Less than two minutes after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport en route to the Dominican Republic, American Airlines Flight 587 smashed into a quiet, seaside residential area Monday morning, killing all 260 people on board and apparently at least five people on the ground.
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Federal authorities suggested that preliminary evidence pointed more to an accident than to a criminal act, and the National Transportation Safety Board took the lead in the investigation with the FBI assisting. The cockpit voice recorder, one of the two so-called black boxes, was recovered at the scene in Queens and sent to Washington for analysis.
By late Monday night, 265 bodies had been recovered, according to Joseph Dunne, first deputy police commissioner. At least six people on the ground had been reported missing after the crash, officials said.
Dunne said that in addition to the nine crew members and 246 passengers listed on the manifest, five infants were aboard the Airbus A300. American Airlines said it would release the names of passengers, many of whom were believed to be part of New York’s large Dominican community, after notifying their relatives.
According to New York City Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, injuries on the ground during and after the crash were limited to “a small number” of civilians, firefighters and police officers. Given the dense population in the area, a narrow peninsula between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the toll on the ground could have been far worse.
Coming two months and one day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the news of the crash triggered a raft of additional security measures in a city already on highest alert. City officials swiftly shut all bridges and tunnels into Manhattan and closed the four area airports for several hours. By early evening, most road and air traffic had returned to normal.
With schools and some businesses closed for Veterans Day, many residents of Rockaway, a middle-class Queens neighborhood of neat brick and frame houses, were at home when the plane thundered to the ground. The crash unleashed towering billows of black smoke, incinerated at least four homes, damaged about a dozen others and cut power to the area.
The disaster deepened the suffering of a community already in mourning. Heavily populated by firefighters, police officers and a number of workers in Manhattan’s financial district, Rockaway lost more than 70 residents in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
“It’s almost too much to take,” said U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who with his Democratic colleague Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was among the many local, state and federal officials to visit the site.
“The authorities are quite confident that within a few days we will have a very definitive answer,” he said, citing the fact that most of the plane’s wreckage had been recovered.
“There is absolutely no reason to believe at this time that it was anything other than an accident,” Clinton added while visiting an assistance center for families of passengers at the Ramada Plaza Hotel on the perimeter of Kennedy Airport.
Bound for Santo Domingo, the jet took off from Kennedy about 74 minutes behind schedule, a delay caused by compliance with new security precautions, according to Donald Carty, chairman and chief executive officer of AMR Corp., parent of American Airlines. The plane left Kennedy at 9:14 a.m. and crashed less than two minutes later.
During its brief time aloft, pilots reported no sign of trouble, said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. “There were no unusual communications from the cockpit,” he said.
The plane appeared to break up before the crash and scattered debris over several blocks. The tail fin was found in Jamaica Bay, the body of water that also abuts the southern edge of JFK airport. A portion of one of the two jet engines fell in flames outside a Texaco station, barely missing the gas pumps.
Parts of its twin ripped into a house four blocks away, setting the house and garage on fire but sparing the family inside. The bulk of the fuselage, which some witnesses said nose-dived into the ground, landed on six houses.
Planes rerouted, grounded
The crash forced the nation’s airlines to temporarily ground or reroute dozens of flights, disrupting travel across the eastern half of the country. But there were no widespread disruptions, and most airlines resumed normal operations by midday.
A cold, cloudless Monday had barely begun for the residents of Rockaway’s tiny Belle Harbor neighborhood, as they eased into a holiday morning of running errands, fixing breakfast, readying for work and attending church services.
To some, the earliest hint of a problem came in the deep and unfamiliar groan of a plane flying lower than the usual flight path overhead. Looking north from kitchen windows and driveways, they first glimpsed the wounded plane swinging wildly from side to side, engine pieces and other flaming debris falling into the trees. Then the fuselage, partially in flames, barreled into a cluster of houses.
A thunderous crash launched a column of black smoke hundreds of feet in the air, instantly igniting as many as a dozen homes, while sending people and furniture tumbling in houses more than half a mile away.
Smoke fills neighborhood
The narrow oceanfront neighborhood–only four blocks wide from the bay to the Atlantic Ocean–rapidly filled with smoke. Panicked residents poured into the street from homes and shops, while members of the neighborhood’s many police and fire personnel reached for garden hoses and emergency equipment.
More than the usual number of children were playing outside that morning, as two neighborhood schools just blocks from the crash site sat empty for Veterans Day.
A third school, home to nearly 100 Orthodox Jewish boarding students, had just started breakfast. Teachers at the Mercaz Hatorah School hurried their students two blocks to the ocean’s edge, for fear the growing fire would reach their building.
“It was pure black, the whole sky, everywhere you looked,” said sophomore Joseph Baumann, 15.
Speech therapist Joy Geraci, 25, was stepping into her car when the plane roared over her head, spitting fire from where a wing should have been. Blocks away, Eileen Farrell, 51, also was leaving for work when the foundering plane roared over her shoulder, sending sheets of metal debris raining down.
“This silver piece of metal was just floating and fluttering down,” Farrell said. “I thought, `Oh my God, it’s going to land right on this street.'”
Kneeling in prayer during mass at nearby St. Francis DeSales Church, Diane Erhard, 62, felt the ground shudder with a massive boom. Parishioners emptied into the street to find the sky blackening and flames climbing above the trees.
“All I could think was, `Oh, just let the children of this town be OK,'” Erhard said. “They have gone through so much already.” Later in the day, St. Francis, already the site of more than 10 memorial services for victims of Sept. 11, became a temporary morgue for the victims of Flight 587.
Standing at the counter of a Texaco station, oil delivery truck driver Ed DeVito was knocked to the floor and the station’s plate glass window shattered over him. As the store filled with smoke, DeVito crawled through the garage and out into the parking lot, where he saw a flaming metal hulk he recognized as an airplane engine. It lay just beside DeVito’s 4,000-gallon oil truck and just yards from the station’s gas pumps.
“Normally, I’d be standing right behind my truck, right where it fell, but today I just happened to be inside,” DeVito said later, as a crew of New York police officers plucked small scraps of plane debris that were wedged into the oil truck’s bumper, placing them in paper bags marked “Evidence.”
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At the United Nations, where Secretary of State Colin Powell attended a midmorning Security Council meeting on terrorism, pedestrian and vehicle entrances were sealed immediately after the crash. The UN complex on the East River reopened to accredited personnel about three hours later.
Ten worst U.S. air disasters
By number of fatalities (passengers and those killed on the ground)
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DATE LOCATION AIRLINE(S) DEATHS
Sept. 11, 2001 New York City American, United 4,304*
May 25, 1979 Chicago American 273
Nov. 12, 2001 New York City American 265**
July 17, 1996 Off East Moriches, N.Y. TWA 230
Oct. 31, 1999 Off Nantucket, Mass. EgyptAir 217
Sept. 11, 2001 Arlington, Va. American 189
Aug. 16, 1987 Romulus, Mich. Northwest 156
July 9, 1982 Kenner, La. Pan Am 153
Sept. 25, 1978 San Diego Pacific Southwest 144
Aug. 2, 1985 Dallas-Ft. Worth Delta 135
%%
* City estimate that includes number confirmed dead and number missing.
** Preliminary estimate that includes only those on board the aircraft.
Sources: Associated Press, airsafetyonline.com
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