Posted on 06/04/2002 3:13:49 PM PDT by kattracks
Most of the eyewitnesses to last November's crash of American Airlines Flight 587 have told investigators they saw fire and/or smoke aboard the doomed plane before it plummeted into a residential neighborhood in Rockaway, N.Y., the National Transportation Safety Board announced on Tuesday.
Of 349 crash witnesses interviewed by the NTSB, 52 percent - or 181 people - said they saw flames coming from the fuselage as the Airbus 300's vertical stabilizer and engines came off.
Another 22 percent of witnesses interviewed reported seeing smoke but no flames before Flight 587 crashed. Only 20 percent said they saw neither smoke nor fire.
Some witnesses told reporters immediately after the crash that they saw an explosion, or a series of explosions, before the jetliner came apart. The NTSB didn't cite the number of witnesses who backed that account, according to an Associated Press report on their interviews.
Within days of the crash, noted air safety expert Mary Schiavo said that such a catastrophic midair breakup would be hard to explain by mere structural defects.
Despite the high number of witnesses who report seeing a midair fire on Flight 587, NTSB spokeswoman Marion Blakey had said as recently as last month that safety investigators found no evidence of fire or explosives in the wreckage.
The agency has repeatedly said there is no evidence the crash was anything other than an accident.
Flight 587 crashed on Nov. 12, a day after the second month anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The FBI had issued a terrorist alert for Nov. 11.
In the seven months since, the NTSB has kept under wraps a traffic surveillance videotape that captured Flight 587 as it took off from New York's JFK airport before breaking apart 123 seconds later.
In an interview with NewsMax.com in February, NTSB spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz said he had seen the videotape but declined to reveal whether it supports accounts of a midair explosion and fire.
"I don't want to comment on that because I'd rather [have] everybody make his or her own assessment when they see it," he said.
Lopatkiewicz said the tape would be made public when we the NTSB opens the case docket, which is now scheduled for October.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Just like Flight 800.
And just like Flight 587.
You know, the only people who would run around like headless chickens are the same ones who refused to listen to the warnings and believe this could happen in the first place.
Maybe we should all conspire and lie to them so they will shut up and stop whining already. It's beginning to wear thin.
Since the engines of this flight were ripped off before the crash by presumably g-loads and gyroscopic forces, it would kind of make sense that there was a fire in the vicinity of the ripped off fuel lines.
Duh.
There are so many reasons why this crash IS NOT a terrorist action. And why it would be obvious if it were.
Someone please explain to me how you get the horizontal stablizer to depart the airplane, leaving its attach bolts in place, by some kind of terrorist action. And at the same time, leave no cut marks on the attach point stubs left behind.
Come on people. If this thing had happened in Los Angeles, no one would have thought anything about it.
Now flight 800, that's another story. And it was Bill Clinton's presidency, right before the Olympics. Plenty of reason to cover something up.
In other words, on the evidence so far, one case was a coverup and the other is still a mystery.
I still think terrorism was involved. I will never believe otherwise!
It is also well-documented that Al Quaida ops experimented with improvised explosives. They killed a Japanese businessman and nearly crashed the whole plane in that case. Plus we have the recent shoe bomber. This flight was on its way to the Dominican Republic, and would have been carrying lots of very random stuff like small appliances and electronics for the folks back home. It would also be fairly easy for an African Moslem to pass for a Dominican (there were no obvious Moslems on the passenger list). Plus there is the timing (UNGA in town, Bush the day before)and location - almost within sight of the UN building and Ground Zero.
Then there is the direct evidence of coverup. Numerous bogus "explanations" were placed with the press, among them: Old engine (proved wrong), bird strike (proved wrong), wake turbulence (proved wrong), cheese (still in play), thrust reversers (proved wrong). The cheap French plastic tail theory is literally the "center fuel tank explosion" of this crash: No other plane was grounded because of this theory.
It may be a mystery, but when you have an explicit threat against airliners by terrorists, the likeliest solution is the one that came out and said "We will cause more airliner crashes."
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