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Another Plane Down in New York
Another plane has crashed, this time in Queens. You can read a blurb at Yahoo.
CNN.com isn't responding for me. LaGuardia, Newark and JFK are closed now. Update: 11/12 14:54 GMT by T : New reports indicate that the plane was departing from JFK, not arriving. Also, CNN has confirmed that this was American Airlines flight 587, an Airbus A 300. Update: 11/12 14:57 GMT by T : Further information is that the plane was en route to the Dominican Republic, and that the disaster actually involves two crash sites, not just one -- an engine fell from the plane some distance from the fuselage.
CBC
Robots.cnn.com is a load balancing mirror for CNN. How long till they go barebones again?
Current headline:
An American Airlines plane has crashed in the Queens borough of New York City. The FAA identifies the flight as American flight 587, an Airbus A300 from JFK airport to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Thick smoke was billowing over the area, and local media reported several houses on fire.
The BBC news site is still responding, albeit slowly. news.bbc.co.uk Escoutaire When a dream dreams the dreamer, the dreams the real.
When a dream dreams the dreamer, the dreams the real.
For example: Canada's Globe & Mail
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
http://robots.cnn.com/2001/US/11/12/newyork.crash/ index.html
There's a direct URL, load balancing.
Since the CNN site is getting hammered (Don't they ever learn?) Here's the text:
American Airlines jet crashes in New York
November 12, 2001 Posted: 9:54 AM EST (1454 GMT)
NEW YORK (CNN) -- An American Airlines jet crashed Monday in the New York City borough of Queens.
CNN confirmed the plane was American Airlines Flight 587 from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The plane was an Airbus A-300. American Airlines did not immediately release the number of passengers on the flight.
A New York police spokesman said the plane crashed in the Rockaways section of Queens. At least four houses were on fire, and a huge plume of smoke could be seen rising from the site.
All three New York City-area airports -- Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark -- closed after the crash, according to CNN affiliate WCBS in New York. Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared a Level One emergency, mobilizing all available police, fire and emergency personnel.
For those that don't live in NYC there is a map of queens here
FYI: Far rockaways are very near JFK.
to reply to my own post, CNN has a different report now:
s h/ index.html
CNN confirmed the plane was American Airlines Flight 587 from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The plane was an Airbus A-300. American Airlines did not immediately release the number of passengers on the flight.
http://robots.cnn.com/2001/US/11/12/newyork.cra
I just heard on CNN (TV version) that the FAA doesn't believe it was a terrorist action.
:(
It is still a tragedy though
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
http://europe.cnn.com/2001/US/11/12/newyork.crash/ index.html
I'm watching this on TV right now (cnn.com still not responding). Some of the initial details have changed:
/leaving/ JFK for Dominican Rep.
- Not a 767, an Airbus A-300 (seats around 300 people)
- It was American Airlines flight 587;
- The crash site is a residential/shopping area (Rockaway Beach Blvd.)
- FAA issued an advisory saying that there is no indication (yet) of a terrorist attack.
- Bridges and tunnels in NYC have been closed.
------
--- I shall always be wherever I've been. - Winston Niles Rumfoord
Tell that to Wall Street; the Dow Jones dropped 200 points when the news broke. Makes you wonder if their machines are connected to siesmic sensors. :-(
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
* American Airlines flight crashes on takeoff in NYC borough of Queens
* FAA: American Flight 587 -- Airbus A300 -- from JFK airport to Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic
* NYC Port Authority: 246 passengers, 9 crew
* All NYC area airports closed, bridges and tunnels leading into city closed
* Affiliate WCBS reports at least 4 buildings on fire
* New York Fire Department dispatches 44 trucks, 200 firefighters
From a local TV station's site -- often a good secondary source of info when the big boys get overwhelmed.
t ai l.html
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/1069613/de
American Airlines Plane Crashes In New York
Four Homes On Fire
POSTED: 9:30 a.m. EST November 12, 2001
UPDATED: 10:13 a.m. EST November 12, 2001
NEW YORK -- An American Airlines Airbus A300 crashed Monday morning in the Queens section of New York, and four homes reportedly were on fire in the neighborhood in the Rockaway section of Queens.
The plane crashed shortly after 9 a.m. ET, and thick, black smoke could be scene in televised reports. It was reportedly headed to JFK, but the origin of the flight was undetermined.
Bill Schumann of the Federal Aviation Administration said there was no immediate indication of what caused the crash. He said the plane could hold up to 275 passengers, and crashed about five miles from Kennedy Airport. There were 246 passengers and 9 crewmembers aboard the flight, according to CNN.
Asked if terrorism is suspected, Schumann said that all options are open at the time and they have very little information. Defense officials said that while combat jets were flying over the sky as is routine, there were not any reports of suspicious activity or distress calls.
Television images show thick black smoke rising from the scene. The smoke was seen turning white, which could indicate that the flames were being put out.
Fox News Channel reports it was an American Airlines flight 587. All three New York City airports were closed to air travel. They include LaGuardia, JFK and Newark airports.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has canceled his morning events and is heading to the scene.
FAA said American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus A300, crashed. It was on its way to Santo Domingo Dominican Republic. CNN reported that the engine came down separate from the rest of the jetliner and that Giuliani confirmed that there are two separate crash sites. A witness said he saw an explosion on the side of the plane.
It was a "level 1" emergency, which means all emergency personnel are advised to go to the crash scene. All the major tunnels heading into New York have been closed.
Reports have varied throughout the morning. The FAA said there seems to be no indication of a terrorist attack.
A witness said he saw debris falling from the sky, at the scene of today's plane crash.
He told the Fox News Channel that four homes are on fire.
Another man told CNN that he was 40 blocks away, and saw "tons and tons of smoke." He said, "Lots of people are standing in the streets.
A woman who lives near the scene of the crash said she heard the engines of a plane -- "loud and low" -- before the crash.
Phyllis Paul told CNN she looked out the window to see a "silvery piece of metal" falling from the sky, several blocks away.
Then, she said, she heard an explosion.
She said she and her son went outside and saw the black smoke rising from the Queens crash site. She said it was "horrifying."
Paul said the sound of the plane gave her a "chill" -- because of what happened on Sept. 11.
The flight was an American Airlines jet, which had taken off from Kennedy Airport -- several miles from the crash site. It was headed to the Dominican Republic.
The crash came two months and a day after the attack on the World Trade Center.
The American Airlines phone number relatives information line is (800) 245-0999.
Lurking peacefully since 1997
Uh, Veterans Day was yesterday, November 11, the anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War. Today is just an observed holiday thingy.
--G
You have to take anything you hear from the FAA in the first couple of hours with a grain of salt. This being a federal holiday, there is nothing more than a skeleton crew at most FAA locations. None of the upper management are in today. They'll be in, but it will take them some time.
There are probably only 100 people on site at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center right now, out of 5000 or so... And most of them are security.
Casca
CNN live closed captioning is available at #CNN_Newsfeed at chat.cnn.com.
Try #CNN_Newsfeed on chat.cnn.com:6667 for a live feed of closed-captions off CNN.
If you'd rather not dork around trying to cut and paste it all into your browser See streets here At this writing it's slow.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I am an aerospace engineer, and I fly on A300s once a week. I also used to be involved in air safety and preventive maintainance for a military aviation.
Notes:
1. Single engine failure during take-off is the single worst design condition for a twin-jet like an A-300.
2. Single engine failures during take-off are always taken into account for any passenger aircraft. A simple engine
failure cannot bring down a jetliner.
3. What can bring down a jetliner is the consequences of an engine failure: fire in the wing, explosion of the wing fuel tanks, compound failure of all redundant hydraulic systems, pylon failure (which would expose fuel lines), etc.
However, most of the above reasons are well-known. Take-off is the hardest flight region, and most eventualities are taken into account into designing these birds.
Further, a quick search of NTSB's online air crash info database, reveals no incident involving an A-300 and engine failure in the last 5 yrs. This is not typical if a design error is to be blamed.
Thus, it can be two things: either a failure of preventive maintainance or sabotage. The former is possible, due to the recent massive layoffs in the airline business, but unlikely: airlines usually don't fire skilled personnel, and when/if they do, maintainance personnel tend to over-perform during times of crises.
Please stop assuming that somehow corners are cut when designing airliners or that aero engineers sit around saying "lets use combustive materials for this one, shall we"? We know that we only get one chance to avoid fatalities. Airliners are routinely designed with huge safety margins, usually on top of the worst-ever-recorded conditions.
Jet engines fall off by design. If a bird goes into the engine, the engine starts to come apart. There's lots of rotational energy there, and you want the engine to come off, rather than apply torque to the wing. The other case where you want the engine to come off is in a wheels up landing, because the engines hang below the body of the aircraft and, again, you want the engine to come off rather than the wing. Look at google for "engine fuse pin".
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Right! And Wrong. There is a company called Ballistic Recovery Systems that makes parachute systems for small general aviation planes. The system are designed to slow the descent of a powerless plane enough to make the impact survivable. They have proposed a similar system for airliner consisting of five 1600 pound chutes. The goal is not to let the airliner fall vertically, but rather to cancel enough weight to slow the airliner's best glide speed. Slowing the glide speed greatly increases the distance it can glide and makes the subsequent landing slower and more survivable.
Not true in this case (possibly others). The Airbus A300 has all of its hydraulics centered in the wing-engine region. An engine falls off and there's a better than 90% chance that you've lost all your hydraulics. Even with double redundancy for the hydraulics there's almost no way that you will NOT lose the hydraulic system, and thus any ability to control the plane. In the event of a general hydraulic system failure, you *could* control the plane via differential power (applying different amounts of power to each engine to perform basic navigation) - however with one engine dropped several kms behind you, you've got no hope in hell for controlling that plane.
"Content's a bitch."
it would be very irresponsable for us to jump to any conclusions. So nobody should be saying that it was, or was not, a terrioist attack.
Its true that planes do crash, and it is possible that this is a conicidence. But given the recent events, it would be just plain dumb to not take into consideration terriosm.
The AirBus A300 is a very reliable aircraft, and has been in use for 30 years.
We need to take the time to look at the facts, once the smoke clears.
"Flee at once, all is discovered."