nvestigators said today that wake turbulence, or an air disturbance from a nearby aircraft, could have been a factor in the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, which broke apart shortly after taking off from Kennedy International Airport on Monday and plunged into a residential neighborhood.
The Airbus A-300, bound from New York to Santo Domingo, appears to have taken off from Kennedy Airport less than the standard two minutes after a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 jetliner took off, officials said.
Investigators said one of the plane's pilots could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder making comments about a "wake encounter." That could have been the Japan Airlines flight, which was four miles away, or about 800 feet higher and to the northwest of Flight 587, farther apart than they are required to be by aviation procedure.
Today's analysis of the air traffic control tower's radar data seemed to show that air turbulence could have been a factor, officials from the National Transportation Safety Board said. Although they are looking closely at that possibility, officials cautioned that the investigation was continuing and that no probable cause of the crash had been ruled in or out.
"We do not know if this really contributed in any way to the actual accident," Marion C. Blakey, chairwoman of the N.T.S.B. said at a news conference this evening. "But we are looking at this very closely."
Ms. Blakey initially said today that the American Airlines flight departed two minutes and 20 seconds after the Japan Airlines flight, but she later said, "We believe that in fact it was one minute and 45 seconds."
Ms. Blakey also said investigators were making "good progress" on the recovery of wreckage from the crash site. Both of the plane's engines are at Kennedy Airport, where they will be analyzed and later sent to Tulsa, Okla., for complete deconstruction. The plane's vertical tail fin was found in Jamaica Bay and is at Floyd Bennett Field in Queens. Preliminary analysis showed that there was no evidence that an outside object struck the vertical stabilizer, Ms. Blakey said. Investigators have also retrieved the plane's rudder, wings, nose and two black boxes.
Officials found the cockpit voice recorder on Monday and are using it to determine what went on inside the aircraft. The plane's second black box, the flight data recorder, was located on Tuesday. That recorder tracks an airplane's mechanical operations and will be compared with the cockpit voice recorder to gain a more accurate idea of what caused the incident, officials said.
George W. Black, a spokesman for the N.T.S.B., said today that the transcription of data from the second box had suffered a setback. A module on the box was damaged and had to be sliced open to recover the data, Mr. Black said. The N.T.S.B. sent the recorder to its manufacturer, which was able to recover the data.
"We have had the manufacturer repair the problem and we are reading out the data as we speak in Washington," Ms. Blakey said. "We hope we will have good information for you very shortly on the specific technical characteristics of the flight."
This evening, investigators were still trying to figure out why the Flight 587's vertical tail fin and rudder broke off in flight and landed in Jamaica Bay, while the main portion of the plane fell into a beachside Queens neighborhood in the Rockaways, just three minutes after the plane took off.
Mr. Black said such a break had happened only a few times before, in at least one case, during a trial of a B-52 bomber.
"There have been tail section fractures before over the years, but most of them were a long time ago." Mr. Black said. "There's certainly nothing in our database like this."
While N.T.S.B. officials said they have not ruled any cause for the crash of Flight 587 in or out, the preliminary evidence does not appear to point to a terrorist act or an explosion. The National Transportation Safety Board is still the lead agency on the crash. If criminal intent were found, the Federal Bureau of Investigation would take over, officials said. On Tuesday, Barry W. Mawn, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s New York office, said the agency had already begun to take some evidence from the site as a precautionary measure.
None of the 260 people on board the flight survived, officials said. Five other people who lived in Belle Harbor, the neighborhood in Queens where the plane crashed, are missing and are presumed dead, officials said.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said on Tuesday that 262 bodies had been recovered. This afternoon he said that figure remained unchanged, a fact that he said was encouraging because there had been some worry that as many as 10 people on the ground were missing.
The mayor also urged families of the victims to take advantage of the grief and counseling services at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, which include gathering specimens of DNA to aid in the identification of victims' bodies and helping families to obtain visas to the Dominican Republic to bury the dead. Most of the families have registered at the site, but he encouraged those who had not come forward to do so.
After visiting both Belle Harbor and Washington Heights on Tuesday, the mayor said he wanted to bring the two communities together for a joint memorial service. Washington Heights, a neighborhood in northern Manhattan that was home to many of the crash victims, has the densest population of Dominicans in the city. Belle Harbor, a predominately white neighborhood, is also a community in mourning, as at least 75 of its residents were firefighters, police officers or civilian workers who were killed at the World Trade Center as a result of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.
"They are communities that have great deal in common," Mr. Giuliani said. "They share a great faith in God. They have a very strong reliance on family. They have very strong connections to each other, and they have a very very strong work ethic. These two communities are much more similar than they are different, and they share something else now and that is massive and disproportionate loss."
Meanwhile, at a news conference outside of the Javits Center this afternoon, community leaders from Washington Heights asked the federal government to grant amnesty for Dominican immigrants who are afraid to come forward to identify their loved ones' remains because they are living illegally in the United States.
"There's a lot of illegal immigrants here that have lost relatives, that have lost families, and they're torn," said Fernando Mateo, president of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, which lost six of its members in the crash. "They don't want to come forward and identify their dead wives, their husbands, their parents, only because they're not here legally. They fear that if they say who they are, they're going to be eventually deported."
Mr. Mateo said six immediate family members of Monday's crash victims had approached him with this problem so far, but he feared that dozens more were in the same situation.
On Tuesday, Senator Charles E. Schumer said he had received a commitment from the Justice Department to expedite visas for people who want to travel from the Dominican Republic to New York to attend funerals. Mr. Mateo said that offer should also be extended to illegal aliens in New York who want to travel to the Dominican Republic to bury the dead. After doing so, they should be allowed to re-enter the United States, Mr. Mateo said.