Flight 587's final seconds

CNN ^ | 11/15/2001 | CNN

[okie01]

The only thing the other people remembered was "Oh Sh4T".

Oh, Sh4T???

[MississippiMan]

There was a Japanese 747, maybe 20 years ago or thereabouts, that somehow lost the vertical stabilizer. (Collision with another plane? I don't remember.) Anyway, the pilots managed to keep it aloft for quite some time by gingerly handling the engines and the remaining control surfaces, but they were not able to land it.

On a sorta related note, I also vaguely recall an incident with a domestic airliner in the mid to late eighties, in which systems failed and the pilot had NO control over any control surfaces at all, and managed to fly the thing in somewhere by manipulation of the engines and it resulted in a fairly controlled crash landing that saved many lives. Remember that one?

MM

[okie01]

Departure of AA 587 was delayed by a bit over an hour; it was styled a "security delay".

What it meant, though, was that boarding was delayed because passengers were slow to get through security.

I.e., apparently not a relevant issue.

[okie01]

"Remember that one?"

United Airlines DC-10 flight out of Denver. Lost the hydraulics. Brought it down and landed in Sioux City, maneuvering only by manipulating engine power -- to turn and to lose altitude.

Helluva job of flying...

[newzjunkey]

That was the Sioux City, Iowa crash in 1989. Amazing work by Captain Al Haynes and the flight crew on that one. They'd lost the #2 engine on their DC-10, part of which destroyed the central hydraulic control package. 296 crew & passengers. 185 survived the 'crash' landing. RealMedia video clip here. (airsafetyonline.com)

[Dan Day]

If airplanes come apart like they are trying to tell us, we should all quit flying. I am .

You can stop flying if you want, but most of the rest of "we all" know how to actually put this in perspective.

If this was an accident due to a defect or an unusual combination of atmospheric conditions, it was a freak occurrence, unlikely to happen again on any plane you might be on even if you spent every hour of your life for the next hundred years on a plane.

Planes crashed in the past, this one crashed now, more will crash in the future, but you're still more likely to win the lottery than die on an airliner crash.

And if you drive instead, you're far more likely to die on the road. 40,000 people a year die in car accidents, are you going to stay out of cars?

The next time I need to travel somewhere, I'm taking a plane, and I'm not going to worry about it one bit. I'm more likely to die of heart failure watching TV than from a plane crash, even taking the recent crash into account.

[Tony in Hawaii]

Ask and ye shall receive. Click here for the NTSB picture site

[newzjunkey]

There was a Japanese 747, maybe 20 years ago or thereabouts, that somehow lost the vertical stabilizer. (Collision with another plane? I don't remember.)

There was a flight in March 1966 out of Japan headed for Hong Kong. It was BOA flight 911, a 707. The pilot wanted to give the passengers a closer look of Mt Fuji and the plane was hit by 60-70 knot winds over the mountain peak. They lost at least a portion of the vertical stab and the plane broke up.

Here's an interesting quote I found about that flight, "After landing, the aircraft's G-meter was found to have registered plus 9g to negative 4g during the flight. It was concluded that, while approaching Mt. Fuji's leeward side, flight 911 was violently impacted by a severe mountain wave which led to vertical fin failure and subsequent inflight breakup, the white vapor being jet fuel flowing out of the aircraft after seperation of the engines."

More details here (including a few photos)

[Don Joe]

"Remember that one?"

Now that you mention it, I think I do, but vaguely.

I wonder if the fly-by-wire computers software could be written to handle catastrophic events? I know that some military planes are so twitchy that they'd crash instantly if their control surfaces weren't micromanaged by the computer (i.e., the no-tail stealth planes). Why couldn't civilian airliners software be programmed to handle things like loss of the tail, or a jammed control surface? The pilots could continue to use the flight controls normally, and the software would translate their movements into whatever it took to maintain stable flight. So, if the tail falls off, and the pilots try to steer, the computer would adjust the speeds of each engine as necessary to steer the plane, and so forth.

[Tony in Hawaii]

I'm with you. How many airline flights are there in the average year, anyway? How many fatal accidents?

[Don Joe]

"There was a flight in March 1966 out of Japan headed for Hong Kong. It was BOA flight 911, a 707. The pilot wanted to give the passengers a closer look of Mt Fuji and the plane was hit by 60-70 knot winds over the mountain peak. They lost at least a portion of the vertical stab and the plane broke up."

Nope, it was a different one. That site has a page on it: JAL 123.

It was a 747 that had some structural damage that took out the stabilizer.

I found some more info at this site, which describes it as "The worst single-plane accident in aviation history":

The worst single-plane accident in aviation history occurred on August 12, 1985, when Japan Air Lines Flight 123 (a 747) suffered massive structural failure, which destroyed its hydraulic systems. After more than 30 minutes, during which the pilot tried to control the aircraft with engine power alone, JAL 123 smashed into a mountain in central Japan, killing 520 of the 524 persons on board. One of the four survivors was Umi Ochiai, an off-duty JAL flight attendant. She discussed her ordeal five days after the crash, telling reporters that, after an initial burst of panic, the "passengers followed the crew's instructions to put on life vests" in preparation for a possible crash landing in water. (Reuters dispatch, Salt Lake Tribune, August 17, 1985.)

BTW, the subject of the page I lifted the above paragraph from is KAL 007, and a read of the full page will provide a great deal of fodder for those already inclined to accept the theory that the government might withhold information (or fabricate information) about an air catastrophe. I don't stand by its claims, but it is an interesting theory.

[Silvertip]

The NTSB's job is NOT to find the cause of accidents.

The NTSB's job is TO PROVE WHY ITS SAFE TO FLY.

If they need help, the FBI and CIA are there to assist. The real potential of a catastrophic economic collapse due to airliners falling from the sky is a matter of NATIONAL SECURITY.

Truth is always sacrificed in the name of National Security.

That's the answer to this and future airliner 'accidents'.

[Z-28]

Sorry, but I don't buy the N.T.S.B.'s hooey...

"On Aug. 12, 1985, a Japan Air Lines jumbo jet lost its vertical tail section on a flight from Tokyo to Osaka. The Boeing 747 flew in circles for half an hour before crashing into a 7,000-foot mountain, its pilots still trying desperately to understand why they had lost control.

"That crash killed 520 people, the worst single-aircraft mishap in commercial aviation. Four people survived.

"In Monday's crash, the American Airlines Airbus A300 took off from Kennedy International Airport and shortly afterward lost its vertical stabilizer and rudder. Without this two-part tail assembly, the jetliner would have suffered a loss of stability and turning control."

The B-2 seems to fly just fine without a verticle stabilizer. I'm not saying an A300 would, but it wouldn't cause its engines to fall off and nose dive immediately into Queen's, NY.

I smell another airline coverup.

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGALN96O1UC.html

[Z-28]

Vertical stabilizer (tail fin) attachment point

Why does the composite material look "burnt" where it separated from the fuselage attachment anchor point? The rest of the pics on that NTSB page reveal nothing useful that I can see. Looks like someone held an welding torch to it. If they did that to only a few, what would happen?

"The side force increases from about 0.3 G to about 0.8 G (0.3 G and 0.4 G is considered to be a very significant force)."

NOT. You can experience .9 G turning a corner in a Corvette.

[Z-28]

stop bold.

[ExiledInTaiwan]

Seems to me a string of Airbus 300 accidents in Asia, last few years. Of course all were in go-around mode, in weather. Some problem with extreme angle of attack and stalling.

Of course most were with China Airlines (ten times the average for incidents) and could have been pilot error: one case in Japan, one in Taipei. Any comments?

[ExiledInTaiwan]

One was pilot error, engaging TOGA (Take Off Go Around) mode by mistake during final approach, unknowingly.

Link here Airbus A300 incidents

[jwalsh07]

Thats carbon fiber amigo. Thats what carbon fiber looks like.

[DugwayDuke]

"The tinfoilers are going to have to explain how the wake encounter just happened to coincide with a missile hit or a bomb in the luggage."

I've read many of the "tinfoiler' theories and while I'm not a "tinfoiler", being familiar with their processes, I'd be willing to bet that they would explain it like this. You see, the Illuminati placed a submarine underwater in Jamaica Bay. As a part of this special top secret program, it launched two invisible, hypersonic, stealth missiles that no one can see or track on radar. These hypersonic missiles were equipted with a special Telsa Effects Warhead that disrupted the flight conrols and produced the wake turbulence to mislead the investigators. The purpose of this missile launch was to destroy the AA flight in an untraceable manner that could be attributed to aircraft structural failure while killing the last surviving witness to Marilyn Monroe's assasination by the Bilderburgers. The Illuminati had to act then because he was enroute to an emergency meeting of the CFR where the exposure of this information would have catastrophic effects upon a complicated plan masterminded by Kofi Anon and Dick Chenney to finance the New World Order by swaping Indonesian coal for Peruvian tin futures. It should all be very clear to you now a cover-up was part of this scheme from the beginning since it was timed to match Putin's visit to Texas. Hope this helps, you heard it here first.

[unending thunder]

I don't buy yuor Illuminati theory, way too complicated.

2 points

1. Several Eyewitnesses report explosion and fire and plane drops ot of the sky. Blu Jet pilot reports fire. Now we all know what a jetliner looks like, and I guess we can all imagine what one looks like without a tail fin. Nobody reported loss of fin or saw it falling.

2. Tailfin falls but probably "flies" not necessarily falling in vertical line unlike 1 ton engines.

Why do we assume tail fin came off before engines?

Does this work ;

1 Left Engine explodes Plane falls sveral hundred feet left wards, tail fin ripped off be excessive lateral forces, maybe badly weakened through decap, corrosion, at same time as engines.

Map of debris would accord with this if Fin "floats & Flies"

I still have open mind. But all this break up happened from take off to landing on ground in less time than to boil an egg.