USA Today has an article about one of my favorite aircrafts, the DC-10. It appears the last DC-10 flight in US commercial service will take place in early January. At that point, the only DC-10s will be in freight or military service, or with smaller international airlines.
The DC-10 was designed and built in Long Beach, California, by Douglas Aircraft Company, now the Long Beach Division of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Production was started in January 1968 and first deliveries were in 1971. In a production run extending to 1989, 386 commercial DC-10s were delivered, plus 60 KC-10 tanker/cargo models built for the U.S. Air Force. It was introduced about the same time as the Boeing 747 and the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar (which was manufactured in Burbank and Palmdale). These were the first wide-body two-aisle jets. The 747 had the edge on the number of passengers; the DC-10 had the edge on fuel efficiency and noise. The L-1011 had the safety edge.
Although the DC-10 is no longer built, Boeing still does MD-10 conversions that make the plane a freight operations with a cockpit layout similar to the MD-11, which was a successor aircraft, also no longer manufactured.
I have fond memories of the DC-10 from when United was flying the aircraft in regular service between LAX and IAD (Washington DC). I always found it a comfortable aircraft with loads of onboard storage. United had a few DC-10s they had acquired from American; you could tell those because the overheads were differently configured. You would never see a 747 in service between LA and DC, so a DC-10 was wonderful (you might get an L-1011, but those were only on TWA).
This is also a reminder of what was the aircraft industry in Southern California. Both the L-1011 and the DC-10 were manufactured in Southern California. They provided loads of high-paying manufacturing blue-collar jobs, just like the GM Camero plant in Panorama City. When production ended, the plants were gone, and the good blue collar jobs were gone. They haven’t returned, although there is still manufacturing in the area. With the death of the 717, Douglas Aircraft (or what was Douglas) in Long Beach is just about gone as well.
Here’s to the last of the tri-jets.
