American Airlines Flight 587 crashes in Queens, New York

The Compass, Nov. 16, 2001

SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. — In a chilling reminder of the September 11 attack on New York City, American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in Queens, New York shortly after taking off from Kennedy International Airport on November 12.

Flight 587, an Airbus A300 bound for the Dominican Republic and carrying 251 passengers and nine crew, crashed into the New York City borough at 9:17 a.m. Monday after breaking up over Jamaica Bay.

Although many feared that the crash heralded a new terrorist attack on New York, government officials quickly began to conclude that the crash was most likely an accident.

“Everything points to an accident,” Marion Blakey, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told the Associated Press on Monday. “The communications from the cockpit were normal up until the last few seconds before the crash,” Blakey continued.

Many witnesses of the crash reported hearing an explosion shortly before Flight 587 went down, but investigators soon concluded that any explosion was probably due to mechanical failure.

By Tuesday, November 13, the focus of the investigation turned to the aircraft’s tail fin, which was severed from Flight 587, an event said to be unprecedented in the airline industry. The engines also broke away from the plane, slamming down about two blocks from the crash site, one engine narrowly missing the fuel pumps at a Texaco station.

The tail fin was retrieved from the waters of Jamaica Bay, which separates the Rockaway section of Queens from Brooklyn. The fin, more accurately called the vertical stabilizer, controls the aircraft’s side-to-side motion.

Although the engines were explosively torn from the wings of the doomed flight, investigators doubted the engines themselves caused the crash.

“It’s pretty clear it doesn’t seem to be a major charring to the engine,” David Field, Americas editor for Airline Business magazine said to CNN, commenting on video footage of the engine wreckage.

“This suggests it’s not an explosion within the engine core itself within the turbine. It suggests something forced the engine and pylon off the wing.”

On Wednesday, November 14, investigators learned that Flight 587 departed Kennedy International only 90 seconds after a Japan Airlines 747 had taken off, according to CNN. The 90-second gap is much shorter than the 2 minute and 20 second gap that had originally been reported by the NTSB on Tuesday. Regular flight practices dictate a minimum two-minute delay between departures in order to minimize the chance of one flight interfering with another.

Investigators suspect that wake turbulence from the Japan Airlines flight may have caused Flight 587 to break apart. Wake turbulence is best described as horizontal tornadoes that emanate from the wing tips of a plane, and have the potential to be very damaging.

The cockpit voice recorder, recovered from the crash site on Monday, revealed rattling noises that started shortly after takeoff, followed by the pilots losing control soon afterwards. The flight data recorder — the other “black box” — was recovered on Tuesday, but was too badly damaged to immediately extract any clues about what happened.

The recorder, according to Fox News, has been turned over to L3 Communications, the company that made the recorder, in the hopes that they can retrieve the data.

In addition to the 260 killed onboard Flight 587, five people on the ground are missing and presumed dead. Of the victims on the aircraft, most of them were Dominicans en route to the Dominican Republic.

At least four homes in the Rockaway neighborhood were destroyed in the crash and subsequent fire. The Rockaway and surrounding community residents were still mourning their losses from the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which claimed the lives of nearly 90 from the area, most of whom were firefighters.

Even though the likelihood that the crash was caused by a terrorist attack was rapidly downplayed, government officials did not take any chances. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani enacted security measures within an hour of the crash, closing area airports, bridges, and tunnels. The Empire State Building was evacuated as a precaution, and the United Nations complex was temporarily closed to foot and vehicle traffic.

Authorities have not ruled out the possibility of terrorist action, although the evidence largely does not support terrorism.

“That does not mean we have concluded there was no crime,” stated Attorney General John Ashcroft. “We simply have no evidence to date of a crime of terrorism,” Ashcroft added.