American Airlines flight 191 | Description & Facts

American Airlines flight 191, flight of a passenger airliner that crashed on May 25, 1979, near Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. A total of 273 people died: all 258 passengers and 13 crew members on the aircraft, as well as two individuals at the site of the crash.

American Airlines flight 191 was a three-engined McDonnell Douglas DC-10 jet bound for Los Angeles, taking off from O’Hare about 3:05 p.m. The weather was clear, and a brisk northeasterly breeze was blowing. As the airliner hurtled down the runway everything seemed normal—until an air traffic controller saw one of its engines flip back over the wing and crash to the runway.

The experienced pilots, Captain Walter Lux and First Officer James Dillard, knew it was too late to abort the take-off, but they immediately attempted the correct procedure for climbing on two engines. But the engine that had broken off had severed hydraulic lines that controlled leading-edge slats designed to lower a wing’s stall speed, ripped a section from the front of the wing, and disabled instruments that would have informed Lux of the precise situation. Hydraulic fluid drained away, wing slats retracted, and the unbalanced DC-10 cartwheeled and slammed into a building after being aloft for just 31 seconds. The impact and fire killed all aboard the plane and two workers on the ground, and it showered a nearby trailer park with burning debris.

The engine separation that caused the crash was a result of the failure of a mounting pylon that had been damaged during an engine change two months earlier. But there had been an earlier fatal accident involving a Turkish Airlines DC-10 in Paris, and two more DC-10 crashes followed—Western Airlines Flight 2605 in Mexico City and Air New Zealand Flight 901 in Antarctica. With more than 650 lives lost, all DC-10s were grounded until design faults were rectified and maintenance procedures improved.