American Airlines Flight 587

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**American Airlines Flight 587**
Summary
Date	November 12, 2001
Type	Pilot error causing structural failure
Site	Queens, New York City, United States
Origin	John F. Kennedy International Airport
Destination	Las Américas International Airport
Passengers	251
Crew	9
Injuries	1 (ground)
Fatalities	265 (including 5 on the ground)
Survivors	0
Aircraft
Aircraft type	Airbus A300-600
Operator	American Airlines
Tail number	N14053

American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens in New York City, United States shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport on November 12, 2001. This was the second deadliest US aviation accident to date, after American Airlines Flight 191.

1 Synopsis
2 Investigation
3 Responsibility
4 Victims
- 4.1 Nationalities
5 Memorial
6 Lottery coincidence
7 Television documentaries
8 See also
9 References
10 External links

Synopsis

An American Airlines A300, similar to this aircraft, was the equipment used for American Airlines Flight 587

On November 12 2001, about 09:16:15 eastern standard time, American Airlines flight 587, an Airbus Industrie A300-605R, N14053, crashed into a residential area of Belle Harbor, New York, shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York. Flight 587 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight to Las Américas International Airport, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, with 2 flight crew members, 7 flight attendants, and 251 passengers aboard the plane. The plane’s vertical stabilizer and rudder separated in flight and were found in Jamaica Bay, about 1 mile north of the main wreckage site. The plane’s engines subsequently separated in flight and were found several blocks north and east of the main wreckage site. All 260 people aboard the plane and 5 people on the ground were killed, and the plane was destroyed by impact forces and a post-crash fire. Flight 587 was operating under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 121 on an instrument flight rules flight plan. Visual meteorological conditions (VMC) prevailed at the time of the accident.

Investigation

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) employee Brian Murphy (second from right) updates NTSB Chairman Marion Blakey (third from right) on the investigation of the tail fin and rudder from AA flight 587 (11 February, 2002)

The A300-600, which took off just minutes after a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 on the same runway, flew into the larger jet's wake, an area of very turbulent air. The first officer attempted to keep the plane upright with aggressive rudder inputs. The strength of the air flowing against the moving rudder stressed the aircraft's vertical stabilizer and eventually snapped it off entirely, causing the aircraft to lose control and crash. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that the enormous stress on the rudder was due solely to the first officer's over-aggressive rudder inputs, and not the wake caused by the earlier Japan Airlines 747 that had crossed that area. If the first officer had, in fact, stopped making additional inputs the aircraft would have stabilized.^[1] Investigators were concerned regarding the manner in which the tail fin separated. The tail fin is connected to the fuselage with six attaching points, each set has two sets of nuts, one made out of composite material, another from aluminum which is connected by a titanium bolt; damage analysis showed the bolts and aluminum lugs were intact but not the composite lugs. There were fears that the composites were faulty because they are used in other areas of the plane including the engine mounting and the wings. Examinations of construction and the materials gave the plane a clean bill of health. The official NTSB report of October 26, 2004 stated that the cause of the crash was the overuse of the rudder to counter wake turbulence.^[2] The smoke and fire resulted from fuel leakage as the engines separated from the wings due to huge g-forces, or engine compressor surges. More than a hundred eye witnesses reported an explosion/fire prior to the separation of the vertical stabilizer, indicating a severe problem existed before the crew lost control of the aircraft.^[3] The accident occurred two months almost to the day after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. This caused a panic with many people believing that the crash was another terrorist attack. Terrorism was ruled out as the cause almost immediately. After the crash, Floyd Bennett Field's empty hangars were used as a makeshift morgue for the identification of crash victims.^[4] American flight 587 no longer exists. The flight route designations of flights between Kennedy Airport and Las Americas Airport are now 619, 635, and 789.

Responsibility

Airbus and American are currently disputing the extent to which the two parties are responsible for the disaster. American charges that the crash was mostly Airbus's fault, because the A300 was designed with unusually sensitive rudder controls. Most aircraft require increased pressure on the rudder pedals to achieve the same amount of rudder control at a higher speed. The Airbus A300 and later A310 do not operate on a fly-by-wire flight control system, instead using conventional mechanical flight controls. The NTSB determined that "because of its high sensitivity, the A300-600 rudder control system is susceptible to potentially hazardous rudder pedal inputs at higher speeds."^[1] Airbus charges that the crash was mostly American's fault, because the airline did not train its pilots properly about the characteristics of the rudder. Aircraft tail fins are designed to withstand full rudder deflection in one direction at maneuvering speed. They are not usually designed to withstand an abrupt shift in rudder from one direction to the other. Most American pilots believed that the tail fin could withstand any rudder movement at maneuvering speed. The NTSB also assigned a portion of the responsibility to American Airlines by indicating that their Advanced Aircraft Maneuvering Program tended to exaggerate the effects of wake turbulence on large aircraft. Therefore, pilots were being trained to react more aggressively than was necessary.^[1] Since the NTSB's report, American Airlines has modified its pilot training program.

Victims

All 260 people aboard the plane and 5 people on the ground were killed. One of the passengers killed on the flight was Hilda Yolanda Mayol, a 26-year-old American woman ^[5] on her way to vacation in her native Dominican Republic. Two months earlier, on September 11, Mayol was working at a restaurant on the ground floor of the World Trade Center, and escaped before the building collapsed.^[6] Had the New York Yankees won Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, infielder Enrique Wilson would have flown home to the Dominican Republic and been aboard American Airlines Flight 587.^[7]

Nationalities

^[5]

Nationality	Passengers	Crew	Total
Dominican Republic	68	0	68
France	1	0	1
Haiti	1	0	1
Israel	1	0	1
Republic of China (Taiwan)	2	0	2
United Kingdom	1	0	1
United States	177	9	186
Total	251	9	260

Memorial

A memorial was constructed in Rockaway Park, Belle Harbor's neighboring community, in memory of the 265 victims of the crash, at Beach 116th Street, a major commercial street in the area. It was dedicated on November 12, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the incident, in a ceremony attended by Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg. The memorial wall, designed by Dominican artist Freddy Rodriguez and Situ Studio, has windows and a doorway looking towards the nearby Atlantic Ocean and angled towards the Dominican Republic. It is inscribed with the names of the victims.^[8] Atop the memorial is a quote, in both Spanish and English, from Dominican poet Pedro Mir, reading "Después yo quiero no más que paz." (Translation: "Afterwards I want nothing more than peace.")^[9] In a ceremony held on May 6, 2007, at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, 889 unidentified fragments of human remains of the victims of the crash were entombed in a group of four mausoleum crypts.^[10]

Lottery coincidence

The New Jersey Lottery holds two Pick-3 lottery drawings per day, and on the day of the crash, the numbers selected for the evening drawing were 5-8-7. The afternoon drawing was 5-7-8. So many people chose the combination for the evening draw that the prize was $16 for each 'winner', whereas $275 is the typical straight bet payout for Pick-3. While the winning numbers were mere coincidence, the low payouts indicate that they had been selected by a much larger number of people than ordinary.^[11]

Television documentaries

There have been two television documentaries made on the accident. An episode of the National Geographic Channel program Seconds From Disaster, first aired on September 6, 2006, examined the Flight 587 accident in detail. The episode was titled Plane Crash in Queens (also known as New York Air Crash).^[12] The BBC program Horizon also created an episode about the crash. Also a 2006 episode of Modern Marvels in The History Channel aired an episoded entitled "Engineering Disasters 20" which featured detailed information on the Flight 587.