American Airlines Flight 587

American Airlines Flight 587 was a regularly scheduled international passenger flight from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Las Américas International Airport in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. On 12 November 2001, the Airbus A300B4-605R flying the route crashed shortly after takeoff into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, a borough of New York City. All 260 people aboard the plane (251 passengers and nine crew members) were killed, along with five people on the ground.The location of the accident and the fact that it took place two months and one day after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan initially spawned fears of another terrorist attack. Terrorism was officially ruled out as the cause by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which instead attributed the disaster to the first officer's overuse of rudder controls in response to wake turbulence, or jet wash, from a Japan Airlines Boeing 747-400 that took off minutes before it. According to the NTSB, the aggressive use of the rudder controls by the co-pilot caused the vertical stabilizer to snap off the plane, along with the plane...