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U.S. Investigators Say Accident Cause of Fatal Airbus Crash
WASHINGTON, Nov 13 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Investigators for the moment are treating the crash of an American Airlines passenger jet in New York as an accident rather than an act of terrorism, officials said Monday.
"We're treating it as a flight accident. But that is subject to change as we learn more," said William Schumann, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.
"All evidence indicates that the crash was an accident," said Marion Blakey, chairwoman for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
All 265 people onboard were killed when American Flight 587, an Airbus A300, slammed into a residential area of Queens, New York City, shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport. The airliner was bound for Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic.
Five people on the ground are also reported missing.
NTSB investigators were on the scene late Monday, but Schumann said it was likely the FBI would be drafted to help the probe.
The NTSB, an independent federal body responsible for investigating plane crashes, makes recommendations to the FAA based on its findings.
Concerns about terrorism emerged because the crash follows by two months the use of hijacked airliners as weapons against New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon near Washington D.C.
However, investigators and officials said it appeared the latest crash was an accident rather than an act of terrorism, with early signs pointing to a catastrophic mechanical failure onboard the plane, especially after they became aware that the pilot dumped fuel into Jamaica Bay seconds after take-off - indicating he became aware of a mechanical failure.
Investigators have recovered the plane's flight-data recorder.
New York Senator Charles Schumer also reiterated that, "signs are beginning to point to an accident as opposed to a terrorist act."
He said crash investigators had told him they were confident that within a few days they would determine the cause of the disaster.
"Not only the black box, but most of the plane has been found. To have this amount of amount of material is rare."
Flight 587 left Kennedy at 9:14 am (1414 GMT), and radio contact was lost three minutes later, FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto said.
The aircraft, an A300-600 with the capacity to hold 266 passengers, was delivered new to American Airlines in July 1988, and was powered by two General Electric CF6-80C2A5 turbofan engines, Airbus said in a statement.
Eyewitness reports suggested one of those engines had tumbled from the doomed plane before it crashed, President George W. Bush said.
Concerns about the safety of the General Electric engines have emerged from recent incidents leading the FAA in June to order more frequent inspections for cracks in the high-pressure turbine discs.
The NTSB recommended the additional inspections after a General Electric CF6 on a U.S. Airways Boeing 767 broke apart during a ground maintenance test in September 2000 due to a crack in a turbine disc.
Also, in July 1998, another American Airbus A300 using the same kind of engine was forced to return to San Juan, Puerto Rico, after developing an engine fire in flight which the NTSB blamed on a maintenance failure. Twenty-eight passengers were slightly injured in that incident.
Meanwhile, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani confirmed that five people on the ground were reported missing and that the bodies of 262 people were recovered.
"We recovered 262 bodies yesterday. We think there are five people missing on the ground, in addition to the people on the airplane," but that number could grow, the mayor told CNN television.
Investigators have recovered the plane's cockpit voice recorder, not the flight data reporter as indicated Monday by New York Governor George Pataki and Giuliani, and have sent it to be analyzed by experts in Washington.
The recorder "shows nothing that would imply any unusual activity in the cockpit," NTSB official George Black said on ABC television Tuesday morning. "There was no sound of anything we would believe to be an unusual sound."
Black added a second "black box" was recovered from the crash site, but it was a black box - not an orange box, the standard color of airplane data recorders.
Twelve houses were hit, including four which were destroyed, Giuliani said Monday. One was damaged when an engine of the doomed plane, almost intact, sliced into it. Other wreckage just missed a gas station.
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