Officials: Crash Likely an Accident
By TED BRIDIS
Associated Press Writer
November 12, 2001, 4:15 PM ESTWASHINGTON -- An accident rather than terrorism probably caused an American Airlines jet to plunge into a neighborhood in New York, federal officials said Monday. Investigators focused on an engine that fell away from the doomed plane.
The investigators swiftly reviewed the plane's maintenance records, but initially found "nothing indicative of a specific problem," said director Marion Blakey of the National Transportation Safety Board. Officials located the flight data recorder and rushed it to the nation's capital for analysis.
"All information we have currently is that this is an accident," said Blakey, as the Bush administration sent experts to the scene.
While the crash was horrific -- the plane carried 255 people to their deaths, and wreckage set several homes on fire in Queens _ the preliminary assessment seemed a relief of sorts for a nation struggling to recover from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and an outbreak of mail-spread anthrax.
President Bush was handed a note informing him of the crash moments after it occurred, and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge moved quickly to the White House Situation room to confer by telephone with FBI Director Robert S. Mueller and others. Officials gave some consideration to shutting down the nation's air travel system, as was done after the September attacks in New York and Washington, but decided against it after sifting through the available information.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said at the White House there had been no unusual communications between the cockpit and air traffic officials on the ground. He also said there had been no credible threats against airplanes in advance of the crash.
Fleischer declined to rule out terrorism but said he would not dispute the assessment of other officials who had said privately there was no preliminary evidence that terrorists had been involved.
Blakey made her comments a short while later.
The president spoke by phone with New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki. In a remarkable sign of the times, Giuliani said he had asked the president for "air cover" to protect his wounded city.
Blakey said debris fell over a wide area of Queens, a few miles from the airport where Dominican Republic-bound American Airlines Flight 587 plane took off. She noted there were reports of some wreckage recovered in Jamaica Bay.
Witnesses said there may have been an explosion on board the plane.
"It's too early for me to advance theories on this," Blakey said. But she noted in response to a question that engine parts were scattered "some distance from the actual crash crater."
At least one of the engines, believed to be from the right side, fell intact on a gas-station parking lot. American Airlines said the left engine on Flight 587 was freshly overhauled and the right engine was about due for maintenance after nearly 10,000 hours of operation.
General Electric Aircraft Engines, the Cincinnati-based subsidiary of General Electric Co., sent two experts to the crash site to assist federal investigators. GE manufactured the CF6-80C2 jet engines -- the same model as those installed on Air Force One _ that were mounted on the underside of each wing of the doomed flight.
"There are eyewitness reports that they saw the engine on fire and it reportedly landed in a separate place from the main body of the wreckage," said Susan Coughlin, a former vice chairwoman for the NTSB and now chief operating officer of American Trucking Associations Foundation. "That would certainly prompt the investigators to figure out why."
A Chicago-based lawyer, Tom Ellis of the Nolan Law Group, said photographs of the surviving engine showed "pretty clear evidence of an uncontained engine failure." His firm sued on behalf of victims of United Airlines Flight 232, which crashed in 1989 in Sioux City, Iowa, after an earlier version of the CF6 engine came apart in flight. So-called "uncontained engine failures" can result in an explosion of metal fragments as damaging as shrapnel from a bomb.
Earlier this year, on May 18, a problem with the same type of engine forced the emergency landing of a Monarch Airlines passenger jet in Portugal. Documents from the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch said a rotor blade snapped, puncturing the engine's housing with a 3-inch hole and causing minor damage to the wing. The pilots reported dramatic vibration, and British officials reported there had been "several similar failures prior to this event."
The FAA ordered airlines in June to begin regularly inspecting these types of engines for cracks in certain rotor disks, a component within the engines, after the dramatic failure of one engine when maintenance crews set it to high power during testing on the ground.
Last year, the FAA also ordered airlines to replace a fuel tube within these engines to prevent high-pressure leaks that investigators warned could result in an engine fire and damage to the airplane. Also last year, the FAA ordered carriers to remove certain fan shafts within these engines earlier than planned to prevent possible catastrophic failure.
GE spokesman Rick Kennedy said American completed all these inspections and repairs. "Airworthiness directives" from the FAA mandating such repairs are relatively common.
GE has built 2,954 of these engines -- first introduced in 1984 _ and they are among the best-selling for wide-bodied aircraft. Kennedy called the CF6 engines "phenomenally reliable," and said they have been installed on more than 1,000 planes worldwide.
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Associated Press writer Jonathan D. Salant contributed to this report.<
(PROFILE (CO:AMR Corporation; TS:AMR; IG:TRV;) (CO:General Electric Co; TS:GE; IG:IDD;) )
Copyright © 2001, The Associated Press
A still from Fox-5 television news shows what witnesses say is the Airbus' engine after it fell
from an American Airlines Airbus A-300 passenger jet into a service station in Queens, New
York November 12, 2001. The White House said it was too soon to say what caused the
crash in New York of the airliner with 255 people on board. (WNYW FOX-5 via Reuters)
A jet engine from American Airlines flight 587 lies amid houses that it crashed into several
blocks from site where the rest of the plane crashed November 12, 2001 in the Rockaway
section of Queens, New York. Normal flight operations at two of the three major New York-
area airports resumed several hours after an American Airlines jet crashed shortly after takeoff
Monday from John F. Kennedy International Airport. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
A large section of the tailpiece of American Airlines Flight 587 is lifted off a boat by a crane
after the Airbus A300 crashed in the Rockaway Beach section of the Queens borough of New
York Monday, Nov. 12, 2001. The tailpiece was recovered from Jamaica Bay and towed to shore. (AP Photo/Daniel P. Derella)