#is there a thriving aviation fandom on tumblr

[townofcrosshollow]

My Official Worst Plane List

The only good thing about being a born again plane autistic is that I am now able to gossip about which planes suck the most.

The Comet 1

My least-least favourite of the worst, the de Havilland Comet 1, the first ever jet airliner, first flown all the way back in 1949. Say goodbye to noisy, jerky, uncomfortable piston propellor planes and say hello to falling out of the fucking sky because the Comet was involved in 3 fatal crashes within its first year of operation.

Two of those three crashes were attributed to breakup due to structural failure- see, jets are more efficient at higher altitudes and thus need pressurized fuselages to keep you from suffocating. But it puts a big load on the aircraft's skin to pressurize and then unpressurize it, and it turns out that the engineers at de Havilland just straight up didn't make the plane strong enough. Whoops.

The Concorde

I know this is gonna be controversial in the Plane Fandom but fuck Concorde. Awful plane. It was the first ever, and notably only ever, supersonic passenger plane, introduced in 1969. It was loud, could barely fly any routes due to noise pollution, and its economics were terrible- because it guzzled fuel so badly, tickets were unhinged levels of expensive. And it broke down so frequently that operators had to have a second Concorde on standby in case the first one broke.

The beginning of the end for Concorde came during a takeoff from Charles de Gaulle in 2000, when a piece of debris pierced the tire of a Concorde and led to a fuel tank rupture, massive fire, loss of control, and crash into a hotel. The planes were briefly grounded, and within only a few years, retired. Good riddance. I don't wanna see that thing's stupid nose ever again.

The DC-10

Not as ugly (or groundbreaking) as the previous two, my least favourite plane comes from one of the worst aircraft manufacturers of all time, McDonnel Douglas (who, coincidentally, merged with Boeing. Shocker!). The DC-10 is honestly pretty cool looking and had a long and successful run, but its legacy is tarnished by the series of accidents caused by a poorly designed rear cargo door.

When this door wasn't properly closed, it could fly open during flight, and insufficient ventilation between the cargo compartment and cabin meant that the floor would collapse. Both McDonnell Douglas and the FAA were made aware of this fact, but in order to stop a costly grounding, they agreed not to issue any airworthiness directives that would mandate immediate changes to the whole fleet worldwide. They basically stuck a bandaid on an open cargo door.

As a result of this lack of action, and MD's aggressive marketing of the DC-10 to Turkish Airlines before revoking all maintenance help and leaving the inexperienced airline struggling, a Turkish DC-10 crashed and 346 people died. It was the second-worst single airplane accident in history, only after Japan Airlines 123, which literally lost the entire tail in flight.

But on a more positive note, some DC-10s have been converted to air tankers and put out forest fires, which looks sick as fuck: