I was doing a Google search of “chicago plane crash” for the Midway accident yesterday where the Southwest plane slid off the runway which brought me to this site instead:
American DC-10 Crashes at O’Hare Killing 273
I posted my personal experience with the crash on the responses:
As an eighth grader, I had just come home from Plum Grove Junior High when I saw a large plume of smoke in the distance. I remember Walter Jacobson of CBS talking about how the thrust of the engine that stayed on the plane counteracting the lighter weight of the side that had lost the engine – causing the rollover. We went to Taiwan that summer, and on our stop back from Seattle to Chicago, we took a DC-10 back home since they weren’t grounded anymore. I think McDonnell Douglas never did recover from that accident. I’m enthralled now by the engineering disasters on the History Channel’s Modern Marvels, and this is a case where the plane was built well, but the maintenance crew by using a shortcut, caused a major disaster. I read that a big problem was that when the crew went to lunch, the hydraulics holding the engine and pylon assembly actually sagged a bit, causing the stress that eventually led to the fatal crash of 1979.