Haunting similarities can be found between Tuesday's UPS jet crash and the deadliest aviation incident in U.S. history, an American Airlines plane crash at O'Hare Airport in 1979.
The MD-11 cargo jet and its passenger predecessor, the DC-10 passenger plane, have both faced a trail of trouble spanning decades. The three-engine jetliners have been plagued by maintenance and mechanical concerns, control issues, crashes and other accidents.
Tuesday’s MD-11 had a left engine fall to the ground after liftoff. A similar left-engine drop occurred before an American Airlines DC-10 crash at O’Hare in 1979, claiming the lives of 273 people.
The left engine on American flight 191 broke off a wing and fell to the ground just after takeoff in Chicago on May 25, 1979.
More than four decades later-the improved cargo version of that aircraft, the MD-11, with a similar left engine loss after liftoff Tuesday in Louisville.
Security video from the Muhammad Ali Airport “shows the left engine detaching from the wing during takeoff,” said National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman on the scene Wednesday. The engine was found on the airfield, Inman said.
The UPS-delivery flight to Hawaii was loaded with jet fuel, exploded and burned, killing all three crew members.
“Possibly with the engine failure, you know, a loss of thrust, but also if there was some sort of structural failure where now you have potentially fuel leaking out of the wing,” said aviation expert Erik Baker, a professor at Lewis University in southwest suburban Romeoville. “Most of the fuel is in the wing. Potentially now there's a what we call a balance problem.”
Baker says federal air safety investigators will look at maintenance leading to the Louisville crash. Authorities determined the 1979 fatal crash at O’Hare was caused by lax maintenance that allowed the left engine to break from its wing housing, and fall to the ground during the early climb out.
“It sounds very similar,” observes Baker. “This sounds like a maintenance review that we would need to look at.”
NTSB investigators say they are assembling teams to look at all possibilities...but the broken away left engine is the first focus-and the most obvious problem-because it landed on the airfield.
Between UPS and FedEx there are nearly 100 MD-11 cargo jets being flown. But with most of them thirty years old or greater, there has been a slow effort underway to retire and replace them.
“Looking at the inspection cycle, looking at the age of the aircraft, looking at the engines, that's already happening at, at all airlines” observed professor Baker. “They would not fly an aircraft that they didn't think was safe. And I think that in our country we have an amazing safety record that is being challenged right now.”
Both black box event recorders have been found in the wreckage of the UPS jet according to federal investigators. Crash experts say the likely cause of the Louisville crash will be a composite of issues-from possible maintenance problems to full fuel tanks that complicated both the weight of the aircraft and the volatility when it hit the ground.