Wikipedia:Peer review/American Airlines Flight 191/archive1

American Airlines Flight 191
This peer review discussion has been closed. I think this would make a great featured article. There has been a lot of recent work on the article through science and technology, I think some review of it as a historical event (the most deadly air accident prior to 9/11) would be merited to get it nominated as a featured article.

Thanks, WGFinley (talk) 20:29, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: I agree that the article has FA potential and is in relatively good shape. However, it is not yet ready for FAC. It's an interesting and important article, and I'd like to encourage you to improve it. Here are some suggestions:


 * Citation 1, used in multiple places, links to a PDF document that is 103 pages long. To make it useful to fact checkers, it should include the page number or numbers that support the claim(s) in each instance. Otherwise, it's quite difficult to determine whether the document supports the claim(s). Since different claims will be supported by different pages, making this change will be a fairly big job and will result in non-identical citations. It will probably not always be possible for a single citation to specific pages in this long document to cover all of the claims in a paragraph. To keep the Reference section from becoming cluttered, you might add a "Works cited" or "Sources" section to the article, list the complete bibliographic information for the PDF there, and use short-form refs like "Accident report, p. 5" for the inline citations.

Lead
 * The two "caused by" phrases tacked onto the ends of the final two sentences are awkward. Juxtaposition suggests that the wing was caused by maintenance procedures and that the public was caused by accidents. Reading twice sorts this out, but it would be better to revise for clarity.

Aircraft
 * "On the day of the accident the records had not been removed from the aircraft, as was standard procedure,[clarification needed] and were destroyed in the accident." I agree with whoever added the tag that this is not clear. Which records? Glancing quickly at the 103-page PDF, I see that at least some data was recovered from the flight recorders. (See page 4).

Accident
 * Could speeds be added for VR here and so on for this particular case? Some specific numbers appear later in the article, but it would useful to have them where we first encounter these terms.


 * "The number one electrical bus, whose generator was attached... " - A bus isn't a "who", so I would re-word this slightly. Also, it might be helpful to link "electrical bus" to something or to briefly explain it.


 * "the deadliest aviation accident in the United States to date" - Since "to date" is not specific, I'd be inclined to delete it and let note 1 provide the caveats.


 * "the intersection of Touhy Avenue (Illinois Route 72) and Mount Prospect Road" - Link Illinois Route 72?

Investigation
 * "In response to the accident, slat relief valves were mandated to prevent slat retraction in case of hydraulic line damage." - I'm not sure what this means. The logic of the sentence implies that after the line was damaged, someone told the valves to prevent the slat(s) on the left wing from retracting. Could the situation be explained more clearly?


 * "Wind tunnel and flight simulator tests... " - Link wind tunnel?


 * "after the uncommanded retraction of the slats" - I don't think "uncommanded" is a real word. Maybe just "after the slats retracted"?

Engine separation
 * "Investigators looked at the plane's maintenance history and found that its most recent service was eight weeks before the crash, in which engine number one had been removed from the aircraft." - This sentence is a bit awkward and wordy. Suggestion: "The plane's maintenance history showed that the number one engine had been removed from the aircraft during its most recent service, eight weeks before the crash."


 * "The procedure recommended by McDonnell Douglas called for the engine to be removed from the pylon prior to detaching the pylon itself, but American Airlines, along with Continental Airlines and United Airlines, had begun to use a procedure that saved approximately 200 man-hours per aircraft and "more importantly from a safety standpoint, it would reduce the number of disconnects (of systems such as hydraulic and fuel lines, electrical cables, and wiring) from 72 to 27."[1]" - Too complex. Mismatch of verbs (called, would reduce). I'd recommend using two separate sentences to explain this.


 * "The new procedure involved mechanics removing the engine with the pylon and engine as a single unit." - Tighten by one word by deleting "mechanics"?


 * "The field service representative from McDonnell Douglas said the company would "not encourage this procedure due to the element of risk" and had so advised American Airlines." - Straight past tense, "did not encourage" rather than "would not encourage"?


 * "the engine would rock like a see-saw and jam against the pylon attachment points" - Straight past, "rocked" and "jammed"?

The DC-10 years after
 * The section head lacks clarity and doesn't meet Manual of Style guidelines. Suggestion: "Aftermath".


 * "Despite losing an engine and all flight controls and crash-landing in a huge fireball (which was caught on video by a local news crew), 185 people would survive the accident." - The people didn't lose an engine. Suggestion: "Although the aircraft lost an engine and all flight controls and crash-landed in a huge fireball (which was caught on video by a local news crew), 185 people survived the accident".

Notable victims
 * I think this would be better rendered as straight prose rather than as a bulleted list. One possibility would be to group the Playboy material into a separate paragraph and to group the others into a second paragraph, or vice versa. I would also shorten the Leonard Stogel part of this; the list of groups is unnecessary, though you might say "California Jam and other musical groups".

History and media
 * This section has the left-overs that seem to accumulate in many articles. I'd consider relegating the Chorba material to a note and merging the other three items with the "Aftermath" section. It might be that "Aftermath" would work as one section with three subsections: "DC-10", "Media coverage", and "Notable victims".

Notes
 * The two links to external sites should be changed to inline citations. The direct links violate Manual of Style guidelines and will not survive scrutiny at FAC.


 * "Three are of particular importance to the understanding of this accident" - I would delete this part of the sentence since it is a personal observation rather than a claim supported by a reliable source.

References
 * The date formatting in the citations needs to be consistent throughout.
 * Some of the citations are incomplete. For example, the author, Chris Kilroy, is missing from citation 4, and citations 8 and 9 lack dates of most recent access.
 * What makes AirDisaster.com a reliable source?
 * The abbreviation for a single page is p., for multiple pages it is pp.
 * Newspaper names should appear in italics.
 * To add hyphens to the ISBNs that don't already have them, you can use a converter here.

Images
 * The source link for File:AA191-responders.png is dead. Perhaps it could be replaced with a live URL?
 * File:AA191-crash-site.png uses the same dead link.
 * Ditto for File:DC-10 engine-pylon.svg.
 * Is "png" the best format for the two FAA photos? Why not "jpg"?

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 20:01, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)