DAVID LEARMOUNT / LONDON

US transport safety body says A300-600’s in-flight recorders reveal accident was not the result of a single event

Almost everything that happened to seal the fate of American Airlines’ flight AA587 appears to have taken place within 8s of the Airbus A300-600R’s second encounter with a wake vortex, according to the US National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) latest assessment of the aircraft’s on-board recorders.

All 260 people on the 12 November flight and five people on the ground are confirmed to have died.

During the 8s between crossing the wake of a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 and the flight data recorder (FDR) stopping, rudder deflections were simultaneous with three sideways accelerations from 0.3g to 0.8g, which the NTSB calls “significant” loads. It is not clear whether the tail fin, found away from the rest of the wreckage, had begun to separate at that point.

When the FDR stopped, the cockpit voice reco

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2001 at 1:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.