Presented to the Club on Monday evening, Dec. 4, 2017 by William P. Densmore
One day in March, 1981, a short obituary appeared in the
Chicago Tribune about a fatal choice — the suicide of Earl Russell Marshall, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It mentioned that Mr. Marshall was a supervisor at the Tulsa maintenance base of American Airlines.
Colleagues of Mr. Marshall at American Airlines had also made a fatal choice two years earlier, a choice primarily responsible for the deaths of 271 people.
Those 271 people had been passengers May 25, 1979 on an American DC-10 jumbo jet which dropped an engine and
crashed on takeoff from Chicago O’Hare International Airport. The engine had been worked on at American’s Tulsa maintenance two months earlier. The day after his death, Mr. Marshall, then 47, was to have been questioned by lawyers for the aircraft maker.
The airline said Marshall had no involvement with the accident aircraft. The Tulsa World newspaper
talked to Mr. Marshall’s widow in 2004, 25 years later. “He had very bad guilt feelings, and the accident gave him something to attach his feelings to,” Marilyn Marshall to the daily. ‘He was a casualty of that crash.”
DC-10 maker McDonnell Douglas Corp. and American
sued each other after the crash and the
National Transportation Safety Board investigated. The companies and the government learned that a maintenance work shift ended on one of the nights the DC-10 was in Tulsa and the crew left a 15,300-pound wing engine and attached pylon hanging overnight partially disconnected from the wing – and supported only by the forklift’s hydraulics. The result – a hidden, 13-inch crack formed in one of the three attachments of the engine to the wing.