The crash of flight 587

A jetliner with 260 people aboard plummeted into the Rockaways yesterday, killing all aboard and leaving six to nine people missing on the ground in Belle Harbor, a neighborhood still torn by grief from the World Trade Center tragedy.

On a crystal-clear November morning, American Flight 587 - bound for the Dominican Republic and running more than 70 minutes late - took off from Kennedy Airport at 9:14 a.m. and crashed three minutes later, destroying or damaging at least 11 houses in the cozy enclave called home by generations of Irish and Jewish families.

Authorities did not definitively rule out terrorism as the crash's cause, and were focusing on the jet's engines, both of which were recovered in Belle Harbor.

Last night, a senior Bush administration official said, "It's looking like it's not a terrorist attack."

Marion Blakey, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, agreed. "At this stage, we believe all indications are that this is an accident," Blakey said at a 10:30 p.m. news briefing, after a preliminary study of the cockpit voice recorder recovered from the crash scene. "The communications were normal from the cockpit up until the last few seconds before the crash."

Many in the area said they witnessed the plane's demise.

"I heard a plane that didn't sound right. It was rumbling," said Susan Locke, publisher of The Wave newspaper in Rockaway Beach. "I looked out of the window, and I saw the silver front of the plane nose-dive to the ground.

"Then," she said, "plumes of black smoke were everywhere."

Some barely escaped death when the plane crashed, as dangerous debris scattered across a wide area that ran from Beach 131st to Beach 128th streets, bounded on the south by Newport Avenue, and on the north by Cronston Avenue.

Kevin McKeon had just hugged his daughter Shannon, 5, and was walking through his kitchen to leave for work when the plane hit his house. It felt, he said, as if "the walls were blowing off" as the impact of the crash tossed him and his daughter into the back yard and his wife into the living room.

A section of the jetliner's wing ended up in the McKeons' basement, while an engine piece ripped through the back of the three-story house and slammed into the free-standing garage, which was set afire. The McKeon family escaped with only bruises and scratches.

Residents of the Rockaways, still deep in mourning for the scores of firefighters and other residents of the peninsula who perished in the World Trade Center attacks, could hardly believe their eyes.

"Oh, God, it was so horrible," said Eileen Dolan, who was headed home after walking her dog on the beach. "There were flames. There were flames coming out of the plane, and then it fell."

At a news briefing last night, authorities said they had recovered remains of 265 people as "relatively intact bodies" and 181 body parts. None of the bodies had been positively identified, NYPD First Deputy Commissioner Joseph Dunne said.

A city detective who interviewed about 60 eyewitnesses related one of the first collective accounts of the crash. "They saw the tail fall off and flames shoot out, and they saw one engine drop, another engine drop, and the plane just nosedive," said the detective, who asked not to be named. "If the plane hit like a landing, it would have been so much worse. It just nosedived, like a bomb."

Among the many bodies at the principal impact site, he said, was a woman holding a baby.

Last night, recovery workers labored under the glare of klieg lights, separating debris into piles of human remains, plane parts and luggage.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, at an afternoon news conference, said that while he didn't want to "minimize" the effects of the crash, it could have "been far worse - even the way in which the plane landed in one defined area" contained the damage.

Meanwhile, Roberto Valentin, a Dominican ambassador at large, said he believed 90 percent of Flight 587's passengers were Dominican, headed to their native land.

The flight voice recorder, one of two so-called "black boxes" aboard the plane - the other being a data recorder - was recovered by mid-afternoon and flown to Washington, where NTSB officials were analyzing its contents.

George Black, an NTSB board member, said at last night's briefing that the voice recorder had "good quality data that starts at the gate." He said the first officer, not the captain, was at the jet's controls.

Air traffic control sources said there was no indication from the cockpit that anything was wrong. Controllers lost radar contact with Flight 587 at 9:17 a.m., when it was traveling at 2,800 feet and 266 knots - a slightly higher speed than authorized at that low altitude.

"Everything seemed normal, and there was no indication on anybody's frequency that anything was wrong," one source said.

Fighter jets flying round-the-clock patrols over New York City, as well as a military surveillance plane, did not pick up any distress calls from the plane, a Pentagon source said.

"We didn't hear about it until after they lost contact with it," one defense official said, referring to air traffic controllers.

There were 246 ticketed passengers and nine crew members on the American Airlines flight. Last night, airline officials said five infants also were on the jet, traveling on people's laps as allowed under FAA regulations.

By early evening, a morgue had been established at Floyd Bennett Field, across the Marine Parkway Bridge from the peninsula, and families of those missing from the neighborhood had gathered at Levine's Washington Hotel, where the city was providing grief counseling and assistance. A temporary triage center also had been set up at PS 114.

Meanwhile, the heartbroken families of those aboard Flight 587 traveled either to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, the trauma unit to which injured were taken, or to the Ramada Plaza Hotel, where American Airlines established a family assistance center.

"Many of these people said goodbye to their children or families at the airport. Now their lives are tragically altered," said Dr. Anthony Maffia, vice president of psychiatry at Jamaica Hospital who was leading one of two teams of mental therapists dispatched to the Ramada.

Some family members were driving home when they heard of the disaster on the radio, Maffia said. Others had arrived home and turned on the television to see the first reports, which showed an ink-black plume of smoke from the crash. Still others had not yet left the airport.

The Airbus A-300, which had been cleared to climb to 13,000 feet, followed its normal flight path upon takeoff from Runway 31 Left, heading northwest and then making a wide arc to the south.

At this point, witnesses reported hearing one or two explosions before the crash. Others said they heard little if any noise. Some saw flames; others did not.

"I heard two explosions. When I saw it, it was pretty close to hitting the ground," said Cynthia Kempner, who was in her home on Beach 127th Street. "The airplane was not on fire. It looked clean ...

"My house was rumbling. After the impact, it rumbled a little more and it shook my house," Kempner said. "Then it was like mayhem. I tried calling 911. I couldn't get through."

Chief Andy McCracken, the chief uniformed officer of the Emergency Medical Service, found the scene almost incomprehensible.

"The footprint of the devastation is unbelievable because it's so small, considering the size of the plane and the area," McCracken said. "It could have been so much more devastating. We have a church right next to a full-time school nearby."

St. Francis de Sales Church, about a block and a half away, has been the scene recently of more than 10 memorial services for victims of the World Trade Center attack. The church also has a school, but hundreds of children were not attending because of the Veterans Day holiday.

The city, on a state of high alert since the Sept. 11 Trade Center attack, scrambled immediately in response to the jetliner crash. Giuliani, who learned of the crash three to four minutes after it occurred, talked by phone to President George W. Bush.

Authorities, meanwhile, took immediate emergency action.

The Federal Aviation Administration suspended flights at Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports, as well as smaller area airports, and the city's bridges and tunnels were closed. In midtown, the Empire State Building - now the city's tallest structure - was evacuated and later closed for the day.

The United Nations, where the General Assembly is in session, was partially locked down. Even as reports of the crash came in, Secretary General Kofi Annan continued to meet with leaders of other countries about Afghanistan.

A spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command said commanders scrambled fighter jets to patrol the skies over parts of the United States immediately after the crash.

Additional planes were sent into the skies over the city, joining those aloft on round-the-clock patrol since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The planes already on patrol over New York were diverted to the crash site and arrived in less than 10 minutes.

The scrambled planes returned to base after several hours and, by 1:30 p.m., nearly all of the emergency measures had been lifted. Bridges and tunnels again were open to traffic, and the FAA lifted flight restrictions at the airports. Departures remained grounded at Kennedy until 6:30 p.m., when the final remaining flight restriction was lifted.

Firefighters last night continued their mop-up of Belle Harbor, and investigators scoured the streets for pieces of the plane and other debris.

One of the jet's engines landed at a Texaco gas station on Beach 129th Street, while another landed four blocks away, Giuliani said at an evening news conference. One larger piece of the plane pulled from Jamaica Bay, initially believed to be a wing, was the plane's vertical stabilizer, or tail fin, authorities said.

Gov. George Pataki said there were "conflicting" reports that the pilot had dumped fuel before the crash. But an Airbus spokesman, Mark Luginbill, said the plane was not capable of dumping fuel.

FAA records show the Airbus A300 series with 47 reports of service difficulty, involving engine troubles, since 1990. In at least four instances, an engine failed or caught fire during takeoff. In a fifth case, an engine fire started after the plane pushed back from terminal. And in a sixth event, a takeoff was aborted because of "overspeed" on the engine, which was subsequently replaced.

In each of those cases, the Airbus was equipped with a General Electric CF6 engine. The CF6-80C2 engines mounted on the undersides of Flight 587's wings were of that family of engines - and the same model as those installed on Air Force One.

Two hundred firefighters responded to the scene, along with hundreds of police officers, EMS workers, EMTs and personnel from the Office of Emergency Management.

Patrick Sullivan - a retired police officer and resident of Breezy Point, another Rockaway neighborhood that lost scores of residents in the Trade Center catastrophe - was driving south over the Marine Parkway Bridge with a friend when they spotted smoke.

He drove toward Newport Avenue and Beach 132nd Street. "I looked down the street and saw the engine," said Sullivan, whose 28-year-old son, also named Patrick, is missing in the Sept. 11 attack on the Trade Center.

Sullivan jumped from his car and began running from house to house, knocking on doors. "It was an inferno," he said. Along the street, he saw five to six wood-frame homes engulfed in flames.

Winds off the ocean pushed fire and smoke away from remaining homes, allowing firefighters to move in close, he said. Construction workers at a nearby work site came to help as firefighters unfurled their hoses.

The mood among those rescuers, Sullivan said, seemed different than that of recent weeks. "After the Twin Towers," he said, "this one was something they could fight."

DAY OF DISASTER

From crash to lockdown and back:

9:14 a.m. - American Airlines Flight 587 takes off from Kennedy Airport for Santo Domingo, 74 minutes late.

9:17 - Flight 587 crashes in Belle Harbor on the Rockaway Peninsula; Fire Department gets call.

9:20 - Mayor Rudolph Giuliani notified.

9:30 - Empire State Building begins evacuation and is later closed for the day.

9:42 - FAA orders all flights halted at Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports.

9:52 - Port Authority Office of Emergency Management closes Lincoln and Holland tunnels, Port Authority bus terminal, George Washington Bridge and the Outerbridge, Goethals and Bayonne bridges.

10:10 - UN chief of security Michael McCann announces news of crash over public address system and says United States has stopped all vehicles and pedestrians from entering UN complex.

10:17 - Port Authority reopens New Jersey-bound crossings.

10:20 - City Department of Transportation closes other bridges and tunnels to incoming traffic.

11:15 - At UN, the 46th Street entrance is open to pedestrians.

11:30 - FAA lifts air restrictions for metro area airports except Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark.

Noon - Bridges and tunnels reopen. Port Authority bus terminal reopens. At UN, 42nd Street entrance opens to pedestrians.

1:30 p.m. - FAA lifts flight restrictions at LaGuardia and Newark airports, allowing resumption of incoming and outgoing flights. FAA keeps partial restriction at Kennedy Airport, allowing arriving flights only.