American Airlines Flight 587: The New York City Plane Crash That Happened Right After 9/11
FAAAmerican Airlines Flight 587 crashed into a Queens neighborhood.
Just two months after the 9/11 attacks in New York City, another plane crash rattled the metropolis. On Nov. 12, 2001, American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens shortly after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. Though the timing of the crash spawned fears of another terrorist attack — and al-Qaeda briefly claimed that the plane had been blown up — the crash was due to human error.
American Airlines Flight 587 took off from JFK Airport at 9:14 a.m., rising in the sky as it prepared for its journey toward Las Américas International Airport in the Dominican Republic. Just moments later, it was spinning toward the Earth. The first officer shouted, “What the hell are we into, we’re stuck in it!” as the captain exclaimed, “Get out of it, get out of it!”
But the flight crew was unable to stabilize the plane. Flight 587 plummeted down and crashed into a row of houses in Belle Harbor, Queens, killing all 260 people onboard, as well as five people on the ground. Many of the victims were Dominican New Yorkers, traveling to visit loved ones on a flight path that most of them knew well and had taken often.
“Every Dominican in New York has either taken that flight or knows someone who has,” Belkis Lora, whose brother Jose perished in the crash, told The Guardian. “It gets you there early. At home there are songs about it.”
NTSBThe plane’s vertical stabilizer, which had fallen into Jamaica Bay.
But while many initially feared that American Airlines Flight 587 had been taken down by terrorists, an investigation proved that the fault largely lay with the plane’s first officer, 34-year-old Sten Molin.
After the aircraft took off, Molin had unnecessarily used the plane’s rudder system. He was seemingly trying to compensate for the wake turbulence caused by another flight, which had taken off just before American Airlines Flight 587. But Molin had been reprimanded by senior officers twice before for “overreacting” over wake turbulence, and in this case, his overreaction proved catastrophic. It caused undue stress on the plane’s vertical stabilizer, which fell off, followed shortly by the plane’s engines.
Tragically, one of the victims onboard, Hilda Yolanda Mayol, had just recently survived the 9/11 attacks after escaping the North Tower of the World Trade Center. And on the day of her fatal plane crash, The Guardian reports that she was traveling with her family, hoping to spend time in the Dominican Republic specifically to help her heal from that trauma.
