Photo by Frank Schaefer

#85 at Paris/Charles de Gaulle

Photo by Frank Schaefer

Thorughout its career, #85 was re-registred in France for several times. Here it is, still with its last UTA-reg F-BTDH, at London/Gatwick in July of 1997.

Photo by Laurent Kepinski

This DC10 was forced to land in Brest, while en route from Gatwick to Orly, because of a failure of the inboard flap system. The failure occurred during a ferry flight and a inflight test of the system. We had to replace the support of the actuator of the L/H inboard aileron. We faced two problems : 1/ the L/H inboard flap and aileron had to be removed and we had no facilities to work in 2/ the support to be replaced was very hard to find and the Boeing RAMS team came with a used one picked up on a stored DC10. That was the only solution to fix the plane before the autumn. Brest is a windy airport, and rainy too ! We built a kind of tent with fabric above the trailing edge. But I was very lucky because the day I planned to reinstall the flap with a big crane, there was absolutely no wind ! (Comments from Laurent Kepinski, project manager of #085's recovery)