Just as the domestic airlines in the United States had city-pairs that would never support the load factors to make Boeing's 747 practical, so too did the European airlines. Unlike the big American carriers, most of the European airlines were relatively small. To get the best deals on their aircraft purchases, a number of them would pool their resources into a buying syndicate. One syndicate was called KSSU KLM, Swissair, Scandinavian Airlines, and UTA. These airlines had 747s, but they needed something else for their thinner routes. Although these routes had relatively fewer passengers, most of them were long routes with segments over ocean. A trijet made good sense, but the DC-10-10, the initial production aircraft, was a little too small and had a range that was a little too short.

To make the sale, Douglas proposed a bigger, heavier, longer-range aircraft, the DC-10-30, requiring three engines of 50,000 lb of thrust each. Ready or not, GE proposed just such an engine, the CF6-50.

We had just barely gotten the CF6-6 running. In October 1968, we fired up the first engine to test, and everyone was patting each other on the back. Then, after the third or fourth time we ran the engine, the chief test engineer forgot and left a stepladder standing in front of it. When we restarted the engine, it sucked the ladder in, totally destroying itself hardly a good omen. We had started with an engine originally rated at 34,000 lb of thrust.