remaining. I recall this one partially crew error. Had they pulled the fire pull early on (which they eventually did) they would have stopped the leak before they lost a whole lot of fuel. The leak was between the fire fuel shut off and the normal engine fuel shut off valves.

Oh, and early in the life of the fleet a flight westbound was down to minimum flight control hydraulics over ALS as I recall and diverted into LAS instead of going to LAX. D system only remaining if I recall the flight control systems correctly.

 

Well there you go, it seems nothing is immune to failure. Interesting to find out the internal stories, the failures, the "saves", the ones that don't make it to the public or even industry press. Can't say which is better or safer, even with all the actual data such as number of airframes/hours flown/cycles/failures it would be quite the task.

 

the UPS 767 has tons of room in the cockpit. for some reason there bulkhead is placed a few feet back farther than the cockpits I have seen in passenger carrying 767's.

 

It's placed further aft to allow room for the captains wallet!

 

lmao... well done.

 

My understanding is that the autopilot-disengage was too sensitive. As the crew were leaning over to try to remove the translucent button covering the bulb, Loft nudged his control yoke, which disengaged the autopilot. That sent the aircraft into a slow descent. Lockheed designed the two control yokes so that each could have different "force settings" required to disengage the autopilot. Unfortunately, Loft's was set too low. Also, Lockheed should have built-in a louder audible signal that the autopilot had disengaged. If any of those features were in place--particularly the latter--Flight 401 wouldn't have crashed. And, who can forget about the hauntings? Loft and Repo haunting L-1011s that had parts salvaged from Aircraft N310EA (the one that crashed). Loft was the pilot; Repo was the flight engineer. Loft was killed in the crash, while Repo died two days later in a hospital.