AIR CRASH RESCUE NEWS:
November 12, 2001 - Officials: Crash Likely an Accident.
WASHINGTON (USA) - An accident rather than terrorism probably caused an
American Airlines jet to plunge into a neighborhood in New York, federal
officials said Monday. Investigators focused on an engine that fell away from
the doomed plane.
The investigators swiftly reviewed the plane's maintenance records, but
initially found ``nothing indicative of a specific problem,'' said director
Marion Blakey of the National Transportation Safety Board. Officials located
the flight data recorder and rushed it to the nation's capital for analysis.
``All information we have currently is that this is an accident,'' said
Blakey, as the Bush administration sent experts to the scene.
While the crash was horrific - the plane carried 255 people to their deaths,
and wreckage set several homes on fire in Queens - the preliminary assessment
seemed a relief of sorts for a nation struggling to recover from the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks and an outbreak of mail-spread anthrax.
President Bush was handed a note informing him of the crash moments after it
occurred, and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge moved quickly to the White
House Situation room to confer by telephone with FBI Director Robert S.
Mueller and others. Officials gave some consideration to shutting down the
nation's air travel system, as was done after the September attacks in New
York and Washington, but decided against it after sifting through the
available information.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said at the White House there had been no
unusual communications between the cockpit and air traffic officials on the
ground. He also said there had been no credible threats against airplanes in
advance of the crash.
Fleischer declined to rule out terrorism but said he would not dispute the
assessment of other officials who had said privately there was no preliminary
evidence that terrorists had been involved.
Blakey made her comments a short while later.
The president spoke by phone with New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Gov.
George Pataki. In a remarkable sign of the times, Giuliani said he had asked
the president for ``air cover'' to protect his wounded city.
Blakey said debris fell over a wide area of Queens, a few miles from the
airport where Dominican Republic-bound American Airlines Flight 587 plane
took off. She noted there were reports of some wreckage recovered in Jamaica
Bay.
Witnesses said there may have been an explosion on board the plane.
``It's too early for me to advance theories on this,'' Blakey said. But she
noted in response to a question that engine parts were scattered ``some
distance from the actual crash crater.''
At least one of the engines, believed to be from the right side, fell intact
on a gas-station parking lot. American Airlines said the left engine on
Flight 587 was freshly overhauled and the right engine was about due for
maintenance after nearly 10,000 hours of operation.
General Electric Aircraft Engines, the Cincinnati-based subsidiary of General
Electric Co., sent two experts to the crash site to assist federal
investigators. GE manufactured the CF6-80C2 jet engines - the same model as
those installed on Air Force One - that were mounted on the underside of each
wing of the doomed flight.
``There are eyewitness reports that they saw the engine on fire and it
reportedly landed in a separate place from the main body of the wreckage,''
said Susan Coughlin, a former vice chairwoman for the NTSB and now chief
operating officer of American Trucking Associations Foundation. ``That would
certainly prompt the investigators to figure out why.''
A Chicago-based lawyer, Tom Ellis of the Nolan Law Group, said photographs of
the surviving engine showed ``pretty clear evidence of an uncontained engine
failure.'' His firm sued on behalf of victims of United Airlines Flight 232,
which crashed in 1989 in Sioux City, Iowa, after an earlier version of the
CF6 engine came apart in flight. So-called ``uncontained engine failures''
can result in an explosion of metal fragments as damaging as shrapnel from a
bomb.
Earlier this year, on May 18, a problem with the same type of engine forced
the emergency landing of a Monarch Airlines passenger jet in Portugal.
Documents from the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch said a rotor
blade snapped, puncturing the engine's housing with a 3-inch hole and causing
minor damage to the wing. The pilots reported dramatic vibration, and British
officials reported there had been ``several similar failures prior to this
event.''
The FAA ordered airlines in June to begin regularly inspecting these types of
engines for cracks in certain rotor disks, a component within the engines,
after the dramatic failure of one engine when maintenance crews set it to
high power during testing on the ground.
Last year, the FAA also ordered airlines to replace a fuel tube within these
engines to prevent high-pressure leaks that investigators warned could result
in an engine fire and damage to the airplane. Also last year, the FAA ordered
carriers to remove certain fan shafts within these engines earlier than
planned to prevent possible catastrophic failure.
GE spokesman Rick Kennedy said American completed all these inspections and
repairs. ``Airworthiness directives'' from the FAA mandating such repairs are
relatively common.
GE has built 2,954 of these engines - first introduced in 1984 - and they are
among the best-selling for wide-bodied aircraft. Kennedy called the CF6
engines ``phenomenally reliable,'' and said they have been installed on more
than 1,000 planes worldwide.
