American Airlines Flight 587
November 2001 aviation accident in New York, US
American Airlines Flight 587 was a regularly scheduled international passenger flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City, to Las Américas International Airport, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. On November 12, 2001, the Airbus A300 flying the route crashed into the neighborhood of Belle Harbor on the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens, New York City, shortly after takeoff, killing all 251 passengers and nine crew members aboard, as well as five people on the ground. It is the second-deadliest aviation accident to have occurred in the United States, behind the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 in 1979, and the second-deadliest aviation incident involving an Airbus A300, after Iran Air Flight 655.
The location of the accident, and that it took place only two months after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in nearby Manhattan, initially spawned fears of another terrorist attack, but the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) attributed the disaster to the first officer's overuse of rudder controls in response to wake turbulence from a preceding Japan Airlines Boeing 747-400 that took off minutes before it. According to the NTSB, the aggressive use of the rudder controls by the first officer, the result of a flawed training scenario that exaggerated the effects of wake turbulence, stressed the vertical stabilizer until it was ripped from the aircraft. The airliner's two engines also separated from the aircraft before impact due to the intense forces.
Aircraft and crew
The accident aircraft, registration N14053, was an Airbus A300 B4-605R delivered new to American Airlines on 12 July 1988. The aircraft's first flight was on 9 December 1987, and it was the first "R" model A300-600 built. On the day of the accident, it was in a two-class seating configuration with space for 251 passengers, and all 16 business-class seats and 235 economy-class seats were occupied. The aircraft was powered by two General Electric CF6-80C2A5 engines.
The public source identifies “American Airlines Flight 587” as november 2001 aviation accident in New York, US. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around American, Airlines and Flight.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “American Airlines Flight 587”, the useful work is to connect “november 2001 aviation accident in New York, US” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q384845. Authority coordinates are 40.577, -73.851. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001, 1979, 1988 and 1987.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “American Airlines Flight 587” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.