NEW YORK (KRT) — An American Airlines jetliner bound for the Dominican Republic from New York with 260 people aboard plunged into a seaside neighborhood moments after takeoff Monday morning, raising fears of another terrorist act and again rattling the shaken airline industry.
The cause of the crash, which appears to have killed everyone on board, remained undetermined, but officials said preliminary evidence pointed to an accident — not an act of terror. Six other people were reported missing on the ground in Queens.
Eyewitnesses said the plane, a 13-year-old Airbus A300, appeared to explode shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport, then broke apart and went into a nosedive. It scattered debris, including an engine that appeared to separate in-flight, across several blocks and into a nearby bay as it hurtled to the ground. A key issue for investigators will be whether the engine, one of two on the plane, fell as a result of mechanical failure or sabotage, or whether the engine’s separation helped cause the crash.
By midday, authorities had recovered the plane’s flight data recorder, and National Transportation Safety Board officials said it would be flown to Washington for analysis by federal safety experts.
The fiery crash came two months and a day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Authorities, however, warned the public not to assume the incidents were related.
“People shouldn’t speculate as to the cause,” New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani told reporters at an impromptu news conference near the crash. “It may well have been an engine failure. … We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”
Nevertheless, U.S. fighter jets scrambled to patrol air space above New York. Bridges and tunnels into the city were closed, and all three major New York-area airports shut down for a period of time.
U.S. spy agencies also combed through intelligence reports and eavesdropping transcripts looking for any clues that pointed to a terrorist attack, a U.S. official said.
An estimated 175 of the passengers on American Airlines Flight 587 were Dominicans, returning to or visiting their homeland.
The plane lifted off at 9:14 a.m., more than an hour after its scheduled departure. It was not clear why the flight was late, and the Federal Aviation Administration would not say. By 9:17 a.m., it had nose-dived into the blue-collar community of Rockaway Beach, which sits on a sliver of land separating Jamaica Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. The plane destroyed four houses and damaged more than a dozen others.
For a nation feeling under siege, the crash was yet another horrific tragedy. It was especially hard-hitting for Rockaway, a waterfront community that lost dozens of firefighters and police officers in the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers.
Linda Spadaro, who lives about three blocks from the crash site, said she saw flaming debris falling from the plane.
“I saw an engine fall off,” Spadaro said. “It just fell off. The plane blew up to a huge fireball. This is horrible. I can’t believe this is happening.”
Billowing black smoke from the crash was visible more than 20 miles away. Blocks away, another fire broke out from a fallen engine, authorities said.
“It’s terrible,” Ellen O’Toole, a Peninsula General Hospital worker, said nearly four hours after the crash. “There’s no survivors.”
Bill Schwartz, a plumber who was driving through the neighborhood, said he saw the crash.
“The plane was at a nosedive,” said Schwartz. “So I pulled over to look at it. It didn’t seem right to me. Then I saw flames coming from the left-hand side of the plane. Then I saw one of the wings broke off. You could see it breaking apart bit by bit.”
More than 100 relatives of the passengers awaited them in the city of Santo Domingo, and news of the crash caused an outpouring of grief. President Hipolito Mejia declared three days of mourning on the island nation.
New York Gov. George Pataki reported that the pilot may have purposely dumped fuel in Jamaica Bay before the plane went down, possible evidence that he knew his plane was in danger.
But the former director of NTSB, Peter Goelz, said ruptured fuel tanks in one or both of the plane’s wings more likely caused the fuel in the bay.
“It would be highly unusual in that period of time that they were dumping fuel,” said Goelz. “It’s likely that all of the crew’s energies would be devoted toward keeping the plane in the air.”
NTSB took the lead in the investigation, underscoring the government’s view that the crash was an accident. The safety board, the FAA and independent aviation safety experts said they were leaning toward a mechanical failure because the engine appeared to fall off and because the crash happened so early in flight.
This particular plane had 88 “service difficulty reports” filed with the FAA since it was bought new by American in 1988, according to a database analysis by Air Data Research in Helotes, Texas. In the past five years, 49 out of 54 of those reports have dealt with corrosion issues. But neither the number of reports nor the corrosion problems are unusual, especially for a plane that flies between the Caribbean and New York, according to Air Data Research President John Eakin.
One of the two engines had gone 9,788 hours since its last overhaul, while the other had gone 694, said American spokesman Al Becker. Those engines are supposed to get overhauled every 10,000 hours. It’s still unclear which engine fell.
The crash could not have come at a worse time for American Airlines or the industry as a whole. Already in financial trouble before the Sept. 11 attacks, carriers laid off thousands of employees after the suicide hijackings. Congress promptly approved a $15 billion assistance package that included $5 billion in cash and $10 billion in loan guarantees.
Travel was slowly picking up as the holiday season approached, but analysts said Monday’s tragedy will likely prolong the industry’s recovery.