American Airlines Flight 587
N14053, the aircraft involved in the accident, at Miami International Airport in 1989.
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| Accident summary | |
|---|---|
| Date | November 12, 2001 |
| Summary | Tail structure failure due to co-pilot error while encountering wake turbulence, incorrect pilot training |
| Site | Queens, New York City, United States |
| Passengers | 251 |
| Crew | 9 |
| Fatalities | 265 (all 260 on board; 5 on the ground) |
| Injuries (non-fatal) | 1 (on the ground) |
| Survivors | 0 |
| Aircraft type | Airbus A300B4-605R |
| Operator | American Airlines |
| Registration | N14053 |
| Flight origin |
John F. Kennedy Int'l Airport New York City, United States |
| Destination |
Las Américas Int'l Airport Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic |
 Photos of N14053 at Airliners.net
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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 A300-600 flying the route crashed into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, a borough of New York City, shortly after takeoff. All 260 people on board the flight were killed, along with five people on the ground. It is the second-deadliest aviation incident in New York state; the second-deadliest aviation incident involving an Airbus A300, after Iran Air Flight 655; and the second-deadliest aviation accident to occur on U.S. soil, after American Airlines Flight 191. No commercial airplane crash since then that was ruled accidental and not criminal has surpassed that death toll, though before 2001, there had been deadlier incidents of this type.
The location of the accident and the fact that it took place two months and one day after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan initially spawned fears of another terrorist attack. 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, or jet wash, from a Japan Airlines Boeing 747-400 that took off minutes before it. According to the NTSB, this aggressive use of the rudder controls by the co-pilot caused the vertical stabilizer to snap off the plane. The plane's two engines also separated from the aircraft before it hit the ground.
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Wikipedia