While attempting to land at Tripoli International Airport in Libya, Korean Air Flight 803 crashes just short of the runway. Seventy-five of the 199 passengers and crew and four people on the ground are killed, in the second accident involving a DC-10 in less than two weeks, the first being United Airlines Flight 232.

Tripoli International Airport is a closed international airport built to serve Tripoli, the capital city of Libya. The airport is located in the area of Qasr bin Ghashir, 24 kilometres (15 mi) from central Tripoli. It used to be the hub for Libyan Airlines, Afriqiyah Airways, and Buraq Air.

Korean Air Flight 803, was a DC-10 flight which, on 27 July 1989, crashed while attempting to land in Tripoli, Libya. Out of the 199 passengers and crew onboard, 74 people were killed, and an additional six people on the ground were also killed. The accident was the deadliest aviation disaster to occur in Libya at the time. It is still the third-deadliest accident in Libya, after Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 1103 in 1992 with 159 fatalities, and Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771 in 2009 with 103 fatalities.

The McDonnell Douglas DC-10 is an American trijet wide-body aircraft manufactured by McDonnell Douglas. The DC-10 was intended to succeed the DC-8 for long-range flights. It first flew on August 29, 1970; it was introduced on August 5, 1971, by American Airlines.

United Airlines Flight 232 (UA232) (UAL232) was a regularly scheduled United Airlines flight from Stapleton International Airport in Denver to O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, continuing to Philadelphia International Airport. On July 19, 1989, the DC-10 serving the flight crash-landed at Sioux Gateway Airport in Sioux City, Iowa, after suffering a catastrophic failure of its tail-mounted engine due to an unnoticed manufacturing defect in the engine's fan disk, which resulted in the loss of all flight controls. Of the 296 passengers and crew on board, 112 died during the accident, while 184 people survived. 13 passengers were uninjured. It was the deadliest single-aircraft accident in the history of United Airlines.