First of all, my condolences go out to the denizens of New York City - how the same crap can happen in such a short space of time is beyond me.
Anyhoo, is it just me or is it a tad suspicious how the tail section AND the engine fell off? In isolation, these events are plausable. But both - on the same plane? In New York City?
Something smells rotten in the state of New York.
Think about it - the security measures that have been taken by the FAA have only focused on what sort of passengers are allowed on planes. There has been no mention of any security checks on airline staff.
Maybe it’s not terrorist-related, but it is highly dubious that this was just one of those random things that happens.
Yes, but two major failures occurring simultaneously? On the same plane? At two different ends of the plane?
Anyone that doesn’t possess even a skerrick of doubt over the plausibility of such failure occuring, without at least some sort of interference to the plane itself, may well belong in the same category of people that feel that Dubya is an articulate man with excellent public speaking skills.
Actually, it now appears that the failure of the vertical stabilizer led to the loss of the engines. Got this off the AP wire.
Feith said it was evident that the engines did not fail. “They were not the catalyst of this accident, but were the result of the tail failure which imposed very extreme aerodynamic stresses on the engines that caused them to separate from the wings”.
Greg Feith is a former NTSB inspector.
Now the real question is what caused the vertical stab to fail. Was it structural failure, poor maintenance or, in an unlikely eventuality, sabotage? It would seem that since the CVR does not contain any aural evidence of a bomb blast, nor is there any exterior evidence of a bomb, the chance that an internal explosion caused this is remote. IANA NTSB investigator, but it looks like this accident was the result of a catastrophic structural failure. This does not bode well for Airbus or AA maintenance. Wouldn’t surprise me if you see the grounding of the A300 fleet sometime soon for immediate inspection and modification.
The news is now saying that the tail failure may have been the result of “wake turbulence” from another aircraft, a 747, that took off immediately before the plane that crashed.
I disagree. Looked at purely dispassionately, a couple of things spring to mind:
It’s easy – human nature, in fact – to look at this crash in combination with the events of Sept. 11 and treat them as all of a kind. But they aren’t; the Sept. 11 events were deliberate actions and therefore anomalous. So it isn’t as if there has been a spate of “airliner crashes,” per se, in NYC.
Most airline crashes – at least in the United States – happen pretty far from population centers. Usually, the planes plummet into the sea, or into a large plot of empty land, just based on airports and flight paths. The only major crashes that spring to my mind that took place in major population centers were the AA DC-10 in Chicago, 1979; the Northwest MD-80 in Detroit, 1987; and the Air Florida 737 in Washington DC, 1982.
Given that, a plane crashing in NYC seems shocking and unusual, but honestly, with the number of flights in and out of there every day, it’s surprising if it doesn’t eventually happen. It’s happened before, too, in 1960.
Does anyone remember the crash of 747 Flight 800 a few years ago? There was no way that it could be anything but a terrorist’s bomb that brought down the Jumbo, an aircraft with a decades-long record of reliability and outstanding performance. And yet careful investigation showed that the explosion was caused by frayed wires in a fuel tank. No terrorists.
Pilots love to play Amateur Sleuth after crashes. I’ve done it myself. It’s just too early to say; not only for us, but also for the NTSB. (But the theory of a structural failure of the empannage that lead to the seperation of the engine and the crash seems reasonable to me. – “Amateur Sleuth”)
I can understand that the events of Sept 11 may cause a possible clouding of judgement. However, it may also add some valuable context to this most recent tragedy.
I’m not questioning the fact that the plane crashed. Plane crashes are an unfortunate fact of life. The nature of the mechanical failure is definitely suspect.
Whilst I admit that I am not an aviation engineer, I fail to see how the detachment of the tail section could somehow cause the subsequent detachment of an engine. If it was failure of the vertical stabiliser, then why did an individual engine fall off?
I still smell a rat, and reading the link given by yojimbo only strengthens my suspicions
The NTSB does not believe that the tail and the engine(s) were lost at the same time. It appears that the tail was lost first.
Maybe because engines are designed to detach under certain circumstances. Those huge engines are attached with 4 - 5 bolts the size of your pinky. They are designed to shear off if sufficient torque is applied. This is so that if an engine seizes, the gyroscopic torque doesn’t rip a section of the wing off.
When the tail was lost, there would be no way to control the plane and the stresses induced by the plane going out of control, could easily caused the engine to become detached.
yojimbo’s link was to a thread that was closed last night. A lot of additional information is available today. There was no mention in that thread about “wake effect” turbulance which is a focus of the investigation today.
I have NO expertise in the area of aviation, and I have NO inside information on the American Airlines airbus crash. SO, I will offer NO opinion as to what happened. I’ll gladly leave that determination to the pros.
My only concern involves how quick authorities were to assert that the disaster was an accident. It may well have been an accident! Evidence may show that in short order! If and when the proof is in, if the experts judge that it was an accident, I’ll accept their finding.
But the speed with which the government came to the conclusion that the crash was accidental leads me to believe that the feds are WAY too eager to assure us that all is well, and that their primary concer is avoiding panic, rather than finding out what really happened.
I suppose that’s understandable, post 9/11. If this had happened a few months ago, FAA spokespersons could have taken a few days (or even a few weeks) to announce their findings and conclusions, and nobody would have minded. But given how reluctant many people were to fly already, it seems to me they jumped the gun, and denied the possibility of terrorism or sabotage LONG before they had any real way of knowing what happened.
I’m not a fear-monger here. I have tickets to fly to New York this weekend, and I’m going without any hesitation. I merely wish the people in charge would just give us the facts- even if the facts are “we don’t know what happened just yet”- rather than try to bolster our confidence.
Though, frankly, SHOULD we feel safer getting on a plane, knowing that the problem was, say, bad maintenance or poor design?
Sorry, I didn’t realize that was a multiple page thread. It wasn’t locked until late this afternoon. I haven’t had a chance to wade through all 7 pages yet.
I’ll just say that it seems pretty clear that the tail failure was the cause of the crash (based on the debris pattern). Since the plane had minor maintenace the night before the crash, it could have been sabotage. It looks very unlikely that there was a bomb involved however. The NTSB has almost every piece of the plane and there is no evidence of an explosion. The tail section is in perfect condition except at the point of failure. The tail is made of composition materials and is going to be inspected by a materials expert tomorrow.
Think about it - the US Government wants to convince its people that everything is all fine and dandy again, and any hint of foul play would stifle their efforts to do this.
I think that the authorities were too quick to call it an ‘accident’. Maybe they think that right now, the people of US can’t really handle the truth.
Every quote from the NTSB I’ve read has been along the lines of “We see no signs of terrorism, but we’re ruling nothing out at this stage.”
Quoth CNN:
Or the good old BBC:
Insufficient data. But I’ve yet to hear any NTSB member rule out that it might be sabotage. Of course, some journalists might have dumbed down the message along the way, in fact that wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
If it’s a terrorist act, it’s a new MO - no explosives, no hijack. Unless of course you want to believe that the NTSB is along in the conspiracy and are fudging the flight recorders.
But Johnny, I know that is the official line thus far, but I’m not sure that that has been conclusively proven at all. Anecdotally speaking only, I don’t know of many aerospace engineers not working directly in the investigation who think that TWA 800 was not a bomb. It had all the classic hallmarks of Lockerbie (sp?), and the “official” explanation just misses too much.
I’m not an aero eng. - I’m a mech eng. I have no official standing, or any experience in aircraft structures at all. All I can say is that the explanation for TWA 800, the Swissair flight, and this one all seem…well, they set off my Suspicion Detector right away.
I’m not saying that they were terrorist acts, but good grief the official lines for these three crashes (thus far) seems lacking.