American Airlines Flight 587 was a regularly scheduled international passenger flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City, to Las Américas International Airport, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. On November 12, 2001, the Airbus A300 flying the route crashed into the neighborhood of Belle Harbor on the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens, New York City, shortly after takeoff, killing all 251 passengers and 9 crew members aboard, as well as five people on the ground. to have occurred in the United States, behind the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 in 1979,
The location of the accident, and that it took place only two months after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in nearby Manhattan, initially spawned fears of another terrorist attack, but the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) attributed the disaster to the first officer's overuse of rudder controls in response to wake turbulence from a preceding Japan Airlines Boeing 747-400 that took off minutes before it. According to the NTSB, the aggressive use of the rudder controls by the first officer, the result of a flawed training scenario that overexaggerated the effects of wake turbulence, stressed the vertical stabilizer until the rudder was ripped from the aircraft. The airliner's two engines also separated from the aircraft before impact due to the intense forces.
Aircraft and crew
The accident aircraft, registration was an Airbus A300 B4-605R delivered new to American Airlines on 12 July 1988. The aircraft's first flight was on 9 December 1987, and it was the first "R" model A300-600 built. On the day of the accident, it was in a two-class seating configuration with space for 251 passengers, and all seats were filled: 16 business-class seats and 235 economy-class seats. On board were nine crew members, including 42-year-old Captain Edward States,