Comment Re:The DC-10 was killed by poor management. (Score 2) 112
Good plane, killed by the same stupid management that killed US Auto industry too. At least in the case of US auto they were actively aided and abetted by the unions. But McDonnel-Douglas was just self inflicted wounds. The third player Lockheed (L-1011 tristar) survived on military cargo plane contracts.
I had a brief internship at Lockheed where I worked under one of the managers who worked on the L-1011 project. According to him, both the DC-10 and L-1011 were good planes (though of course the L-1011 was better). The problem was that when both companies had decided to build the planes, they'd done their market analysis based on the assumption that their plane was the only one servicing the widebody-but-smaller-than-747 market. i.e. $x profit per plane * number of planes sold > design costs.
When both planes rolled out almost simultaneously, they split the market in half. Both manufacturer ended up selling about half as many planes as expected, and neither made much if any money. That's why Lockheed abandoned the commercial aircraft industry after a long and storied history - a decision by upper management that military contracts which were guaranteed to pay were safer than a commercial venture which went south not because of anything under their control, but because a competitor rolled out an almost-identical plane at the same time.