Original subtitles

At the time, it was the worst crash in aviation history.

It was just a scene of absolute, utter devastation.

In 1974, more than 300 people died

when their plane fell from the sky.

There's barely anything left here that's recognizable as being a part of an aircraft.

You couldn't walk anywhere without the danger

you were going to stand on a part of a human being.

The key to understanding the disaster

is found thousands of kilometers away.

An unusual piece of evidence that tells the troubling story

of a crash that could have been prevented.

Mayday! Mayday!

June the 12th, 1972.

One of the newest members of American Airlines Fleet

is in Detroit, Michigan.

- John. - Paige.

Sir.

Flight 96, a brand new DC-10,

is getting ready for takeoff.

Captain Bryce McCormick and Co-Pilot Paige Whitney

have been in the plane for hours.

...back there, so when we're in flight, if you can get a chance

just to look at that?

Detroit is just a stopover on a flight from LA to Buffalo

and then to New York.

- ...got there? - I do.

You ready to try one, Paige?

All right, sir.

McCormick has flown the plane out from California,

but Whitney is going to fly the next leg.

Both men want as much time at the controls as possible.

Neither one of them has more than 75 hours flying the DC-10.

Few pilots have more.

There simply aren't enough of the planes in the air.

In 1972, the DC-10 had just been introduced.

The plane is the latest advance to passenger jets.

Its style and its size set it apart from other airliners.

The McDonnell Douglas Corporation has spent

more than a billion dollars developing it.

In the late '60s, there was a race going

among the three major manufacturers of jetliners.

McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, and Lockheed

to see who could get the first jumbo out.

So they've got really busy on getting this DC-10

into production as fast as they could.

And one of the things that they could not suffer were many delays

based on some problem with the design.

American Airlines is one of the first companies to buy the plane.

Flight 96 is one of those planes.

Just the fifth DC-10 ever built.

Cydya Smith has just been trained

to be the chief flight attendant on the DC-10.

I was excited because it was one of the first Jumbos that we had.

And I was going to have the opportunity to fly number one,

which is what I always wanted to do on a big jet.

Okay, you got it?

Okay.

Hand on the wheel.

I gotcha.

V-1, rotate.

Just after seven in the evening,

Flight 96 lifts off from Detroit airport.

Just minutes after takeoff,

the plane is rising easily through 3,500 meters

over Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

I was sitting in my seat and the captain had turned off

the "Fasten Seatbelt" sign and I was making my way to the galley

and I had to go sort of downhill because we were climbing.

I had to go to the galley to turn on the coffee.

When I... When I punched the coffee

and I moved over to one side, that's when it happened.

I remember falling over because the plane was going...

Was like this, but all of a sudden, it just went like this.

I saw ceiling compartments fall,

and I saw things coming out of pockets and everything

and I thought to myself, "Oh, boy."

It felt like the last day of my life.

We've hit something. We lost an engine here.

In the cockpit, the crew is fighting for control of their jet.

The throttles, which control the three engines, have snapped to idle.

The plane loses almost all its thrust.

The huge jet begins slowing down.

The plane immediately took a huge drop.

And the next thing that happened

was I was hit in the face with a piece of the plane.

My husband was frantically trying to find a stewardess

to give me something to put pressure on my face to stop the bleeding.

Let me have it!

McCormick takes over control of the plane.

He and Whitney wrestle the jet level...

but Flight 96 has been badly damaged.

Have we got hydraulics?

No. I've got full rudder here.

The rudder on the tail which controls the direction of the jet

is jammed to the right.

That's forcing the plane to swing dramatically in that direction.

While McCormick fights to turn his damaged plane back to Detroit,

Cydya Smith is shocked to see a gaping hole in the floor of the main passenger cabin.

People were asking me, you know, what to do.

and I knew that I didn't know what to tell them.

Smith has been able to account for all of her passengers

but flight attendant Sandra McConnell is missing.

Sandra! Can you hear me?

Sandra, where are you?

And finally, I saw her come out of one of the bathrooms.

McConnell has to cross the hole in the floor to move to safety.

And almost every step she took, the floor kept collapsing.

The crew brings up power to the engines on the wings.

But the third engine on the tail stubbornly refuses to respond.

Center, this is American Airlines Flight 96. We've got an emergency.

American 9-6. Roger. Type of emergency?

We got a jammed rudder. We need to get down and make an approach.

Along with his engine and his rudder,

McCormick is also having trouble controlling the elevators on the tail of the plane.

They help him move the massive plane up and down.

They're slow to respond, but he can move them.

The situation isn't completely hopeless.

I think it's going to fly.

American 9-6, turn further right, heading will be 2-0-0.

Without complete control of the elevators

and with a rudder that's frozen to the right,

McCormick has to use his engines to turn the plane.

By increasing the thrust on one side of the plane, he can change direction.

But it won't be fast.

I have no rudder control whatsoever.

So our turns are gonna have to be very slow and cautious.

All of the passengers move as far away from the hole in the back as possible.

But apart from the cut to Loretta Kaminsky, so far,

there are no other serious injuries.

Captain! There's a hole in the back of the plane.

- A hole? - Yes, sir.

What do you want us to do?

Get everyone ready for an emergency landing.

Bryce McCormick's DC-10 is badly damaged.

The lives of everyone on board now depend entirely

on his ability to land a plane that can barely fly.

With explosive suddenness, a short flight from Detroit to Buffalo

has become the most challenging flight

of Captain Bryce McCormick's career.

He's down an engine and he can't move his rudder.

As he heads back to Detroit,

McCormick begins to slow his plane down so it can land safely.

But when he does, his plane begins falling dangerously fast.

Ideally, McCormick should be descending at 700 feet a minute.

But now he's falling more than twice that fast.

1,600 feet a minute.

What's the sink rate?

Sink rate, 1,600.

At this rate, McCormick will crash well short of the runway.

He increases power to his engines to slow his fall.

Sink rate, 700.

McCormick has slowed the plane's descent to 700 feet per minute.

But to do that, he's had to increase his forward air speed,

which means he'll be landing far faster than usual.

For the first time since the beginning of the crisis,

McCormick talks to the passengers.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.

We've had a small problem, but the plane is under control now,

and we're heading back to Detroit for an emergency landing.

Bryce McCormick was as calm

as if he were welcoming you on the plane.

As the plane nears the airport,

flight attendants asked passengers

to remove their shoes and any sharp pieces of jewelry.

They had to take off their shoes and glasses.

We collected everything in a blanket.

Less than half an hour after leaving,

the badly damaged DC-10 struggles back to the Detroit airport.

The few minutes that it took to get back to Detroit

were the longest minutes that I will ever remember spending on an airplane.

Because we were sure that we were not going to survive.

Captain Bryce McCormick now needs to give the jet

even more power to push the nose up for landing.

His plane is still drifting to the right and traveling fast.

I have no rudder to straighten it out when it hits.

The DC-10 with 67 people aboard,

roars toward the runway at almost 300 km an hour.

Brace!

The landing was the most frightening part of the entire flight.

When the plane hits the ground, it begins veering hard to the right.

Once the plane landed, it seemed like we just went on forever.

I mean, it was just forever.

One set of landing gear wheels

runs off the runway and through the grass.

After a harrowing touchdown, the plane eventually comes to a stop

just 300 meters from the end of the runway.

Okay, engines off at your discretion.

Shut 'em down.

Every woman wanted to hug him.

And, um, he was just amazing.

Because we... It was just at that moment that we all realized

that we were alive because of him.

That he literally had saved our lives.

Oh!

If you take a look at something like this

and you say, "Well, there's good flying and there's bad flying,"

this is beyond good. This is superlative.

This is using every instinct you have as an airman

and all the... all the capabilities you have

to stay calm enough to get the situation assessed.

With the plane on the ground,

the crew has its first opportunity to inspect the damage.

The captain and I walked back...

when everybody was off.

We walked back to the back

and we just looked up and saw this hole.

And it was just so weird.

There's no indication that the jet hit something, as the pilots first thought.

What has caused such damage to the airliner?

The hole was so enormous that...

if anyone had been sitting in the seats that were there,

they would have been sucked out immediately.

At that point, they still felt it might have been a bomb.

But while the incident had happened with explosive suddenness,

no indication of a bomb is found.

As investigators begin their work,

they discover that not all of the DC-10 is at the Detroit airport.

A coffin that the plane was carrying in its cargo hold

is discovered 30 km away from the Detroit airport,

near Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Investigators also find the plane's rear cargo door.

Doors are not supposed to fall off airplanes.

Especially since it was a rather new airplane,

you would not expect something like that to happen.

When they examine the cargo area of the plane,

they discover that the very design of the door makes it a potential weak spot.

Most doors on a jet open inward.

In fact, the door is slightly larger than the frame it fits into.

As the pressure builds inside a jet,

this type of plug door is actually forced into the frame of the aircraft.

The design makes the door extremely safe.

But McDonnell Douglas designed the cargo door on the DC-10 to open outwards.

That decision was made to increase the amount of storage space on the plane.

When it's closed, hooks on the DC-10's door

grab hold of a bar on the plane's door frame.

To make sure it's closed,

baggage handlers push down on a lever,

which drives locking pins through the hooks, which hold them in place.

When investigators examined the cargo area of the plane,

they don't find any structural damage around the door.

When they study the locks on the cargo door itself,

they find that the latches are not completely closed...

and the pins that are supposed to make sure the door is locked

are not in their locked position.

When we interrogated the cargo handler that closed the door,

it became immediately apparent

that he used excessive force to close the door.

And in fact, he said he had to use his knee

to get the door handle to go flush.

Investigators make a frightening discovery.

It's possible to close the lever on the outside of the door...

even if the hooks and locking pins are not in the closed position.

Paul Eddy is a journalist who investigated the history of the DC-10.

What Windsor showed is that you could actually pull the handle

in order to buckle the top fixture

so that the handle went home properly,

but the locking pins had not gone through the spools.

Engage the lever.

This means that baggage handlers can believe the door is closed...

when it's not.

Not only can the outside lever be closed without the locks being fully engaged,

there's no way for the crew of the plane to know.

The faulty locking pins will still turn off the warning light,

even though they aren't in their proper position.

The door was a ticking time bomb.

As passenger jets climb, the difference between the pressure inside the plane

and the pressure outside the plane grows.

If a door isn't properly shut, it will blow out with explosive force.

The problem on the American Airlines flight

began as the plane passed through 3,500 meters.

When the door blew,

the coffin in the cargo hold was sucked out.

When the air pressure inside the plane was released,

anything that wasn't firmly attached was pulled out of the airliner.

It's a really startling thing if you're not expecting it.

What you've got is a lot of air

stuffed inside this pressure vessel that now wants to get out.

And the bigger the airplane is, the more powerful the hurricane of air

leaving the airplane is during that period of time.

By itself, explosive decompression does not make a plane un-flyable.

So why had Captain McCormick experienced such difficulties controlling his jet?

Investigators take a closer look at the back of the plane's cabin,

and learn that the very design of the DC-10 makes it vulnerable.

When the cargo door blew off, there was so much pressure

on the floor of the cabin that it collapsed into the cargo compartment below.

When it did, the floor ripped into some of the plane's critical control systems.

When it collapsed the floor, it took the cables that controlled number two engine,

and it took most of the cables or impeded most of the cables

that had to do with the flight controls in the back.

I think it's going to fly.

It left McCormick just enough control to keep his plane level.

The remarkable flying of Bryce McCormick

had saved the lives of everyone on board Flight 96.

But there was a problem with one of the newest and most expensive planes

flying over North America.

In the Windsor incident, there was an obvious flaw.

And that's where the NTSB said, "Look,

"here is really the smoking gun, the ability to close that thing

"without having all those locks engaged.

"Let's make sure we change this system right now.

"Every DC-10 operator needs to know this."

All right, I want everything checked. I want all the bolts checked...

Chuck Miller is the head of the NTSB's Aviation Safety Bureau.

You have to check all the latches, okay? Every single latch...

It's his responsibility to point out problems

with the new DC-10 and propose solutions.

He helps write the fixes he thinks McDonnell Douglas

needs to make to keep the planes safe.

He was a very, very professional man, and he had...

His investigators had enormous respect for him.

Chuck didn't sit back in the office.

Chuck was always on the scene.

For Chuck Miller, fixing the DC-10 is a matter of professional pride.

For McDonnell Douglas, the near accident over Windsor has enormous implications.

Their billion dollar gamble came close to tumbling from the sky.

If anything else goes wrong, the company itself could be at stake.

March the third, 1974.

A perfect spring-like day in Paris.

It's been almost two years since a DC-10 came close

to crashing near Windsor, Ontario.

Now, more than 50 of the new planes are flying around the world.

One of them, Plane 29, is owned by Turkish Airlines.

Normally, the last leg of this trip from Turkey to England

wouldn't be very crowded.

But today, the DC-10 is filling up fast.

People are squeezing into seats throughout the plane.

A strike at a British airline has passengers scrambling

for any flight back to London.

Wendy Wheal is one of many last minute additions to the flight.

A model, she's returning home after a shoot in Spain.

We'd been married for 18 months and we were about to start a family.

I believe the secret of her success for modeling was...

not just that she was a very attractive girl,

um, and good model material,

but she was generally liked by all the photographers

because she had such a pleasing, lovely, light personality.

With all the new passengers boarding

the flight is a little behind schedule.

And it's not only the crew who are waiting.

At the back of the plane is baggage handler, Mohamed Mahmoudi.

With all the new passengers,

he's not sure if there are any more bags to load.

Not expecting any other luggage,

Mahmoudi locks the rear cargo door.

The DC-10 is set to go.

Just after 12:30 in the afternoon, THY Flight 981

one lifts off into the skies above Paris.

London is less than an hour away.

Flight Control, this is Tango Hotel Yankee 981.

We're at 6-0. Requesting clearance to flight level 2-3-0.

Tango-Hotel-Yankee 981, you are cleared to flight level 2-3-0.

981, roger.

As it flies away from the airport,

the DC-10 continues to gain altitude.

2,700 meters.

3,000 meters.

3,300 meters.

The huge jet shudders and banks to the left.

What happened?

- The cabin blew out. - Are you sure?

Just 16 seconds after the start of the crisis,

the crew struggles to save their crippled jet.

The nose is pitching down, the plane, picking up speed.

Bring it up!

Pull her nose up!

I can't bring it up.

She doesn't respond!

Passengers at the back of the plane witness a horrifying scene.

Two rows of seats have simply disappeared.

Through a huge hole in the floor,

passengers can see the sky over France.

7000 feet!

Hydraulics?

We've lost it!

The crew discovers that they have no hydraulic power

with which to control the plane.

Without it, they can't move their rudder or elevators.

Even without its most basic controls,

the plane begins to level out.

But it's fallen too far.

Looks like we're going to hit the ground!

Speed!

The DC-10 is traveling almost 800 km an hour.

The flight from Paris to London never even makes it to the English Channel.

Just nine minutes after taking off, Turkish Airways Flight 981

becomes the worst plane crash of all time.

In London, the flight is listed as delayed.

The news of the crash comes out slowly.

I went to the ticket office kiosk.

And I...

asked what has happened to the flight.

And instantly the look on the gentleman's face behind the counter

told me something was wrong. Instantly.

There's barely anything left here

that's recognizable as being a part of an aircraft.

I looked on the television and I just thought,

"Well, I just hope she's dead."

Because I just saw the carnage of the forest, in Senlis

and it was like looking at...

a first World War trench movie.

Flight 981, carrying 346 passengers,

virtually disintegrates on impact.

There are no survivors.

It was just a scene of absolute, utter devastation.

And the litter of...

personal possessions, electric wires, bits of metal, bits of bodies,

just strewn everywhere. I mean, you couldn't walk...

You couldn't walk anywhere without the danger you're going to stand on...

a part of a human being.

I still have nightmares about this, even though it's 33 years ago.

Investigators for the French Accident Investigation Bureau

are quickly on the scene.

My first job was to...

evaluate the scope of the wreckage

and to begin the first investigation on the spot.

At first I was unable to know what has happened.

I was just seeing that terrible crash has occurred, and...

that it will be very hard work for investigators.

Despite the enormous force of the crash, the black boxes,

made of three layers of hardened steel and insulation, survive.

Their contents could provide valuable clues about the crash.

Most speculation was that it must have been a bomb.

Because, you know, you've got a almost brand new, very powerful airplane

flying in clear blue sky,

and it gets to 12,000 feet and falls out of it.

Investigators are called to a field 15 km from the crash site.

They find a piece of fuselage and two rows of seats from the DC-10.

Somehow they fell free of the airliner

before the rest of the plane smashed into the forest.

When investigators arrive,

the bodies of the passengers who were in the seats have already been removed.

When relatives of those who died in the crash arrive in France,

they're directed to a small church in the town of Senlis.

One of the saddest sights I've ever seen

is in this church.

They laid out on tables

everything they'd found. You know, clothing...

possessions, teddy bears, rings, watches...

and then relatives who wanted to were allowed to come

and walk around these trestle tables with all this stuff like that.

They produced a little packet with my wife's wedding ring and rings, engagement ring.

It was all pretty battered up,

so you can imagine the thoughts that went through my mind.

Since the accident involves an American plane,

the NTSB's Chuck Miller joins the investigation.

For the second time in two years,

he's dealing with a problem with the DC-10.

I don't believe that Miller suspected

for one moment that the door hadn't been fixed after Windsor.

But it becomes clear that the piece of fuselage found in France

is in fact the plane's rear cargo door.

It seems like a repeat of the Windsor accident.

Miller is left with a haunting question.

Why hadn't the problem been fixed?

When he saw the door,

of course he saw that the... it hadn't been done.

The fix hadn't been made.

And that's when I think his anger

became very, very strong indeed.

Miller takes an unusual step.

Although the official investigation is just beginning,

he gives journalist Paul Eddy an important tip.

I said, "Have you got any ideas?

"What made the door come off?"

He said, "Yeah. If I were you, I'd go and look at a place called Windsor, Ontario."

Hello, I'm Chuck Miller.

Miller shares his suspicions with the French investigators.

Could you please pass these around?

These were taken on June 12th, 1972,

right after the incident.

We have asked for the report on the Windsor accident

and our American colleagues, were also volunteers

to give us a lot of details.

Now we had an American Airlines flight

from Detroit to Buffalo have its cargo door blow off.

And he has been very frank,

and explained what he was thinking of the Windsor accident.

After all the work done during the American Airlines investigation,

had something been overlooked?

Was there another problem with McDonnell Douglas' enormous plane?

With the information from Chuck Miller,

French investigators take a closer look at the plane's cargo door.

They make a shocking discovery.

There is no new problem.

It's just like the American Airlines case all over again.

The latches that are supposed to hold the cargo door closed aren't locked.

And since two rows of seats were sucked out of the DC-10 over Paris,

it's clear that the floor on the plane collapsed, just as it had in Windsor.

It looks like we're going to hit the ground!

Bring it up!

I can't bring it up! She doesn't respond!

In fact, when investigators listen to the cockpit voice recorder...

7,000 feet!

they find that the Turkish flight crew had even less control of their plane

than the crew of American Airlines Flight 96.

We need to get down and make an approach.

I think it's going to fly.

Over Windsor, Bryce McCormick

was able to recover his plane and land it.

But in Paris, all the hydraulic systems were destroyed.

Hydraulics?

We've lost it!

The hydraulic fluid helps crews move the rudder and elevators on the tail.

Not being able to control them meant the crew couldn't keep their plane in the sky.

The basic problem was the Paris flight was much heavier

in terms of the number of people on board.

The floor, when it collapsed, collapsed with such a tremendous amount of pressure

that it literally severed all the cables and controls at the back.

They had no hope after that point.

Do you and each of you solemnly swear that the testimony you're about to...

Shortly after the crash of Turkish Airlines Flight 981,

Chuck Miller is back in the United States.

Our first witness this morning is Mister C.O. Miller,

Director of the Bureau of Aviation Safety

of the NTSB.

This time, he's facing questions from American senators.

Or potentially catastrophic design defense.

A special hearing begins to find out how a problem

that was identified in 1972 could bring another plane down two years later.

And of course, our understanding up to this time, they all had been.

What you've got to now discover is,

why wasn't that door fixed?

Why would a major, venerable,

mighty, American corporation...

deliberately do something like this?

So...

Less than a month after the near-crash over Windsor,

the NTSB had made two very specific recommendations.

Miller and his investigators recommended that a change be made

to the locking mechanism.

Engage the lever.

They wanted to make sure that it was physically impossible

for baggage handlers to close the lever

without the locking pins being in place.

They also suggested that vents be put into the floors of all DC-10s.

This would rapidly allow the pressurized cabin air

to equalize without collapsing the floor.

But in the two years since the accident,

neither one of these recommendations was implemented.

There is a fundamental problem at the heart of aviation safety

and there has been in the United States for a very long time.

And that is... that it's the job of the NTSB

to discover what's happened...

and to come up with recommendations

as to how to prevent it happening again.

But it has absolutely no authority to implement them.

The NTSB does not have regulatory authority.

They have to turn to the FAA as they did,

and say, "We want these things done."

And that's where the system went wrong.

If the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration,

issues an Airworthiness Directive,

planes are pulled out of service until the proper fix is made.

But as serious as the problems on the DC-10 were,

no Airworthiness Directive was ever issued.

A so-called gentleman's agreement

between the head of the FAA

and the head of McDonnell Douglas stopped it from happening.

The gentleman's agreement is the root cause of Paris.

There is no question that if an Airworthiness Directive had been issued

as it should have been, after Windsor,

Paris would not have happened.

It was an entirely avoidable accident.

McDonnell Douglas assured the FAA that it would fix the problem voluntarily.

An Airworthiness Directive would cast a shadow on the still fledgling DC-10.

The last thing in the world you want

is for the public or any of the airlines

who are going to be operating these airplanes

to think, "Uh-oh, maybe there's some flaws in this bird."

And so an Airworthiness Directive,

especially one that requires you to go back and re-engineer something,

is a really horrific thought for a manufacturer.

McDonnell Douglas did make changes to the way the cargo door was built.

A peep hole was cut in the bottom of the door

so baggage handlers could see if the locking pins had engaged.

Several warning signs were also attached to the plane's door.

The company also made other changes to the DC-10.

These included increasing the length of the locking pins

and attaching a plate to the inside of the door.

This plate would make it physically impossible

to push down the lever if the door wasn't properly locked.

But each of the proposed fixes had its own problem.

Many baggage handlers didn't know

what the small window in the door was for.

And the baggage handler in Paris read and spoke three languages...

but not English,

the only language in which the warning signs were written.

The support plate that was supposed to be installed in the door

was never attached to the jet that crashed in Paris.

Papers confirming the completion

of the work are also uncovered.

But no matter what the paper trail says, the fix was never made.

Again, the problem is you don't have an independent FAA inspector

coming along to look and see it

and then put his stamp on it.

because it wasn't an Airworthiness Directive.

In the years following the Turkish Airlines crash,

an enormous flurry of lawsuits are filed in California.

The tragic story of the DC-10

has one more surprise in store.

It's 1974...

and an unprecedented series of lawsuits

are being filed against McDonnell Douglas.

The families of those who died near Paris want someone held responsible.

As time went by, I learned more and more about what actually happened

and realized that it was not an accident, as we would call an accident.

It was totally avoidable.

My goal was to expose these people.

In the weeks leading up to the trial,

lawyers who are involved in the case have access

to the entire history of the DC-10's development.

They're not the only ones who pore through the evidence.

So does journalist Paul Eddy.

We were determined to get to those documents and that testimony.

Somebody gave us a key to the depository where the documents were.

And so at night we would go in...

and then had a huge accumulated pile of documents to go through

in order to find out what they've been up to.

Reading through the immense pile of paper,

Eddy makes an incredible discovery.

A memo written by Dan Applegate,

the director of product engineering for Convair,

the company who'd built the cargo door for McDonnell Douglas.

I think the point where we knew we got them

was the Applegate memorandum

that specifically pre-warned this would happen.

The memo is a damning indictment of the cargo doors

that were being made for the DC-10

and the lack of venting in the cabin floors.

It warns that it's only a matter of time

before there's a major disaster involving the doors.

"The airplane demonstrated an inherent susceptibility...

"to catastrophic failure

"when exposed to explosive decompression.

"of the cargo compartment."

The memo, written just weeks after the near disaster in Windsor,

recommends that immediate changes be made to the DC-10 cargo door.

You know you've got them. You know you've got them, because, you know they knew.

During the court case, another chilling find is made.

Not only did McDonnell Douglas know about the problem after Windsor,

they knew during the development of the DC-10.

Four years before the Paris crash,

two years before Windsor,

the cargo door failed during a pressure test.

The company knew there was a problem

but the fundamental design of the door stayed the same.

I could not believe a large corporation...

McDonnel Douglas, at the time could do such a thing.

Could risk our lives, ordinary people's lives...

for the sake of money.

Well, in aviation, it's called tombstone technology.

In other words, we always have the balance of money.

And unfortunately, over the years,

that has been true more times than not

that we have had to wait until we had enough people die in an accident to say,

"You know, we really are going to have to spend the money over here."

The Applegate memo and other information that comes out during the court case

leads to one of the biggest settlements in the history of aviation.

McDonnell Douglas paid over 80 million dollars in damages.

After the Paris crash, foolproof changes

were finally made to the DC-10 cargo door.

And this time, nothing was left to chance.

The FAA issued an Airworthiness Directive

that ensured the doors would never again open in midair.

And it worked.

After Paris, there wasn't another serious incident

involving the cargo doors on a DC-10.

But the plane's history

and an intensely competitive industry did have an impact.

McDonnell Douglas sold far fewer commercial DC-10s

than it had once hoped for.

Most of the pilots that I know who have flown the DC-10

over the years really love the old bird.

She's probably a little more clunky than the 747

in terms of her heaviness of flight controls.

But it's still a lovely bird to fly.

That's fine, but you can't disassociate

either the airplane or the company

from the awful reputation that the crash left.

Eventually, McDonnell Douglas itself disappears.

The company was bought by Boeing in 1996.

In the forest outside Paris, a monument now stands

honoring those who were killed on Flight 981.

A permanent reminder

of one of the most disturbing crashes in the history of aviation.

You never forget.

And I've gone on to lead, uh...

my life for 30 odd years.

But I've never forgotten.

People, to this day,

think it was an accident...

and it wasn't.