If Not Terror, What Was It?

By Bill Saporito

In the first moments after American Airlines Flight 587 went down last Monday, the unthinkable seemed to be happening again: an airliner crashes in New York City, Air Force fighters scramble, tunnels are closed, the Empire State Building is evacuated, and the United Nations is locked down. As sirens wailed and hundreds of fire fighters converged on the scene, 8 million New Yorkers tensed with a fear that they were still in the terrorists' cross hairs. "Be brave...Stay calm," urged Mayor Rudy Giuliani, reprising a sickeningly familiar role as a dozen homes blazed around him.

Within hours, authorities began to downplay terrorism as a possible cause of the crash, and the National Transportation Safety Board--not the FBI--took charge of the investigation. "All information we have currently is that this is an accident," said NTSB chairwoman Marion Blakey on Monday--and every day throughout the week. For many families, though, what was no longer unthinkable still became unbearable: an Airbus 300 jet on its way to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic convulsed in midair, flinging away its tail and engines and augering into the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, just across Jamaica Bay from John F. Kennedy International Airport. The crash killed all 260 people on board and five on the ground--the worst toll for a U.S. carrier since another American flight crashed in Chicago in 1979, killing 275--and it set ablaze several blocks of the seaside community of Belle Harbor.

In the gruesome recalibration of catastrophe that we have made since Sept. 11, the assumption that Flight 587 was an accident brought some measure of relief to the city and the nation. Yet days later, relief turned to apprehension across a country poised for its busiest week in the air. How did a jetliner with a solid safety record, maintained by the nation's biggest airline and flown in perfect weather by two experienced pilots, break into pieces less than 3 min. after takeoff? What would cause the tail of a plane that has been thoroughly tested for years to snap off? Was this a singular event, or are American's 34 remaining A300s susceptible?

The answers will not be known for months, but in the meantime the Federal Aviation Administration late last week began to focus on the rudder-and-tail assembly, which is made of a carbon-fiber composite rather than the metal used in most jets. The FAA ordered an inspection of the tail section of all Airbus 300s as well as the smaller 310s. American is the only U.S. passenger airline to fly A300s, although UPS and FedEx also use them.

Flight 587 was full when it left J.F.K. at 9:14 a.m., in contrast to the half-empty planes leaving from much of the country. Dominicans may move to the U.S. for a better life, but they love their homeland, and AA 587 was a virtual shuttle service between those two worlds. It was highly profitable for American, because it had no direct competition. It was filled with families such as Mariana and Lasar Flores and their son Isaiah, 2, on their way to visit Mariana's sister. And there was Ramona Pimentel, on her way home from a visit to New York City, where she had worked for many years.

The takeoff to the northwest into a gentle breeze was uneventful. The plane banked left over the bay on its way south. But soon Captain Edward States and First Officer Sten Molin knew they were in trouble. On the plane's cockpit voice recorder, investigators heard the plane shudder once, 107 sec. into the flight, then a second time 14 sec. later. Something had caused the airliner to wobble, and the pilots tried to straighten it out. A few seconds later, the A300 was knocked sideways, viciously, twice from one direction and then from the opposite side.

As the pilots struggled to control the jet, it banked steeply to the left, the nose pitching down 30[degrees]. The voice recorder continues for a few more seconds, and the pilots are overheard trying to cope with the careening aircraft, but at some point the tail ripped loose, the engines most likely soon after. The pilots "had no idea what happened," says former NTSB investigator Chuck Leonard. "There's no signal that comes on saying TAIL GONE." Leonard speculates that the missing tail produced the whiplike swings. "The aerodynamic forces must have been preposterously wild," he says.

These gyrations were noted by eyewitnesses on the ground. "It sounded like the Concorde," says Dan Sugrue, an employee of the energy company KeySpan, who was eating breakfast in a diner near the crash site. The sound made him turn, and he saw the still ascending plane as it started to "ride sideways," losing what appeared to be a piece of a wing, a sight other eyewitnesses reported. "And then just, boom, straight down into the ground," Sugrue says.

Initially, investigators suspected trouble with the General Electric engines that had landed a block apart, one on a boat parked in a driveway, the other in a gas station, barely missing the pumps. But inspectors found no signs that the engines had failed or ingested birds or thrown a turbine blade through the cowling. Then, late on the afternoon of the crash, the Coast Guard fished the jet's vertical stabilizer--the upright part of the tail--out of the bay. Television reporters kept noting that the tail seemed curiously undamaged.

They were wrong. The tail and rudder assembly was severely damaged where it connected with the fuselage. (The rudder is the thin, vertical part that runs along the back of the tail and keeps the plane flying straight.) When the A300 got too far sideways, aerodynamic forces apparently tore the tail and rudder off the plane like a page yanked from a book. The same forces popped the engines off their pylons.

The tragedy traumatically linked two neighborhoods at opposite ends of a city whose history is shaped by an ever-shifting tide of immigrant groups. The jet struck Belle Harbor, a little seaside paradise separated by water from the city's hubbub, and jealously guarded by its residents. It's a place teeming with cops, fire fighters and other civil servants, many descended from Irish immigrants who began arriving after the Civil War.

The World Trade Center attacks hit Belle Harbor hard. Some 70 residents--firemen, cops, traders at Cantor Fitzgerald--perished in the disaster. A number of them worshipped at St. Francis church, where Mass was being said when the plane hit nearby. "I had been to, I think, 10 funerals there," said Giuliani. After extinguishing the last of the burning houses, four firemen, still in full gear, walked a few blocks north to pay their respects at the home of Richie Allen, a comrade who died in the Trade Center and whose memorial service was held just three days before the American crash.

Carole Keller, a teacher whose house sits a few blocks from the crash site, feared for her daughter Suzanne, who had been scheduled to leave J.F.K. at 7:15 a.m. with her new husband for a honeymoon in Antigua. Suzanne's wedding was originally set for Sept. 14, but was postponed because the guest list was full of firemen and police officers. After several nerve-racking hours glued to the television, Keller got a phone call confirming her daughter was safe and on another flight.

In Washington Heights, Santa Mejia got no such news. She thought her cousin Maria Rodriguez had boarded an earlier flight but discovered she was on the doomed plane, which left an hour late--delayed by new security procedures. Many of the victims lived in, or were tied to, the Dominican community of Washington Heights, atop the bluffs north of the Harlem River and east of the Hudson. Dominicans are recent arrivals, supplanting generations of Puerto Ricans, Italians, Jews and Irish.

Washington Heights lost scores of residents in the World Trade Center attack, and now Flight 587 would add at least 40 more to that toll. "There's no sense of security in the community anymore," said Mejia. Immigration status is a pressing concern for many of the friends and families of the victims. Some fear that if they accompany the body of a relative to the Dominican Republic, they may not be able to return. Nor were many in the community convinced that the crash was an accident.

Commercial airliners are not designed to be whipped side to side, which left investigators puzzled as to how a highly automated jet that is virtually self-correcting got into that fatal position. Was it turbulence from the aircraft ahead? Some two minutes before AA 587 lifted off, a Japan Airlines 747, the world's biggest passenger plane, took off from the same runway, headed in the same direction. All jets produce a vortex of air, a mini-tornado, off each wing tip as they travel, and 747s can cause serious problems for smaller planes trailing in their wake. But the A300 is not a small plane, and the vortex problems are well known. The American Airlines plane was farther than the prescribed four miles from the JAL "heavy," as wide-body planes are called by aviators. One of the American pilots noted "wake turbulence" as the doomed jet flew through the 747's slipstream, but the force produced by the vortex should not have been strong enough to push the A300 into peril. An Airbus pilot told TIME: "It's a heavy behind a heavy. The issue of wake turbulence in this crash is a red herring."

But did the pilots overreact in trying to compensate for the slight wake encounter? After the plane shook the second time, co-pilot Molin was working the controls, and a voice is heard on the plane's recorder asking for "max power," possibly indicating that the plane was beginning to stall, or at least slow dramatically. "You don't go to max power unless you're too slow," says Denny Kelly, a former commercial pilot who is now an independent accident investigator. "Why were they going too slow? Was it turbulence? Something external? Or some problem in the cockpit?"

Both pilots had completed American's advanced-maneuvering training program, which teaches them how to recover from unexpected trouble--including wake turbulence from a Boeing 747. Both pilots most likely were aware of the July 1999 "Industry Training Aid" on procedures for recovering from disruptions or "upsets" in flight. That study emphasized the need for careful, even delicate handling of the controls during an unexpected event. "Too much rudder pressure applied too quickly or held too long may result in loss of directional control," the study warned.

The release on Thursday of information gleaned from the flight-data recorder added support for the theory that the pilots might unintentionally have magnified a relatively minor problem. The jolts that swung the aircraft side to side appear to have been caused by the pilots. "Pilot-induced loads," says NTSB investigator Tom Haueter, "were higher than the wake loads." The rudder was "deflected" 10[degrees], according to the NTSB. Most pilots interviewed last week said a rudder should only be deflected, or moved, a few degrees. Sources told TIME that the rudder may have been jammed even farther over than the NTSB is publicly acknowledging.

In 10 of 15 fatal Airbus accidents prior to AA 587, crew confusion regarding the Airbus computer systems was considered to be a factor. After some of those accidents, Airbus made changes in software or its suggested procedures so that in extreme conditions the crew can override some of the planes' automated systems.

The Airbus A300 that crashed was a middle-age jet delivered to American in 1988, meaning it was not completely fly-by-wire (i.e., computer controlled), and clearly the pilots were the ones doing the flying, not the autopilot. But there have been incidents in which the onboard computer programs have frozen just as the ones in your personal computer do. In May 1999, an American Airlines plane experienced what is called "uncommanded" rudder movements, jamming the rudder pedals. The pilot used other controls to land the plane.

Airbus has also been at the forefront in replacing metal with carbon-fiber composite materials--the materials that constituted the failed tail fin. The tail section of the A300 is made with a composite of plastic reinforced with carbon fiber. Composites have properties of strength and flexibility that are in some cases better than those of metal. The sophisticated U.S. B-2 Stealth bomber is made with composites and can withstand G forces in excess of those that commercial jets are designed to handle.

Composite parts, however, can be weakened by manufacturing flaws, by water seeping in between layers or by direct impact. And the NTSB won't yet exclude sabotage as a possible cause of the crash. Although most security experts say it would be extremely difficult for someone to loosen screws on the tail assembly or damage it in some way, investigators haven't ruled out those possibilities. "People are acting almost as if this airplane was randomly designed," says Paul Czysz, a professor at Parks College of Engineering and Aviation at St. Louis University. "It was fatigue tested, and I'm sorry, but it just doesn't come apart like that."

So as the NTSB continues its investigation, the flying public is left with several possible causes of the crash of Flight 587, none of them particularly reassuring. Flyers will do well to keep in mind more comforting data: 610 million passengers boarded 9 million domestic commercial flights last year, and all but 87 made it home. That's a far lower accident rate than the one for Americans who drive to their holiday destinations.

--Reported by Amanda Bower, Benjamin Nugent and Julie Rawe/Belle Harbor, Sally B. Donnelly/J.F.K. and Roy B. White/Washington Heights

With reporting by Amanda Bower, Benjamin Nugent and Julie Rawe/Belle Harbor, Sally B. Donnelly/J.F.K. and Roy B. White/Washington Heights