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A comment on SpaceX wins $440M contract with NASA to develop Space Shuttle successor. Parent comment

Re:SpaceX wins $440M contract with NASA to develop Space Shu... by ams6110 on Friday August 03, 2012 @09:13PM (#4337042)
I wouldn't say the DC-10 problems of the 1970s forced McDonnell-Douglas out of the airliner business. They continued in business into the 1990s before being acquired by Boeing. The DC-10 itself was in passenger service until just a few years ago, and is still flown in freighter and military configurations.
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Re:SpaceX wins $440M contract with NASA to develop Space Shu... by breidh on Sunday August 05, 2012 @12:13AM (#4340561)
The DC-10's legacy is really one of bad timing more than anything. Its direct competitor, the L-1011 suffered a very short production run for many of the same reasons, none of which involved safety.

The 1980s ushered in a new era of twin engined widebody aircraft and the phasing out of the flight engineer. These two trijets were consequently a difficult sell, although the MD-11 was competitive with the 747 briefly in the early to mid 90s.

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Re:SpaceX wins $440M contract with NASA to develop Space Shu... by neurotech1 on Friday August 03, 2012 @09:59PM (#4337171)
The last DC-10 airliner was made in the 80s. The 747 is still in production. People aren't buying tickets to fly FedEx so the safety perception isn't as big an issue.
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Re:SpaceX wins $440M contract with NASA to develop Space Shu... by ams6110 on Friday August 03, 2012 @10:46PM (#4337298)
Perception is the key, statistically the DC-10 was not an unsafe aircraft. Its hull loss and fatality rates are not much different from the 747.
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Re:SpaceX wins $440M contract with NASA to develop Space Shu... by Tloewald on Saturday August 04, 2012 @08:32AM (#4338304)
Statistically the 747 is 6x safer than the DC10, and its figures are distorted by the Canary islands collision that had nothing to do with airworthiness.

http://www.fearofflying.com/resources/safest-airliners-and-a...

That said, today both planes are (literally) perfectly safe.

The DC-10s problems all stemmed from a bad cargo door latch design combined with insufficient redundancy in its hydraulics.

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