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In 1979, an [[Air New Zealand]] DC-10-30 flew into [[Mount Erebus]] in [[Antarctica]] during a sight-seeing trip. All 257 on board [[Air New Zealand Flight 901]] were killed. The accident was caused by complex factors, centred around an un-announced flight plan change, and not related to the airworthiness of the aircraft.
Perhaps the most infamous instance of a DC-10 crash was the [[United Airlines Flight 232|Flight 232 disaster]] at [[Sioux City, Iowa|Sioux City]], USA, in 1989. After the #2 engine suffered an uncontained fan disk failure in flight, resulting in rupturing critical hydraulic lines, the crew, lead by an unrostered senior pilot flying as a passenger, performed an emergency landing by varying remaining engine power as they had no hydraulic power to the controls. Although the aircraft was completely destroyed and with the loss of many lives, over half of the passengers survived.
The Sioux City crash concerned investigators because the total loss of hydraulic pressure aboard the DC-10 was considered nearly impossible. The design, however, had lines from all three independent and redundant hydraulic systems in close proximity, directly beneath the #2 (tail) engine. Debris from the #2 disk failure penetrated all three lines resulting in loss of control to the elevators, ailerons and the rudder.
Eventually, the MD-11, a successor of the DC-10, incorporated [[Hydraulic_fuse]]s to prevent such loss of control in event of a hydraulic failure.
The [[Air France Flight 4590|Air France Concorde crash]] of 2000 was attributed to a fragment of titanium metal that fell from a DC-10 that had taken off some four minutes earlier. [[Continental Airlines]], the operator of the DC-10 in question, quickly retired its entire fleet of DC-10's immediately afterward.
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