Imagine you need to get from Los Angeles to New York. To make it not so painfully long,
you choose to take American Airlines Flight 96, with stopovers in Detroit and Buffalo.
But several minutes after your plane leaves Detroit, it happens. Seemingly out of the
blue - bang! And a part of the aircraft's floor is missing right under your feet! (Whoa,
where’s my carry on bag? And,) what are the chances that you'll get out of this mess
unscathed? Well let me tell ya…
It happened on June 12, 1972. A DC-10 that belonged to American Airlines had just broken
through a thin layer of clouds over Windsor, a Canadian industrial City in the Province
of Ontario. Flight 96 was on its regular route from Los Angeles International Airport to
LaGuardia Airport in New York through Detroit and Buffalo. The large aircraft lifted off
the runway at 7.20 PM, and several minutes later, the cockpit crew relaxed - the takeoff
had gone smoothly. The morning before the tragic flight, the
captain of the plane, Bryce McCormick, had already flown the flight's first leg. That's
why First Officer Peter Paige Whitney was piloting the plane when it took off from Detroit.
Captain McCormick was an aviation veteran with more than 24,000 flight hours under his
belt. The co-pilot was also an experienced airman who had already accumulated 8,000 flight
hours. There were 56 passengers on board the plane (even though the aircraft could carry
206) and 11 crew members. All the control panel readings were normal,
so Whitney turned on the autopilot. He didn't have anything to worry about: the radar confirmed
that there was no bad weather on the route between Detroit and Buffalo. So, the crew
turned off the "No Smoking" and "Fasten Seat Belts" signs, and passengers wandered off
to the bathroom or to chat in the front lounge. Cydya Smith, the chief flight attendant on
Flight 96, left her seat as soon as she saw the signs off and went to the galley to make
coffee. And at exactly that moment, it happened. She was suddenly brought down to the floor
by a powerful explosion. Paralyzed with horror, the woman saw the galley doors bursting open,
huge chunks of ceiling panels falling on the passengers' heads, and dense white fog filling
the cabin. She must have been deafened by the explosion; she couldn't hear the panicked
screams and commotion. In the cockpit, the pilots were violently jerked backward. Captain
McCormick thought for a moment that his plane had just collided with another aircraft midair.
The cockpit was rapidly filling with dark gray dust that blinded the men and didn't
let them breathe. But the captain was wrong. The real reason
behind the catastrophe was very different but no less treacherous. Unexplainably, a
cargo door had been blown out less than 5 minutes after takeoff, and it left the plane
with a gaping hole in its side. But that wasn't the worst! When the accident happened, it
released the pressurized air in a powerful explosion, which tore out a massive floor
section right in the passenger cabin. And that's not all. The hole was right over the
gash in the hull of the plane, meaning the passengers seated next to the gap could see
the ground thousands of feet below. Hurricane force winds were sweeping through
the cabin. One of the cabin crew members, Beatrice Copeland, was trapped under the collapsed
door, unconscious. Another flight attendant was almost sucked out of the airplane and
managed to escape only thanks to her fast reaction. When the floor disappeared under
her feet, she realized that right behind her back, there was a lavatory door. She managed
to get inside and lock the heavy metal door. Passengers screamed when the plane jerked
to the right and dropped several thousand feet down. The cabin crew saw a weird looking
fog forming inside the cabin and realized it was the result of the depressurization.
With an increasing feeling of dread, they also understood that the oxygen masks weren't
going to drop from their spots. The problem was that the plane hadn't reached an altitude
of 14,000 feet (4,200 m) yet, and the masks couldn't be deployed. That's why one of the
flight attendants grabbed a walk-around bottle of oxygen and started to offer it to the passengers.
But the pilots still didn't know about the gaping hole in the cabin's floor. As soon
as the visibility became a bit better, the captain only had a couple of seconds to take
over control of the plane. The biggest problem was that the DC-10 had one peculiarity: it
didn't have a backup system that allowed for manual operation if the hydraulic system got
knocked out. At that moment, the people on board the damaged
plane still didn't know how lucky they were having Mr. McCormick as a pilot. Being curious
about some of the DC-10 features, he’d spent hours on a flight deck simulator. He’d repeatedly
tested how to save a plane if its hydraulic system failed. As a result, he learned to
do it by manipulating the engines in such a way that he could turn the plane or even
push its nose up and down. Presently, the captain discovered that while
wing engines 1 and 3 responded to his commands, he couldn’t move the controls in engine
2. But with the returned wing engine power, the captain had precious minutes to figure
out his course of action. He discovered that the aircraft couldn't bank by more than 15
degrees in either direction. Any more of an angle - and the machine would go into a spin.
That's why he decided to boost the thrust on one engine and decrease it on the other
to turn the plane and move back toward Detroit. McCormick understood that his damaged plane
would need the priority to land, and he contacted the Detroit airport control tower. "It's American
Airlines Flight 96," he said. "We have an emergency." He also warned the controller
that they would be descending very slowly and cautiously because he couldn't really
control the direction of the descent. The biggest challenge McCormick was facing
at that moment was to slow the plane down. Approaching the runway at a speed of 184 miles
per hour (300 kph) , the plane didn’t have much chance of surviving the landing. Twenty
minutes after Flight 96 left Detroit, the plane returned to the radar of the control
tower. First Officer Whitney was monitoring the rate of descent, calling out the numbers,
and his voice sounded more alarmed with every passing second. The plane was moving too fast,
and the rate was too steep. At first, they were descending at 300 feet (91 m per minute)
per minute. But as they were slowing down, the descent rate was getting higher and higher:
500 ft (152 m per minute), 700 ft (213 m per minute) , and eventually 1,500 feet (460 m)
per minute! The plane wasn't descending anymore; it was falling! The only thing McCormick could
do to save the aircraft and its valuable cargo was to speed up. As soon as he did this, the
descent rate decreased to 800 feet (244 m) per minute, but the speed skyrocketed back
to 184 miles per hour (300 kph) . When the plane touched down, it was still
moving incredibly fast. But the worst thing was that the aircraft was moving toward the
main terminal building. Something had to be done fast; otherwise, the collision couldn't
be prevented. Miraculously, Whitney managed to return the plane to the runway, with two
sets of wheels running on the runway and the other two off. The aircraft finally stopped
just 880 feet (270 m) away from the end of the runway, and the captain ordered to shut
down the engines. The cabin crew helped the passengers evacuate
with the help of emergency exits. It took a mere 30 seconds to move all 56 travelers
out of the plane. Captain McCormick and First Officer Whitney were the last to leave. All
67 people on board were alive, with only 11 not very serious injuries (9 passengers and
2 crew). The whole accident took only 30 minutes, from the moment the explosion occurred to
the miraculous landing. After they took care of the passengers, the
crew members went to look at the hole that had nearly made their plane crash. And there
it was: a large cargo door gone as if peeled away by a huge can opener. Nobody could understand
how and why it had happened at a height of 11,750 feet (3,600 m) in the air. But on the
very same day, the missing door was located in a cornfield not far from Windsor, and investigators
came to a shocking conclusion. It turned out that the door was closed when the airplane
took off, but it wasn't secured. Naturally, as the plane was ascending, the air pressure
inside was increasing, and finally, the cargo door couldn't withstand this pressure and
blew out. On top of that, do you remember the missing
floor section in the passenger cabin? Well, it wouldn't have happened if there had been
pressure relief vents in the floor. They would have allowed the air to flow through, and
it wouldn't have ripped the floor apart. It was a design fail that led to such dramatic
consequences.
What did you find the most shocking about this near-crash? Let me know down in the comments!
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