[classygreeneyedblonde]

I hope they find out what really happened

[hole_n_one]

During the night, a terrorist saboteur disguised as a ground crew mechanic reached up in the back of the left jet engine of the American Airlines Airbus and cut the hydraulic line going to the thrust reverser actuator and the control safety sensor lines.

I would think that any significant loss of hydraulic pressure to any system would have been caught during the pre-flight check.

[inflorida]

Ok, maybe I need to put on my tin foil hat but...
I have felt since day one that this crash was not an 'accident'.
Move along folks...nothing to see.

[KC_for_Freedom]

I don't think this will hold up,
The tampered hose would be discovered in the wreakage
I think a partial thrust reversal would be evident to the trained crew. It makes one heck of a roar.
Unsaid in the scenario is a massive cover up similar to the TWA 800 fiasco. This may have occurred, but the adults are back in the white house and this president does not seem like the type to lie to the American Public.

[VOA]

If the left engine thrust reverser had either partially or completely actuated
during flight, it would cause the plane to go into a flat spin to the left.

I'm no aviation professional...but I do remember seeing a story for maybe 5 years or so ago
in which it was speculated that a jetliner was brought down someplace in South America...and it
was thought the cause was that a thrust reverser had been deployed during takeoff
due to a signal from a cell-phone aboard the plane.

I don't know if that is even possibe...if it were, I'd think there would be planes falling
out of the sky all the time!

[Jeff F]

The most obvious problem with this scenario is the complete lack of eyewitness corroboration. The plan was flying in NYC and was observed by many people. No one has reported anything like this spectacular high-speed flat spin.

[jlogajan]

Wake Turbulence Discounted

Ha ha ha. It is an inconvenient fact that he brushes away as a coincidence.

[Kenyon]

Isn't it odd that two of the most unusual air crashes in memory involved planes that took off from Kennedy?

[Slyfox]

A witness interviewed after the crash said that the tail edge was so straight
that it looked as if someone had loosened a few bolts prior to take off.

[GretchenEE]

I am just kicking myself because I received an alert from The Elijah List (a Christian ministry) shortly after this plane went down (I'm still looking for the copy but haven't found it yet), in which the author of that issue said he believed that God showed him right before this plane went down that there would be an act of sabotage on a plane involving the hydraulics or fuel line or something similar. Not being an engineer or even remotely familiar with how engines and planes work, I can't remember it rightly. I will keep looking. Even before I received that Email alert, my gut sense was sabotage brought this plane down.

[John H K]

Thrust reverser actuation is obvious on both the flight data recorder and by inspecting an engine after a crash. No evidence of a thrust reverser actuation was found.

[copycat]

They are getting closer. This scenario, unfortunately, does not adress the fact that dozens of witnesses, including a retired LEO and firefighter, saw not one, but two explosions before the plane began to break up...as reported here.

IMHO, the sabotage angle is correct, and the events after the engine problem are correct...the sideways turning of the craft took the tail off. However, I believe the two "rattles" heard on the CVR correspond to the two expolsions seen by eyewitnesses. I believe explosives were planted inside the wing, near the junction to the plane.

[Ronin]

I hope they do too. But even if they do, the chances of us little people learning the truth are not too good.

[GretchenEE]

I am just kicking myself because I received an alert from The Elijah List (a Christian ministry) shortly after this plane went down (I'm still looking for the copy but haven't found it yet), in which the author of that issue said he believed that God showed him right before this plane went down that there would be an act of sabotage on a plane involving the hydraulics or fuel line or something similar. Not being an engineer or even remotely familiar with how engines and planes work, I can't remember it rightly. I will keep looking. Even before I received that Email alert, my gut sense was sabotage brought this plane down.

[Cleburne]

Eh, we all know THEY did it...

[Vigilant1]

Here's some Aviation Week articles on the AA Flight 587 crash investigation:

No Ties Seen Between United A320 Tail Check Findings, Flight 587 Accident

A compilation of articles on the AA Flight 587 crash

[RandyRep]

Our earlier threads in November included someone saying essentially what this guy writes. He was either the author of this piece of hokum or this guy plagiarized it for the unsuspecting Newsmax editors.

The GE CF6-80C2 engine has pneumatic actuators to deploy and stow the thrust reversers, so a "cut" in the hydraulic line would serve only to render the brakes useless. That doesn't eliminate the thrust reversers as the cause of the crash - until you find out from the NTSB reports that the reversers were in their stowed and locked position after the crash. Nobody, except the tinfoilies, think it was the reversers.

The aviation press has raised several hypotheses, but they discount the explosions supposedly observed by witnesses on the ground. The description of the explosions seem to indicate they were near or behind the wing. A fair amount of the aft airframe survived the crash and burn, and if they had found evidence of explosions, it would have been reported. Even with an explosion - how does it cause the loss of control?

After reviewing many reports in the press, and receiving email from other aircraft engineers speculating about the cause, I continue to believe that there was a flaw in the rudder structure, which caused the rudder to not respond to pilot commands, flutter wildly in the 250 knot air stream, and eventually break off from the vertical tail. The wild flutter caused a failure of the vertical tail attachments to the fuselage, which in turn caused the tail to depart the aircraft and the airplane to spin out of control. Some reports indicate that one of the attachments had been recently repaired, which may have made the situation worse.

Virtually no one in the aircraft engineering community thinks it was air turbulence that caused the vertical tail to fail. It may have exacerbated the problem, though, by making the previously damaged rudder attachments fail.

Another A300 was grounded in Peru several weeks ago because the pilot reported poor rudder response during takeoff, and they stopped safely before liftoff. The flight recorder for this aircraft is being inspected by the FAA and NTSB.

They will eventually figure this out, but it is taking a fairly long time.

I am an aircraft engineer for a company that makes the pods (and thrust reversers) for many commercial aircraft.

[Colt .45]

Its all smoke and mirrors, my dear ... smoke and mirrors.

[ValerieUSA]

It was sabotage, but probably more direct than a cut hydraulic line. The way planes wait and taxi and get thrown off schedule at a big airport, you couldn't count on a cut line to do the job at the right time.