American Airlines Flight 587 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City to Santo Domingo's Las Américas International Airport in the Dominican Republic. On November 12, 2001, the Airbus A300 operating the route crashed into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, a borough of New York City, shortly after takeoff. All 260 people on board were killed, along with five people on the ground. It is the second-deadliest aviation incident involving an A300 after Iran Air Flight 655 and the second-deadliest aviation accident to occur on U.S. soil after American Airlines Flight 191. Currently, it ranks as the thirteenth worst air disaster in aviation history.
The accident took place only two months and one day after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Several factors, such as the date, time, aircraft size, airline, eyewitness accounts, and location in New York, raised concerns that the crash was caused by another terrorist attack. According to Northeast Intelligence Network, Al-Qaeda listed the crash among its successes, and a Canadian militant cooperating with authorities suggested that it had been brought down with a shoe bomb. Nonetheless, terrorism was officially ruled out as the cause by the National Transportation Safety Board, which instead attributed the disaster to the first officer's overuse of rudder controls in response to wake turbulence released by a Japan Airlines Boeing 747-400.
Read more about American Airlines Flight 587: Summary of The Accident, Investigation, Aftermath, Victims, Memorial, Cultural Background, Television Documentaries
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