Associated Press
NEW YORK – Neither turbulence from another jet nor pressure placed on the rudder by a desperate pilot should have been enough to snap off the tail of Flight 587, aviation experts said Friday – raising the prospect that something was wrong with the plane before it left the ground.
“I think there was a pre-existing structural problem with the tail,” said Greg Feith, a former National Transportation Safety Board investigator. “It was going to fail regardless. It just so happened the conditions were right.”
The American Airlines Airbus A300 plunged into a New York neighborhood Monday shortly after taking off from Kennedy Airport for the Dominican Republic. The crash killed all 260 people aboard and five on the ground.
The cause of the crash has not been determined, but investigators have focused on the jetliner’s tail assembly, which came off sometime before the crash.
NTSB chairman Marion Blakey said the frantic efforts of the pilots aboard Flight 587 to save the plane also should provide clues to what went wrong.
“We do know, just from what we can see on the flight data recorder, that the pilots were trying to actively fly that plane out of the problem,” Blakey said, cautioning that this does not imply pilot error. Investigators have already suggested the pilots wouldn’t have known the tail fin was missing.
“It seems to me this was a very extraordinary crash. In fact, we don’t have a parallel,” Blakey said before she and other investigators left New York for Washington, D.C., where the inquiry will continue for months.
Investigators say Flight 587 shook violently from side to side after encountering two wakes generated by a Japan Air Lines 747 that took off about two minutes earlier from the same runway at Kennedy. Because of its size and weight, the four-engine 747 generates heavy turbulence.
While Flight 587 was more than four miles behind the JAL jumbo jet, as required by FAA regulations, NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said the agency was looking at whether to suggest keeping planes farther apart, since wakes dissipate over distance.
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