On May 29, 1970, during a cabin-pressure test at a hangar in Long Beach, Calif., an improperly closed cargo door burst open, causing the floor of the passenger compartment holding pressurized air to crash down into the cargo compartment holding now-unpressurized air. But the only thing that proved to McDonnell Douglas was that some joker on an airport tarmac might not press the electric button long enough to finish the latching process. The solution was to put a hole in the door for a vent flap that would be closed by the same linkage that shut the cargo door. If the vent didn’t shut, the pilots would know from the air leakage that there was a problem before they got high enough for the cargo door to blow out. It was foolproof, except for one thing: A little excessive force by a baggage handler, struggling to shut the door, could make the vent flap closed even though the cargo door wasn’t fully locked. The pilots would take off without knowing there was a problem.
On June 12, 1972, with fewer than 100 hours on the DC-10, McCormick got a chance to try out his new skill on a real airplane with real passengers. He was the captain of American Airlines Flight 96, originating in Los Angeles and terminating in New York, with stops along the way. During a brief layover in Detroit, a cargo handler had trouble closing the rear cargo door. By leaning his knee on the closing lever, the handler got the cargo door to shut, but the little vent flap looked askew. He called a mechanic, and they opened and shut the door again, deciding it was good enough. A warning light in the cockpit blinked out, telling the crew the door was locked. It wasn’t.
Climbing on autopilot at an altitude of 12,000 feet with 67 people aboard, Flight 96 was near Windsor, Ontario, when things went crazy on the flight deck. The crew heard a bang from the rear of the plane, and a jolt slammed co-pilot Paige Whitney and McCormick back in their seats. The left rudder pedal jammed to the floor, and the engine throttles flew back to idle. McCormick’s right leg came up, and his knee hit him in the chest as a blast of dust, grit, and rivets blew into his face, knocking off his headset. The emergency trim handle broke off in his hands.
McCormick tried moving the control column back to level out the airplane, but the elevator controls were so damaged that he could budge the column only with great difficulty. The airplane went into a right-hand turn and began nosing into a dive that, if not stopped, would be its last. Cockpit warning lamps flared up from one side of the panel to the other, telling of an engine fire and dangerously low air speed, among many other problems. The only things McCormick and Whitney could think of as the cause were a midair collision or a bomb.
In fact, the air pressure had generated so much leverage that it sheared off metal pins and blew the cargo door out. The door broke in two, folding the top part up like the lid of a tin can and sending the bottom to crash against the tail and fall to the ground. Just as happened in the 1970 hangar test, the cabin floor near the door collapsed. The collapse jammed the control cables to the tail.
As the round cocktail bar at the rear of the airplane collapsed into the crater that appeared in the floor, flight attendant Bea Copeland fell into the pit. She looked through the hole in the fuselage at her feet to see the landscape below.
McCormick pushed the wing-engine throttles to full power, bringing the airplane out of its dive. To counteract the right-hand bank from the jammed rudder, he turned the wheel on his control column 45 degrees to the left and kept it there. Then he paused to take stock of the situation. McCormick’s simulator training had taught him to avoid sudden moves, because the tiny edge of control he still had couldn’t extract the plane out of a steep dive or turn.
He and Whitney alerted air traffic control and, afraid of a possible fire, shut down the tail engine. McCormick nudged the wing engine throttles to see if he could control the airplane in the same way he had in the simulator. It worked. The DC-10 had a fatally flawed cargo-door design, but, as McCormick knew, the layout of its engines made it unusually well-suited to steering by engine power.
In one respect, McCormick was a little better off than he had prepared for in the simulator sessions: He had some use of the elevator control, although only one side was working, and every time he used the elevator it tried to roll the airplane over. In another respect, McCormick was worse off than in his simulator training, because he had no control over the tail engine.
Turning the wheel on the control column to the left leveled the airplane’s wings but left McCormick without enough use of the ailerons to control the airplane’s path. He could probably keep the airplane under control in midair, but could he steer it back to a runway?
At this point, the procedures manual called for an emergency descent to lower altitudes, but McCormick overruled that. The passengers could survive the thin air of 12,000 feet for a few moments, but his control over the airplane wouldn’t survive any sudden moves.
Flight attendant Copeland pulled herself to safety from the collapsed floor, and McCormick, citing a “mechanical problem,” coolly informed passengers that American Airlines would provide a new plane at Detroit so their trip could continue. The passengers’ mood lifted immediately. Suddenly, they could see beyond this apparently fatal problem to life on the ground.
Working very slowly, McCormick turned the jet back to Detroit’s Wayne County Airport. In a feat of airliner piloting that has never been equaled, McCormick kept the crippled DC-10 under control to the runway threshold.
It came in hot, at 186 m.p.h., because the only way McCormick could keep the airliner from tipping forward and smashing into the ground was to maintain high power on the engines. Immediately after the plane touched down, the jammed rudder sent the airliner off the runway to the right, the nose gear threatening to break off every time the airplane slammed across a taxiway. Now, irony of ironies, the airplane was speeding toward a crash with the airport fire station. Both wing engines were at full reverse, but they weren’t going to be able to stop the aircraft in time.
Co-pilot Whitney seized the moment and steered the DC-10 to safety by cutting back on one thrust reverser. This overpowered the stuck rudder. The wheels finally came to rest.
Not one person was killed, and this aircraft would fly again, most recently for FedEx Corp. [
www.fedex.com].
McCormick asked McDonnell Douglas to “fix the damn door.”