Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "Mentour Pilot" channel.

@javianbrown8627 : People who, when challenged, fall back to citing their qualifications or experience are seldom to be trusted. A person who really does know the subject can either make his points self-evident or tell you where (eg in the subject literature) you can independently check it. Such people are very common in the teaching profession unfortunately.
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@bodymaker16 : You might find that he transferred from the parent carrier to the local subsidurary airline because the parent company didn't want any more of his risky flying.
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Colin, Exactly - people don't suddenly go stupid. You do indeed get incompetent fools rising above their level of incompetence. Often its because a) they tell lies about what has happened in previous incidents and in their CV, b) blaming subordinates, and c) they are skilled in sucking up to their superiors and telling superiors what the superiors want to hear.
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Trust me: Confirmation bias is a problem with scientists too. They invented the term. Also with engineers and technicians.
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One time, I was on a 747 flight from one end of the country to the other - about 3000 km. Boarding etc proceeded normally until the cabin crew closed the doors. Then apparently a woman seated 2 rows behind a door started making a fuss. I was seated just in front of this door, so I could hear everything that was going on. Apparently the woman had a fear of confinement. First, a hostess tried to calm her. It almost worked, but when she was assisted with her seatbelt, she went off again. Then the purser had a go at calming her down. Each time, after much calm words, he asked her if she would like to continue with the flight, she replied something like "Yes, I do, I'm sorry I'm such trouble." But, every time, when asked to put on seat belt, she went off again. After 20-30 minutes of this, the captain came down and he had a go at calming her and getting her to agree to sit down and put on her belt. He spent 15 minutes doing that. I (and I guess most other passengers) got pretty fed up - I was wishing he would just simply kick her off the plane, or give her a vallium or something. Eventually, he gave up and told the cabin crew to open the door and he told her to sit down and belt up now, or get off. He told her that if she did get off, other airlines would be notified and she would never be permitted to fly again. That made her dither at the door for another 5 minutes. Then she announced, "yes, I'm getting off" and out she went. Whereupon 2 young teenagers suddenly got up and left with her, angrily saying "Mum, mum - we are going to miss the wedding!". Then we had to wait another 30 minutes or more for her and her kid's baggage to be unloaded. All up, we were delayed about 2 hours. Mr Mentour, can you do a video on typical airline handing of people who express fear of confinement or fear of flying? I wonder who in this case paid for the wasted fuel keeping the engines idling for 2 hours just because a silly woman couldn't make up her mind.
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403: Yes, that is one of my pet hates. As an engineer, I am trained to be very wary of things of unknown consequence - they nearly always rise up to bite you.
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@mytech6779 : Note that China Airlines is not a mainland Chinese airline. It is a Taiwan airline - they have much the same standards as the USA, and conform to international norms. It looks like the captain in this case should not have been flying, but this is not by any means an isolated example of a pilot with 1000's of hours experience turns out to be a dud when something goes wrong. Simulator training can be only so good when you know perfectly well that no matter what, you ain't gonna die.
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The pilot in this case was clearly a ningnong that should not have been flying. Why was he flying? - that is the key question here, apparently not addressed by the incident investigation. In 60 years of working life, some of it in big companies, some in small, I have learn this: sometimes ningnongs somehow get employed or promoted beyond their competence, sometime well beyond. It happens. It happens because some favour got done, the guy provided a bulldust CV and they didn't check it, lots of reasons. It doesn't tell me the guy is or was mad - just incompetent, and got away with it until an incident requiring competence occurred. In whatever field we are in, we have all had incompetent teachers. If we are honest lots of us have experienced situations where we did not have the courage to report incompetence in more senior people - such reports usually aren't believed anyway, and they shoot the messenger. Having said all that, I am surprised at what the investigation report said and didn't say. I'm not a pilot, but my background is in another field (electric power generation) where mistakes can kill and/or cost a vast amount of money. I have participated in formal investigations and I have chaired formal investigations. The rule we follow is this: if an incident has occurred, the possible reasons include, and only include:- Deficiency in operating manual(s) Deficiency in training Deficiency in staff recruitment/selection Deficiency in performance monitoring Deficiency in machinery. Thus an investigation report should request the company (and manufacturer if applicable) to have corrective action along these four specific lines. It is no good just blaming the pilot and asking that he be psychiatrically checked, though that may be applicable. If just that is done, then the real problem, manuals, training, selection, monitoring, or machinery (presumably selection in this case) remains, and sooner or later another ningnong will cause another incident. I recall the accidents of the Comet 1, where at first they just blamed the pilots. Only in later investigations did it come to light that all the Comet 1 accidents were almost certainly due to faulty aircraft design and people died needlessly. This led to changes in how airliner accidents get investigated in Britain. somebody has done a wrong thing, or neglected to to do a required thing, the possible reasons include, and only include:- Deficiency in operating manual(s) I would be interested in comments from Mentour Pilot or anybody else from the airline industry on the relevance or otherwise of the above.
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At 0.43 Petter explains that aircraft accident/incident investigations are NEVER about pointing the finger of blame at someone, they are about identifying procedures and systems to reduce the probability of incidents/accidents. This is very important point - if you just blame the person who made a mistake, you have not improved safety, as sooner or later someone else will make the same mistake. Worse, finding someone to blame and sanction may make the investigator feel his job is done, and the process or system fault is left uncovered. Also, witnesses are inhibited from giving a true testimony if they figure it's all about punishing someone. Most witnesses, if they are convinced it is about improving safety, will do the right thing and be and objective and accurate. I have chaired formal incident investigations (not in the airline industry). It sometimes happens though that an incident uncovers someone who is incompetent. As far as the formal investigation is concerned, that is NOT the end of the matter. We look at the company's recruitment, promotion, check-out, and training processes to uncover why an incompetent person was employed in that job. And we share how those processes can and should be improved. But the company then has two things to do: 1) fix their deficient process; and 2) work out what to do with the chap who is incompetent. Maybe he just needs a bit more supervision or training, but sometimes no amount of oversight or training will sufficiently improve him - he's just not up to the job. The words you write in the investigation report may well have a large bearing on that. You need to be careful on what you write. It can be very difficult. In the case of this video, I feel sorry for the lady First Officer. Looks like she made a very human mistake that could have been serious.
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I initially thought that myself - tell a stewardess so she can report to the captain. But then I thought the pilots would know they had no power from that engine at the very least, and should know that no bleed air and electric power was coming from that engine. Rightly or wrongly I might think they would notice a reduction of weight on that wing. They would be extremely busy - I wouldn't want to be a back seat driver and upset their processes. My job as passenger in such a situation would be to sit quiet and let the professionals do their job.
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A factor in this is that the KLM captain had not flown for 12 weeks prior to this flight. I know from doing complex jobs under pressure myself that such a long break can impair your reaction time and decision making ability, especially as one gets older, as this chap had. If the incident had not happened, on his next flight the captain would probably got his performance back to top standard. I'm not a pilot, so I might be unaware of some factor, but in a circumstance like this, rotten visibility, language issues, wouldn't it have made sense for the KLM crew to ask the tower, or the other aircraft, to specifically confirm the runway is clear, by asking "yes or no"? Because that would depart from procedure or radio etiquette? They were fools if that was the reason. Since clearance for takeoff is critical to safety, why does it depend solely on a single voice communication? Because that's the way it has always been done? Given technology is easy, how about mandating that ATC must dial in a flight number and flick a switch to transmit clearance by radio to the aircraft, which would light a lamp or something in front of the aircrew? If you don't get a green light AND voice approval to take off, OR voice approval repeated in separate transmissions, you don't take off. That is a procedure that is both fail safe and fault tolerant.
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This sounds like a classic case, where too much automation - intended to reduce pilot workload - when it goes outside its limits, actually makes the pilot workload higher, beyond what he can do. I bet if those two galas, if they were flying an old fashioned plane with no automation, they would have landed safely, captain drunk or not. They would have done it on practiced instinct. This is a very important point, because we are constantly being told self-driving cars are possible and will be common within a few years. But the driver must maintain situation awareness and be ready to take over instantly. That is just not going to work.
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In 1977 I attended a public speaking course. We were asked to each choose a topic and speak on it for 40 minutes. I choose to speak on the Turkish Airlines crash and the DC-10. I had made slides of the Boeing door mechanism, the Lockheed door mechanism, and the DC-10 door mechanism, and the routing f control lines, which made it very clear the DC-10 design was defective, and still very much inferior even after the modifications. While I was speaking, I noticed the body language of the teacher indicating she was not happy and getting even more unhappy. This made me think I was doing something wrong, perhaps ignoring something she had taught us, or I was not speaking clearly or something, but all I could do was carry on. I was surprised at the end to be congratulated on an excellent talk. Later, I found out that the teacher had booked a holiday and was flying out 2 days later on a DC-10 - and I had considerably frightened her.
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How you tie your tie matters - especially if like me you have a large neck. A tie that looks part undone or non-symmetrical ruins the whole idea of wearing a tie. There are different sorts of knots - pick one that works for you. Uniforms with ties have other benefits. I get a different level of respect and service in shops wearing my work uniform than I do wearing my weekend clothes.
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@vk2ig : Also the metal skin of the aircraft blocks the signal, only a weal portion of it gets through the windows. That's why you can get a good signal on the ground where you intercept the horizontally directed cell tower beam, but at cruising altitude it would be more difficult. You may, however, get some signal (if you were allowed to).
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What this video tells me is that the DC-10 had a single point of failure - loss of hydraulic fluid on one side - that leads to a crash. Didn't they do an FMEA (a formal discipline standard in aircraft design, and other industries where faults can lead to deaths - Failure Mode Effects Analysis) on the hydraulic system? Ah, I recall that an FMEA was done by a contractor on the DC-10 cargo door mechanism, which predicted total loss - and Douglas just filed the report and did nothing - and hundreds of people on a Turkish Airlines flight died as a result.
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I have flown frequently on my employer's or customer's business. I often saw pilots and cabin crew going thru the same security checks, x-ray etc as I and other passengers do. I always thought it stupid and due to European Community buerocratic nonsense. After listening to Petter, I still think so. Maybe cabin crew should be screened, but not pilots. Because a pilot doesn't need a bomb or anything - he has full authority over the aircraft controls. If he wants to depressurise the aircraft to disable any crew opposition and fly it into a remote deep part of the ocean, as is suspected happened to an Indonesian airliner a couple of years ago, he can. Yes, as Petter says, a pilot might have been "got at" by a terrorist who has seized his wife and children and forced him to carry a bomb or something. That's true. By the same token, the terrorist who has seized the wife and kids might just as well say "Listen, fly this aircraft to this Congo airfield or your kids get it, slowly." Or "belly land in the Congo jungle or some such." It would be far better to instruct pilots to give some secret code gesture to security, or code word to ATC to tell them that they are under duress.
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Being an electrical power generation engineer used to mission critical systems where there are not 6 or 10 circuit breakers as in a house, but dozens of circuit breakers feeding lots of complex systems, I am surprised that this incident is even possible. I am surprised because in other industries they have a system whereby the popping of ANY circuit breaker causes a lamp to light (and sometimes a buzzer to sound). So the operators know immediately that a breaker has popped - all the have to do is find which one it is. It is common to have 2 or 3 lights, identified as Urgent, Non-Urgent, or the like. Why the heck don't they have this in airliners? Such a system is dirt cheap to implement, with entirely negligible weight penalty and a cost of 10 cents or so per breaker.
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Perhaps a pilot can tell me different, but to me this sounds really really dumb. Situation: both engines are running at normal power, normal RPM, normal EGT etc. That means the engine fuel consumption MUST be normal - that is set by the laws of physics. Isn't there fuel flow meters anyway? But, a fuel tank has gotten low much earlier than expected. The total fuel onboard has got much lower than expected. That NECESSARILY means a large fuel leak - there is no other possibility - the ONLY ways to consume fuel is burnt it in the engines or leak it out. Forget computer driven instruments, check lists that automatically pop up, etc. Basic instruments show engine normal and fuel low, so there MUST be a fuel leak. Therefore, you don't have to be a pilot with 1000's of hours, it is plain that rather than transferring fuel, you should stop any transfers that may happen automatically, until you figure out which tank is loosing the fuel. You can't train for every possible fault condition - that would require trainers better than God, and infinite time. So what you need to do is get three things in balance and each at a minimum spec:- 1. Select the right person - you wouldn't want a low IQ person to be a surgeon, nor should he be an airline pilot. 2. Provide the right documentation/manuals 3. Provide the right training. The pilots in this case were skilled - experienced and trained, and they had the manuals & check lists (but didn't look), but were too dumb to reach what seems to me a simple direct conclusion not requiring any manuals or checklists. Thus they were not the right people. I hope they lost their jobs.
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That seems to be a matter of designer choice to some extent. Many US large military aircraft, eg B-52, do not have a nose wheel, and instead have a large bogey (ie multi-wheel) system forward of the wings, and another bogey set aft of the wings. But the USAF can afford very long runways and clear zones around them. The main-wheel-under-wings+nose wheel arrangement permits a greater takeoff rotation, increasing wing angle and thus lift, and thus needs less airport land.
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My pilot experience is limited to a couple of lessons in a Cessna decades ago. Recently for my birthday my wife blew about $300 on a 737 simulator experience. The instructor talked me through landing by means of the autopilot pretty much the same as Pete showed in this video, then let me try it a second time with only a couple of reminder points. I found it surprisingly easy, though in real life I would most likely be really stressed out. One difference is that the instructor told me to use manual braking on the ground. I found that surprisingly difficult. The brakes are not as smooth as in a car and the airplane has enormous inertia. I reckon I would have made any passengers sea sick with my braking. Being rather short (160 cm) it was difficult to reach the wheels down lever. Overall, if I, a 77 year old, can learn this in one lesson, it can't be difficult at all - UNLESS something is wrong with the plane, which is likely to be the case if both pilots are gone/dead/incapacitated (think hijacker shot pilots, collision, or pilots sucked out window).
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Mr Mentour Pilot, you are funny without meaning to be. The point of this video is a) passengers informed on what they need to know, and b) ensure that they see "technical issues" in the context of being safe, rather than as an instance of equipment unreliability. Then at 11:56. you speculate that the electrical surge caused by turning the pump back on too quickly, tripping the pump circuit breaker, blew the PA circuit board out. The whole point in the engineering process of designing power wiring - basic competency if you like - and choosing the size and location of circuit breakers is to ensure that any fault causing a surge is contained in its effect to ONLY the equipment fed from the tripped circuit breaker, and does not spread to other systems. If there is an aircraft where this has not been done, then I sure don't want to fly on it. I have however been around long enough to know that the rare coincidence of two completely unrelated faults does occur.
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If I remember right, about 20 years ago a Russian aircrew took off in a T-jet (i.e., rear-engined) airliner in which the yaw damper system had been removed and not replaced, which left the aircraft directionally unstable. They got airborne and then discovered the aircraft was uncontrollable, and they hurtled around in random directions in the sky until crashing. Peter, can you look into that one?
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Petter did this video in 2017 - 5 years ago. 5 years is a long time with respect to AI progress. I wonder if Petter still has the same view today. At 10:12 cost is mentioned. Cost is ALWAYS critical in any business. There's nothing unique about the air industry in that regard. You find that sometimes robots are used because of superior performance - as in DaVinci robot surgery, but nearly always robots get used as soon as the robot is cheaper than a human. That happened in the car making industry in the 1970's as the decision making is very limited on a production line. At 9:13 Petter said there are no driverless trains. He got that wrong - the monorail commuter train (driverless) in Sydney Australia goes back at least 20 years. I remember riding on it when visiting Sydney 18 years ago. Here in Australia driverless freight trains are ho-hum now. Petter is correct in saying running a train is comparitively simple. Driving a car is very complex, but self driving cars are almost here. I should think that piloting an aircraft is somewhere in between - because airspace is simpler and more regulated than driving on roads. Those Australian self driving railway locomotives are not a new type. They are standard locomotives that have been retrofitted with a computer control system. It will happen the same way in airliners. Existing types will be retrofitted with computers and mechatronics that inferface with the control systems and autopilot just as the present pedals, control column/yoke/joystick, and switches do. Petter thinks robot pilots won't happen within his working life. He doesn't look that old, and it may well do so. Any job that involves decision making on a logical basis - as piloting is - is ripe for take-over by robots. It matters not how frequent decisions have to be made - in fact the more the quantity of decisions per minute, the more a robot can outperform a human. Job that involve creativity and lateral thinking, such as art, engineering, physics, teaching students, are not suitable for robots. In many Mentour Pilot videos, Petter has made the case that accidents have occurred because problems have caused the pilot flying to be mentally overloaded. For an Albert electronic brain, that is merely a matter of installing enough capacity, and is a problem that can be completely eliminated. Industrial psychologists believe that the average human brain can cope with three problems concurrently. Four if you are exceptional. For computers there is no limit.
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That's not actually a good question. There was never any chance of De Havilland getting it right first time. They attempted to do something they were not in the least qualified to do, and got many things in the Comet seriously wrong. The Comet 1 had lots of crashes and was finally ordered permanently grounded because it was so bad - the only Western airliner to be so ordered. Even the dreadful DC-10 was allowed to continue flying once the known design flaws were corrected. No other airliner has ever come anywhere near to the Comet's ratio of passengers killed per passenger-kilometer flown. Windows were implicated in only 2 losses. Quite apart from that, the Comet 1 was actually a quite small aircraft (only 40 passengers, but with non-luxury seating perhaps up to 80), designed according the then British concept that only rich people and captains of industry could afford to fly. Boeing realised very early that the way to go was to make very large aircraft and by this means get the cost per passenger-kilometer down so that ordinary tourists could afford to fly. So, even if De Havilland HAD got it right first time, it was a niche market machine and most airlines would have sooner or later gone for a big Boeing or Douglas anyway.
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Sounds like typical 1960's British engineering - half solve a problem (in this case window pressure load) with a vast number of bolts, instead of thinking about it and installing the window from the inside as per normal industry practice in other countries. Sounds like a classic case - a largely desk-bound chap who is a boss thought that as he was a boss, he must be smarter than the workers and knew it all. You get these types in all sorts of industries, and they cause a lot of pain with their stuff-ups.
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@cessnacitation-x Poor quality penny pinching engineering in 1950's and 1960's Britain was very well known. That's why their manufacturing lost their export markets and then their home markets, eg cars - the demise of British Leyland - their cars with crappy Lucas electrics could not compete against Japanese reliability. Another example: the loss of the British consumer electronics industry - Decca colour TV sets so bad they ended up banned in Australia due to safety concerns. Vickers railway locomotives so unreliable and subject to major catastrophic breakdowns they triggered a royal commission into railway train cancellations; the dreadful Comet 1 airliner - the only Western Airliner to be permanently banned from carrying passengers due to its many catastrophic design faults and sloppy assembly.
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As I recall, the American DC-10 landed safely after door blow-out in large part because the captain was used to Boeings and wasn't completely happy with the lower levels of control system redundancy and control line routing in the DC-10. But he realised that with one engine mounted in the vertical stabiliser, ie above the center of drag, and 2 engine under wings, ie below centre of drag, you could control the DC-10 by only manipulating the three throttles. So he practiced that in the simulator. Eg to turn left, advance thottle on the right-hand engine. To put nose down, pull throttles back on 1 & 3 and/or advance 2, and so on. When the door blew out and control via control surfaces thereby lost, he put into practice what he had tested in the simulator. The Turkish crew did not have that simulator experience. Also they were ex-military pilots and automatically followed their military orders-are-orders instinct in their old rank order (different to their civilian rank), so that no intelligent discussion of the problem was possible.
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I don't think she was on a dare. I think she was just stupid. Some people are. Some women (and it is always a woman) think they have a sovereign right to do whatever stupid thing they want. In a small shopping centre carpark where it all works well when drivers enter and exit in am anticlockwise direction, which is clearly signed, you occaisonally get some ningnong who tries to leave clockwise. It causes grid lock, because unless and until the ningnong reverses, cars within the lanes cannot back out due to more cars coming in behind. When its a man, when the other drivers or a pedestrian tell him he's trying to go the wrong way in a one-way road, invariably they wake up and reverse back into their bay and the problem is over. But several times it has been a woman and we've had to call the police - they think no one is entitled to tell them what to do and just refuse to back up. Some people are just really really dumb. About once each 2 years or so it get reported in the media that someone has stowed away in the wheel well of an airliner. My mother's third husband insisted on getting off when he saw that the airplane was being fully loaded with a person in every seat - he figured that the airplane could not safely fly with all that weight and would crash at the end of the runway. He's not the only one from what I've read.
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Surely if you have a number of instruments showing various engine parameters in front of you, you ought to know what various combinations of readings mean. What's the point of having the instruments if you don't? It seems the copilot had only a bit of a clue. The pilot in command knew nothing. So they crashed. Surely, if you are confronted with something you don't understand, then that is the point where you need to give yourself time to come to an understanding - in this case abort the takeoff, surely?? According to Wikipedia, the pilot Wheaton had previously been suspended for about 4.5 months for multiple instances of unsafe flying. Sounds like he should have been terminated.
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Whenever a government agency outsources work to a contractor to save time and money, the result is very likely to be underqualified people doing the work, as the right people will cost too much to allow the required savings.
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i have only this excellent video to go on, but it seems to me that the chap's history of depression is a red herring. The problem was pure and simple - the dumb twit took a hallucinogenic of unknown potency and without experience. He also took it at a location where magic mushrooms do not occur, so his so-called friends had probably bought it from a dealer - which means it had unknown contamination. Many years ago, I was with a community service group that, among other things, offered rehabilitation programmes for druggies. The most difficult to handle of all illicit drugs are the hallucinogens such as psylocibin and LSD. They scramble your brain, sometimes on your first dose. While the effects usually last only hours, sometimes they can last much longer, and after apparently wearing off, recur days or even months later. And when they do recur (flash back) the person's behavior can suddenly be so bizarre that nobody can understand it. I hope his so-called friends got prosecuted.
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I'm not a commercial pilot, but I am an engineer. I am surprised that the vibration indication is an uncalibrated 0 to 5 display, given that engine vibration due to a dislodged fan blade may be life threatening. In any engineering field where 1) not taking action may result in further major machinery damage, and/or not taking action may result in person injured or killed, it is well know that the relevant trouble indication shall be a) clear as to its significance, and b) have only just sufficient resolution. For fuel tank capacity, you want lots of resolution, so you can calculate remaining endurance. But for lots of things, they have only 3 possible indications, eg Normal, Abnormal - action required, Danger - take immediate action, or, as in some fields, Normal, Non-Urgent, and Urgent. An indication of 0-10 is rarely if ever used - that level of precision just gives more decision uncertainty and a longer time for the humans to comprehend. In this case, what is the difference between Vibration 4 and Vibration 5? Does 5 require immediate shutdown and 4 does not? What should the pilot do if it's 2 or 3? Take action or just note it for the engineers to look into after landing? Does vibration 5 mean the engine must be shutdown no matter what and vibration 4 means best shut it down unless the other engine has failed completely? It should clearly say so. Perhaps this is covered in training, but that was not and could not be of benefit to the poor pilots in the case of Midland Flight 92.
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I'm surprised that the cargo area smoke detection did not give an early warning, which could well have led to a much better outcome. Since the 1980's computer rooms have utilised aspirating smoke detectors (VESDA) that are so sensitive they will often detect a single cigarette in a very large room.
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Mr Mentour Pilot - you seem to have messed this one up. Where did you get these drawings from, which have a blue-print-like appearance? They cannot be genuine Douglas or NTSB drawings as they are shown with metric dimensions. I ask this because your explanation does not make any sense. As shown in your drawing at 4:47, there is NO reason why the vent torque tube should be become bent, as it has virtually no load on it - only the vent plug. And, as far as assuring C-latch safety is concerned, it would not matter if it did become bent. Note that the door mechanism went through more than one redesign. The cargo doors originally did not even have vent plugs You may have been confused with a text description of a different DC-10 door design in which the vertical jack-shaft is operated by the torque tube to the left of the vent plug (as viewed on your drawing) instead of right at the handle as shown in your drawing. In this case the strength and confinement of the torque tube is more important, but the system is still safe, because if the C-latch have not gone fully home, the vent plug will remain open not matter how much force the ground crew applies. The corporate negligence that lead to this incident and the Turkish Airlines crash is much more serious than you have presented. At the DC-10 design stage, major parts of construction were contracted to be farmed out. As part of this, contractor General Dynamics were responsible for FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis - a standard process long used in American aerospace engineering/design) but not the actual door design, which remained with Douglas. GD's FMEA on the door identified that the door design was faulty, door blow-out likely, and the result would bmodee total aircraft loss. This was sent to Douglas long before the Applegate memo in June 1972 (to the same effect) and was not acted on. Apparently it was merely filed along with all the other routine FMEA's. Later, when pressure testing Hull No. 1 on the ground, the door blew out, the floor collapsed, and controls wrecked. Even then Douglas management blamed the chap who closed the door, had repairs done, but did not evaluate the failure mode or take corrective action. When they had Hull 2 tested, its' door failed too, so Douglas added the vent plug to the design. EVEN AFTER THESE FOUR (4) CONFIRMATIONS OF A SERIOUS DESIGN FAULT, DOUGLAS STILL DID NOT EVALUATE THIS FAILURE MODE LEADING TO LOSS OF IN-FLIGHT CONTROL OR TAKE EFECTIVE CORRECTIVE ACTION!!! Between 1973 and 1977, DC-10's suffered 180 cargo door faults, though obviously most did not result in major in-flight incidents. As of 1977, Boeing airliners (much more common that DC-10) had only 17 door faults, with none causing in-flight hazard.
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Mr Mentour thinks jumbos solved an airport congestion problem. I guess he must be referring to runway timeslot allocation. At the airport near me, every time an A380 and a 747 land, the streets around are just about grid-locked for an hour. Its a real pain to spend a few hours in a cramped aircraft and then find that when you have got off and collected your baggage, and you are tired, you can't leave the airport for an hour. More flights in smaller aircraft would allow the ground flow to operate much more efficiently even with the same number or more of bums on seats per day. I don't think it is correct to say Boeing read the market and THEN designed the 747 to fill the market need. Like other Boeing aircraft, the original 747 design and engineering work was done to fill a USAF requirement, on a USAF design contract. They didn't get the production contract, but they still had a design that could be easily amended to be a civil airliner.
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