Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: The Flight 981 Disaster
Subtitle: Tragedy, Treachery, and the Pursuit of Truth
Author: Samme Chittum
Narrator: Keith Sellon-Wright
Format: Unabridged
Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-03-17
Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC
Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: History, 20th Century
Publisher's Summary:
On June 12, 1972, a powerful explosion rocked American Airlines Flight 96 a mere five minutes after its takeoff from Detroit. The explosion ripped a gaping hole in the bottom of the aircraft and jammed the hydraulic controls. Miraculously, despite the damage and ensuing chaos, the pilots were able to land the plane safely.
Less than two years later, on March 3, 1974, a sudden, forceful blowout tore through Turk Hava Yollari (THY) Flight 981 from Paris to London. THY Flight 981 was not as lucky as Flight 96: it crashed in a forest in France, and none of the 346 people onboard survived.
What caused the mysterious explosions? Were they linked? Could they have been prevented? This book addresses those questions and more, offering a fascinating look at the two dramatic aviation disasters.
Members Reviews:
"A plane put together by committee..."
On Sunday, March 3, 1974, Turkish Airlines flight #981, departing Paris/Orly Airport on a routine flight to London/Heathrow, fell from the sky soon after takeoff. The plane crashed into a forest called Ermenonville and 346 "souls" - crew and passengers - lay scattered in tiny pieces, amid the detritus of the DC10 which had carried them to their deaths. That plane had crashed because a cargo door had come loose during the take-off, causing an explosive decompression, which collapsed part of the floor, severing most of the hydraulics needed in flying the plane. In her book, "The Flight 981 Disaster: Tragedy, Treachery, and the Pursuit of Truth", author Samme Chittum tells why those poor souls needn't have died that day.
The same accident had happened on an American Airlines DC10 in 1972, on a flight which had just taken off from Detroit , heading to Buffalo. The pilots felt a bang, part of the passenger floor collapsed, severing the hydraulics, and the plane was almost uncontrollable. Luckily, the flight's captain, wary about the DC10, had taken extra instructions in how to fly an uncontrolled plane, and he and the copilot, were able to steer the plane and make a controlled crash landing at Detroit. No one was killed that day, but the FAA looked at what had caused the incident. They found that the rear cargo door was not always locking and there was very little way to determine from the outside if the baggage handlers had the door latch in place. The FAA made several suggestions to the manufacturer of the plane - McDonnell Douglas - as well as to the carriers who already had bought the plane, as to how to fix the latch mechanism. Because of...politics, or corporate worry about the costs of the upgrades, or sheer incompetence, many of the "suggestions" were not implemented on some of the planes. On plane #29, which crashed in March, 1974, the lack of fixing the problems with the door and the vents resulted in the deaths of 346 people.
In addition to looking at the two crashes attributable to the cargo door problems, Chittum writes about two other fatal crashes of DC10's. One was in Chicago in 1979 - Memorial Day weekend - when American #191, departing on a routine flight to Los Angeles, crashed into a field at the airport, killing all 271 passengers and crew members, plus two people on the ground. The problem was not the cargo door; rather, the left wing engine fell off during take off, sending the plane into the field.
