engineering

Northwest Airlines Flight 710

Northwest Airlines Flight 710 is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Northwest Airlines Flight 710 rather than just read about it. In short: Northwest Airlines Flight 710 was a scheduled flight between Minneapolis, Minnesota and Miami, Florida, with a stop in Chicago. On March 17, 1960, the six-month-old Lockheed L-188 Electra operating the flight broke up in midair in southern Indiana, near Cannelton, killing all 63 people on board.

Key takeaways

Northwest Airlines Flight 710 belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Northwest Airlines Flight 710 to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Northwest Airlines Flight 710 from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Northwest Airlines Flight 710 was a scheduled flight between Minneapolis, Minnesota and Miami, Florida, with a stop in Chicago. On March 17, 1960, the six-month-old Lockheed L-188 Electra operating the flight broke up in midair in southern Indiana, near Cannelton, killing all 63 people on board. After unexpectedly encountering clear-air turbulence at 18,000 feet (5,500 m), the aircraft's right wing and part of the left wing separated, causing the fuselage to plummet and impact the ground at a nearly 90-degree angle, leaving a deep crater. Portions of the wings landed up to four miles (six kilometers) away. The in-flight breakup of the Electra closely resembled the September 1959 crash of Braniff International Airways Flight 542 near Buffalo, Texas, which killed all 34 occupants. That flight was also operated by a nearly new Electra. In that crash, the left wing separated and landed about one mile (two kilometers) from the main wreckage. Investigators were unable to determine the cause at the time, but the similarities between the two crashes led the Federal Aviation Agency to place flight restrictions on the Electra pending identification of the cause, and to order Lockheed to reevaluate the aircraft's structural integrity and demonstrate its airworthiness. The subsequent investigation, involving more than 250 engineers and technicians, determined that when an Electra with damage to the mounting structures of one of its outboard engines operated at high speeds or in turbulence, a destructive phenomenon called whirl mode wing flutter could occur, leading to wing failure. After identifying the cause of the failures, Lockheed launched a program to design structural modifications to prevent whirl mode wing flutter and to retrofit all Electras already in service. These changes proved effective, and modifications to the fleet were completed on July 5, 1961.

Background Northwest Airlines Flight 710 was a regularly scheduled flight between Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Miami, Florida, with a scheduled stop in Chicago. On March 17, 1960, the flight was operated by a Lockheed L-188C Electra aircraft. At 12:51 p.m. Central Standard Time, the flight left Wold-Chamberlain Airport in Minneapolis with 69 passengers. It arrived at Midway Airport in Chicago after an uneventful flight, and 51 of the passengers departed the plane. Another 39 new passengers boarded while the crew prepared for the flight to Miami and the ground crew refueled the aircraft. Flight 710 took off from Midway Airport at 2:38 p.m. with 57 passengers and a crew of 6. At 3:13 p.m., as the flight passed a navigational waypoint at Scotland, Indiana, the crew made a routine report to the Indianapolis Air Route Traffic Control (ARTC) Center with the aircraft's position and altitude at 18,000 feet (5,500 m). The crew estimated that the flight would reach its next check point at Bowling Green, Kentucky, in twenty minutes, and reported that the flight was proceeding normally. Indianapolis controllers told them to contact the Memphis, Tennessee, ARTC in fifteen minutes on that center's radio frequency. In the area, the weather at the plane's altitude was clear, with unrestricted visibility. Below it, there were two layers of broken to overcast clouds; cloud tops in the upper layer extended up to 5,000 to 6,000 feet (1,500 to 1,800 m) altitude. An area of low pressure centered over the Lower Peninsula of Michigan and a low pressure trough extended southward along the Illinois-Indiana border. At the same time, a ridge of high pressure extended from the southern plains to the northeast, from Arkansas, through central Kentucky and into southern Ohio. A different Electra flight that had passed through the same area at 2:30 p.m. that day reported that it had encountered severe airspeed fluctuations and turbulence in the area. Two U.S. Air Force B-57s operating near Louisville, Kentucky, reported moderate to severe clear-air turbulence in the area at high altitudes between 3:00 and 3:30, with one of them slowing down and descending from between 20,000 and 25,000 feet to 15,000 feet to escape the turbulence. A DC-7 passing through the area reported severe clear-air turbulence at 19,000 feet. Before leaving Chicago, the pilots of Flight 710 had been informed about the weather conditions in the area, but the weather reports did not mention anything about clear-air turbulence along the flight's path.

Accident

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Northwest Airlines Flight 710

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Northwest Airlines Flight 710 claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Northwest Airlines Flight 710 before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Northwest Airlines Flight 710 ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Northwest Airlines Flight 710

In research: Northwest Airlines Flight 710 appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Northwest Airlines Flight 710 in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Northwest Airlines Flight 710 is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1960 in Indiana, Airliner accidents and incidents caused by in-flight structural failure, Airliner accidents and incidents in Indiana, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Northwest Airlines Flight 710 outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Northwest Airlines Flight 710 in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Northwest Airlines Flight 710 means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Northwest Airlines Flight 710 out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Northwest Airlines Flight 710 in simple terms?

Why does Northwest Airlines Flight 710 matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Northwest Airlines Flight 710?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Northwest Airlines Flight 710.