Ermenonville, Sunday 3 March 1974

Some records are best not broken. Turkish Airlines flight 981 broke one by becoming the deadliest air crash to date, the date being Sunday, 3 March 1974. I can remember it, and it shocked me. It shocked the world. Paris Match asked whether the day had come to say “no” to jumbo jets. Their by-line is Le poids des mots, le choque des photos—the weight of the words, the shock of the pictures: they actually showed French firemen gruesomely collecting body parts. But, no, there would be no “no” to jumbos.

Image: two weeks after the crash, Paris Match asked “Is it necessary to eschew giant aircraft? They said, ‘A jumbo jet crashing with 450 people on board will be dreadful’.”

Ermenonville would subsequently be beaten by Tenerife, by 9/11, and by a couple of other crashes in the 80s and 90s, but what marks this disaster out from the others is the question of where the fault lay. No air crash had less pilot error contributing to it than the Turkish DC-10.

Tenerife was due to a mix of terrorism, air traffic control, weather, and pilot rest-time legislation; 9/11 was deliberate (even if controversy reigns over precisely whose deliberate act it was); the Charkhi Dadri collision was a mix-up of pilots and ATC; JAL 123 was attributed to a faulty repair; but Ermenonville was due to a faulty build: the aircraft was designed wrong.

There are nowadays no DC-10s still flying in public service, but they were a great advance in technology when they appeared in 1970 and entered service a year later, recognisable to the travelling public with their characteristic tail engine (similar to the contemporaneous Lockheed 1011, or Tristar), but never lovingly embraced by travellers, given the events of 50 years ago. They could carry as many passengers as a 747 Jumbo, but could land on a shorter runway, making them that bit more versatile. Planes have crashed with hundreds of people aboard, from which every last one of them has walked away, or in which very few have perished. The survival rate from the Habsheim air show disaster was astonishing: the three dead were a disabled boy unable to move, a small girl and a woman who bravely re-entered the wreckage to save them. The Saudi aircraft fire killed over 300 as the plane sat for half an hour being consumed by an interior fire on the runway after a successful landing in Riyadh. There is no inevitability to a plane crash. But some of them are unavoidable.

The DC-10’s doors opened inward, which was a great safety feature since the pressurisation inside the cabin pushed the doors against the frame, thus sealing the doorway completely. However, in order to maximise storage space in the cargo hold beneath the main passenger cabin, those particular doors opened outward. Without going into details, the closure mechanism for the cargo doors was inadequate: they could be forced shut without actually engaging the locks, but far enough to extinguish the cockpit warning “CARGO DOOR OPEN”.

The aircraft’s manufacturer knew of the problem. A forward cargo door had blown open when testing the DC-10 in a wind tunnel, causing massive decompression and a floor collapse in the cabin. And, in 1972, one year after entering service, an American Airlines DC-10 had suffered exactly the same problem as would occur to the Turkish airliner in 1974.

One of the problems with the ship Titanic was the shortage of lifeboats. There were not enough for all of the people on the ship. This was not perceived as a design fault (in fact Titanic had six lifeboats more than it required to have). The reason behind that was that previous incidents involving high-capacity passenger ships had shown that there was a good likelihood of the stricken vessel staying afloat for up to three days, which would be ample time in which to ferry the passengers off to rescue vessels. Hence the relatively small number of boats. No one bargained on a ship that size that would stay afloat for only two hours. “It’s made of iron, Rose—it will sink!”

American flight 96 had resulted in no fatalities, and what that fact instilled in the minds of the management at McDonnell-Douglas was a lack of urgency: moreover, they successfully communicated this to the Federal Aviation Authority in Washington, D.C. On flight 96, the rear cargo door of the DC-10 had flown open, having been inadequately closed, decompressing the cargo space and causing a loss of control to the tail no. 2 engine and the surrounding steering mechanisms. However, the crew successfully landed the aircraft with no loss of life. The skill of the pilots in that incident caused McDonnell-Douglas to assume an attitude of complacency as to the seriousness of the problem: the constructor was able to persuade its friends at the FAA not to issue an airworthiness directive, which would have grounded the entire type and caused huge embarrassment to the maker.

Instead, McDonnell-Douglas undertook to issue service bulletins to cover all the items mentioned in the incident’s final report. They downgraded the gravity of the situation. There were three bulletins:

* windows to be inserted into the cargo door so ground crew could verify from the outside that the door was properly locked;

* supports to be incorporated to prevent the connecting bar between two parts of the locking mechanism from bending under pressure, thus permitting a false “locked” signal;

* relief vents to be incorporated so that any decompression of the cargo hold would also decompress the passenger cabin (triggering oxygen masks if it happened over 10,000 feet) and thus avoid deformation of the separating floor between the upper and lower parts of the aircraft.

On flight 96, the floor had indeed been sucked down when the cargo area decompressed, but that aircraft’s layout included a cocktail bar arrangement at the rear of the aircraft cabin, which thus contained no actual passenger seating. The aircraft was carrying very few passengers that day and, despite being seriously hindered, the pilots still achieved a safe landing and evacuation.

McDonnell Douglas then went one further. After downgrading the severity of the issue, they then lied about putting it right.

With a flight crew totalling 11 and 167 pax, the 1974 Turkish flight had started in Istanbul and had a stop-over at Paris Orly. Fifty passengers left the flight there, but a huge number joined it, 216, because industrial action had cancelled connections on BEA and Air France up to London. People would be glad they were at last getting home, some having travelled to watch an international rugby game in Paris on the Saturday, since the new working week would be starting the next day—a day that would never come for them.

The flight was packed, and there was no rear bar area in this aircraft’s configuration. When the same door as had blown out in the AA96 incident blew out on THY981 at 12,000 feet over the town of Ermenonville, six passengers were immediately sucked out, still strapped to their seats. They would later be found in a field along with half of the cargo door. Because the mechanisms for the no. 2 engine and tail controls all ran through the space between the upper passenger cabin and lower cargo hold, the decompression severed them and the rudder was wrenched so as to propel the aircraft into a left bank. All control of the aircraft was immediately lost and, after continuing on a four-degree glide slope for around 15 kilometres, it struck tree tops in the Forest of Ermenonville, impacting at nearly 800 kilometres per hour. The aircraft immediately splintered into tens of thousands of pieces. So brutal was the sheer force of the impact that no fire broke out, the fuel being instantaneously atomised to nothing. Of the 346 souls on board, none survived.

McDonnell-Douglas had issued three service bulletins, which it expressly (and erroneously) confirmed had all been implemented on the aircraft in question. It wasn’t true: only one had in fact been carried out. They used their influence with the FAA to secure their financial health, and they lied on the airworthiness paperwork for the airplane in question. The only measure that had been implemented was insertion of the window into the door, and the ground crew operative who had closed the door on that day spoke only French. He had not been trained on the closure procedure, so he had not understood what he was supposed to see through this window that had been installed. The notice appended to the fuselage explaining the importance of ensuring the door’s closure was written in English and Turkish. His Turkish Airlines colleague was off duty that day.

In terms of corporate mentality, Ermenonville bears a similarity to the Ford Pinto and GM truck scandals. The cargo door had already failed in trials and on American Airways flight 96. It took the loss of 346 lives to finally put it right: to lock the door.

When Paris Match posed that question back in the March of 1974, “Is it time to say no to jumbos?” they reflected the fears fliers then had of tumbling from the skies. But with the climate emergency that is now upon us, the question I want to ask today, 50 years on from THY981, is whether it isn’t time to say no to jets altogether.

The great benefit of the jet aircraft is its ability to