I was in the hospital that day watching the news on television. I was in disbelief...after all, engines don't just fall off jet airplanes.

Years later, I studied this crash for a research paper in college, and used John Nance's book "Blind Trust" for my research. I was amazed to learn that the pilots cannot see the wing engines from a DC-10 cockpit, so they had no idea that the engine had actually fallen off the plane. All they thought was that the engine had failed, but as soon as the planebegan to roll to the left, they kept fighting control in what would have been as Nance put it, "a routine engine-out procedure on take-off and fighting a roll that made no sense to them."

That's the eerie part to me...they never even knew what went wrong with the aircraft.

--Susan Kidwell-Housworth