“I hope your plane back home’s a DC10”
So… what do we know about DC10s?
The A to Z of HMHB
The A to Z of HMHB
There are 14 Half Man Half Biscuit albums, plus two roundup compilations, as well as 4 EPs and a handful of one-off songs. No 'Greatest Hits'. Indulge yourself by starting here.
In which we chose the nation's favourite Half Man Half Biscuit song. For the next four years, anyway.
Search for any lyric, reference, song title ...whatever.
The Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project website © 2007—2021 Chris Rand • All lyrics are the property of their owners
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grilly
Possibly the only thing HMHB and The bloodhound gang have in common.
‘Like a DC10, guaranteed to go down…’ from “kiss me where it smells funny”
3 August 2014
Mark C
Let’s add Not The Nine O’clock News in as well ….
I believe that Colonel Sanders can fry,
And that pigs and even DC-10s can fly
4 August 2014
OLD APPLEJACK
Be interested to know what accident the pic is from, if possible?
(sorry, got a morbid interest in the topic)
This – Chris. By the way, top tip which not many people know (and this is brilliant): if you want to find out more about any picture on the web, go to Google Images and click the little camera. Then open up the web page with your mystery image in another window, and drag the image onto the panel which appeared in your Google window. Bingo, Google shows you where else the image can be found on the web.
4 August 2014
dr desperate
It was the first major incident at LAX, @OAJ, when burst tyres caused Continental Flight 603 to Honolulu to crash on take-off, killing four people. As one of the ghouls on the Flickr page points out, the billboard in the upper left hand corner of the photo shows an identical Continental DC10 and reads “If you aren’t flying Continental to Hawaii, try and have a nice trip anyway”.
4 August 2014
EXXO
Shame not to make the most of the DC10-related research we did on the song page 4 summers ago….
• Dave Cooper
The DC10 joke is really of it’s time isn’t it?
7 June 2010
• Third rate Les
DC10s apparently have a reliability rate similar to other planes of the period, although it’s rather sobering to realise over 1,200 people have died on them.
I watched one of those ghastly Discovery programmes about one of those crashes (AA191) which was a shocking series of stupid mistakes – basically the engine sheared off from having been incompetently attached after maintenance, then sheared the hydraulics, which made the flaps retract, which meant that wing stalled. Oof.
It was in Chicago rather than the south of France, mind you. Seems an unlikely choice for the Marseilles – Birkenhead route, but you never know.
7 June 2010
• Charles Exford
@ Dave – I’d say of our generation, rather than of its time. Nearly 50% of all-time DC-10 deaths occurred in 2 crashes within 6 months in 1979, hence it’s still a fine curse for those of NB57′s age. Not many DC-10 disasters in the immediate years just before this song came out though.
@ Les – in my experience girls one meets on holiday are rarely from the same town as oneself. That’s generally thought to be the beauty of the arrangement. As it happens, though, the worst ever DC-10 crash did occur very close to a straight line between Marseilles and Speke, in woodland outside Paris.
7 June 2010
• Mark Boyle
Further to those attempting to rehabilitate DC-10s, the plane was subject to dread for more reasons than those two appalling crashes.
It was the mainstay of the Laker Airlines fleet – the first budget airline (lovingly parodied in The Guardian’s ‘If…’ cartoons as Sir Wally Wanker and his fleet of McDonnell Douglas Deathtraps). That alone should tell you all you need to know about a plane parts of which (particularly the rear door) fell off during take off and landing to the danger of other planes (it was a bit of a DC-10 that did for that Air France Concorde in 2000)
The plane suffered in the same way all three-engined airliners of the period did (e.g. the Lockheed L1011 Tristar – whose main claim to fame is the Ghosts Of Flight 401 incidents) – shoddily built with too many contracts won via bribing executives or government officials.
So good call Nigel on those bloody ‘Dick 10′s – I’d sooner fly in a Heinkel Grief or a Messerschmitt 163 Komet!
8 June 2010
• Third rate Les
I hope your plane back home’s a Messerschmitt 163 Komet indeed…
Not really a rehabilitation attempts; as you point out, compared to the phenomenal reliability of most of today’s planes, it looks shoddy indeed. And the rear door’s not the worst bit either – read up on the outward-opening luggage hatches. Jeepers….
4 August 2014
Batley’s very own… Steve malkmus
See also the song “DC-10” by the Swiss new-wave/proto-riot-grrl act from the 1970s who were originally called Kleenex but after being sued by Unilever adopted the name LiliPut.
17 October 2015
Balhamist
Can thoroughly recommend DC-10 (and much else) by Kleenex. I love the incongruity of Kimberly-Clark imagining there was a risk of people mistakenly buying a Swiss fem-punk band instead of a box of tissues.
Moving on from the DC-10, another notorious aircraft, the Lockheed F-104 aka the Widowmaker (262 lost out of 914 total), got a whole concept album to itself, Robert Calvert’s Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters. De Havilland’s beautiful but deadly Comet 1 would have been a good subject, as 3 out of 12 crashed, but I suppose they weren’t ready to put aviation disaster to music in the early 50s.
Perhaps the Boeing 737 Max deserves the DC-10/Starfighter treatment…
12 February 2020