Two eyewitness to the Nov. 12 crash of American Airlines Flight 587 said over the weekend that investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board are wrong to focus on potential structural defects as the cause of the disaster - insisting instead that the plane's tail came off over New York's Jamaica Bay only after it exploded in a fireball.
"It was after the explosion," eyewitness Tom Lynch, a retired firefighter, told the New York Post. "I'm telling you, the tail was there until the second explosion."
"No tail fell off, not before the explosion. I swear to that," Lynch told the paper's Steve Dunleavy.
The eyewitness said there was absolutely no doubt about what he saw.
"I had my head up taking in that beautiful, clear day and was staring straight at the plane. It made a bank turn and suddenly there was an explosion, orange and black, on the right-hand side of the fuselage. It was a small explosion, about half the size of a car."