The Washington Post and associated press
NEW YORK — Federal investigators said Monday they had found no evidence so far of terrorist involvement in the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, and were looking instead at the loss of one or both of the jetliner’s General Electric turbine engines.
The jetliner, a European-made Airbus A300, en route to the Dominican Republic broke apart minutes after takeoff and crashed in the waterfront neighborhood of Rockaway Beach on Monday, engulfing homes in flames and sowing initial fears of a new terrorist atrocity. At least 265 people were killed, police said.
"Everything points to an accident," said Marion Blakey, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board. "The communications from the cockpit were normal up until the last few seconds before the crash."
But officials at the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI and the White House also said they could not rule out sabotage.
American Airlines said 260 people — 251 passengers, including five infants sitting on their parents’ laps, and nine crew members — were aboard the jetliner, and authorities said none survived. Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Dunne said 265 bodies had been recovered, but didn’t provide details on how many people might have died on the ground. He said six to nine people in the neighborhood were missing.
Investigators from the NTSB recovered the jetliner’s flight voice recorder and sent it to Washington, D.C., for analysis, officials said. George Black of the NTSB said the quality of the voice recording was good, and that the co-pilot was at the controls, which was not unusual.
Blakey said an initial listen to the recorder found nothing "to indicate a problem that is not associated with an accident."
As night fell in Rockaway, several hundred people working under the glare of klieg lights formed bucket brigades and separated luggage, plane parts and human remains for the debris. Police said the bodies were being recovered "relatively intact."
Flight 587 left Kennedy Airport at 9:14 a.m., 74 minutes late because of security checks put in place after the World Trade Center attack, American Airlines chairman Don Carty said. It took off into a clear blue sky.
There were no communications indicating trouble between the pilot and air-traffic controllers before the crash, according to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. U.S. intelligence agencies also did not receive any credible threats of terrorist attacks beforehand, officials said.
Three minutes later, the plane spiraled nose-first into the Rockaway Beach section of Queens, a middle-class neighborhood, 15 miles from Manhattan.
One smoking engine was found intact in a parking lot at a Texaco station two blocks from the crash site, where it had missed the gas pumps by no more than 6 feet; neighbors ran to the scene with garden hoses to help put out the fire. Part of the second engine was found another block away, in Kevin McKeon’s back yard after it crashed through his kitchen.
The vertical stabilizer — the tail fin — was pulled from Jamaica Bay, just offshore, Giuliani said.
The city, which was already on high alert because of the Trade Center catastrophe in lower Manhattan, reacted immediately. Fighter jets patrolled the skies; bridges, tunnels and all three major airports were closed for a time; the Empire State Building was evacuated.
"People should remain calm," Giuliani said. "We’re just being tested one more time, and we’re going to pass this test, too."
Before the crash, flames were seen shooting out of the left engine and witnesses said the plane had difficulty climbing and was banking to the left.
The plane was given a routine maintenance check Sunday night, and investigators were checking who had access to the plane during those hours. The plane had another, more intensive check on Oct. 3.
The Airbus had two CF6-80C2 engines made by General Electric. In March, the FAA directed airlines to inspect such engines for possible cracks in turbine rotor discs. The cracks could cause the discs to fly apart and prompt engine failure, the FAA said. The alert was issued after the FAA received a report of an engine failure during a maintenance run on the ground.
Jet engines have been known to break up catastrophically, hurling shrapnel. In 1989, for example, a United Airlines DC-10 with GE-built engines crashed in Sioux City, Iowa, killing 112 people, after the metal hub that held the engine’s fan blades shattered and ruptured the jet’s hydraulic lines.
Investigative sources said late Monday that the airplane’s engines and its vertical tail section, which were found apart from the main fuselage, appear to have broken away from the aircraft before the crash.
In the past, some airliners have suffered the sudden separation of one engine while in flight, but both engines on a twin-engine jet breaking away is extraordinary — and raises the possibility of either sabotage or a major maintenance failure, the investigative sources said.
"We’re utterly baffled," said one official. "This is not even within statistical calibrations."
Investigators from the NTSB and the FBI combed the wreckage Monday in search of clues, paying special attention to mapping the patterns and condition of the debris.
Officials said FBI investigators would conduct tests for the telltale chemicals that would be left behind if explosives blew up the plane. One senior FBI official, however, said there was no immediate evidence of an explosion.
"The way it’s going now, that’s the direction we appear to be headed this time," the official said early Monday afternoon. "The evidence so far points to an accident of some kind, not terrorism."
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