American Airlines Flight 191 Crashes on Takeoff in Chicago, Killing 273
The McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10 lost an engine during takeoff, and all 273 people on board were killed, according to reports.
This report went out within minutes of the first account of it. Early reports are provisional and are frequently revised; where sources disagree, both readings are given.
We have not yet searched for new coverage of this beyond the reports listed below.
Was this report accurate and useful?
Reference data
From aircraft and geographic registries, not from the news sources. Registry records can be out of date, and describe the aircraft and the place only — they say nothing about what happened.
- Terrain elevation
- 653 ft
- Nearest aerodrome
- 9.0 miles NE of Chicago Midway International Airport (KMDW/MDW)
Sources
Revision history
- Version 223 Aug 2026, 07:44current
Updated operator fleet figures to reflect registry records (254 aircraft, 1 matching type) and clarified that the aircraft involved has not been identified.
- Version 123 Aug 2026, 07:40
First published.
How we work
This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.
Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.
Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.
None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.