Thoughts on AA587?

[fly.mcs]

Many of you remember American 587 crashing in Queens on Nov. 12, 2001. I just viewed this video on YouTube:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=-3fOZgNaYI8

I always found it odd that a rudder and vertical stabilizer could be torn off due to wake turbulence. Eyewitnesses also claim of seeing a fire before the crash. Any thoughts?

[Iberia A340-600]

Well my thoughts are that I am not exactly looking forward to flying on two American A300s in March. :?

[T-Bird76]

Well my thoughts are that I am not exactly looking forward to flying on two American A300s in March. :?

The A300 is a pretty cool plane to fly on, bigger then what you expect. Now they aren't the most comfortable. AA packs people in pretty tight. If you can get an exit row.

[Iberia A340-600]

[quote=T-Bird76]

Well my thoughts are that I am not exactly looking forward to flying on two American A300s in March. :?

The A300 is a pretty cool plane to fly on, bigger then what you expect. Now they aren't the most comfortable. AA packs people in pretty tight. If you can get an exit row.[/quote:eb710]

I used to fly on them all the time to SJU back when my family flew American Airlines but now we use jet Blue and Continental.

I agree with you that it is a pretty cool aircraft. I love watching them at SJU but the thought of flying on one never appealed to me after we stopped flying American.

As long as I have a window seat I'll be fine. :)

[nwafan20]

Here is a accident report that a few buddies of mine on another forum made up about the accident:

American Airlines Flight 587
Airbus A300, N14053
Kennedy International Airport in New York to Dominican Republic
Crashed in Belle Harbor, NY

Executive Summary: On November 12, 2001, about 0916:15 eastern standard time, American Airlines flight 587, an Airbus Industrie A300-605R, N14053, crashed into a residential area of Belle Harbor, New York, shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport, Jamaica, New York. Flight 587 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight to Las Americas International Airport, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, with 2 flight crewmembers, 7 flight attendants, and 251 passengers aboard the airplane. The airplane’s vertical stabilizer and rudder separated in flight and were found in Jamaica Bay, about 1 mile north of the main wreckage site. The airplane’s engines subsequently separated in flight and were found several blocks north and east of the main wreckage site. All 260 people aboard the airplane and 5 people on the ground were killed, and the airplane was destroyed by impact forces and a postcrash fire. Flight 587 was operating under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 121 on an instrument flight rules flight plan. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed at the time of the accident.

The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the in-flight separation of the vertical stabilizer as a result of the loads beyond ultimate design that were created by the first officer’s unnecessary and excessive rudder pedal inputs. Contributing to these rudder pedal inputs were characteristics of the Airbus A300-600 rudder system design and elements of the American Airlines Advanced Aircraft Maneuvering Program.

http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2004/AAR0404.htm

American 587 took off shortly after a Japan Airlines 747 departed the same runway. The A300 flew into the larger jets wake, which is turbulent air. The first officer, the flying pilot, attempted to keep the plain upright with the rudder. That is when he used too much rudder, according to the NTSB and cause the vertical stabilizer to snap.

NTSB Animation of AA587 and flight control input. http://www.ntsb.gov/Events/2001/AA587/f ... _web01.wmv

Why this could have been prevented, and why its not probable cause.

USA Today on AA507 in 1997: http://www.usatoday.com/news/graphics/g903/flash.htm

Airbus and American are currently disputing the extent to which the two parties are responsible for the disaster. American charges that the crash was mostly Airbus's fault, because the A300 was designed with unusually sensitive rudder controls. Most aircraft require increased pressure on the rudder pedals to achieve the same amount of rudder control at a higher speed. The Airbus A300 and later A310 do not operate on a fly-by-wire flight control system, instead using conventional mechanical flight controls.

Airbus charges that the crash was mostly American's fault, because the airline did not train its pilots properly about the characteristics of the rudder. Aircraft tail fins are designed to withstand full rudder in one direction at maneuvering speed. However, they are not usually designed to withstand an abrupt shift in rudder from one direction to the other. Most American pilots believed that the tail fin could withstand any rudder movement at maneuvering speed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_A ... Flight_587

What made an Airbus rudder snap in mid-air?

When Flight 961 literally began to fall apart at 35,000 feet, it increased fears of a fatal design flaw in the world's most popular passenger jet

David Rose
Sunday March 13, 2005
The Observer

At 35,000 feet above the Caribbean, Air Transat flight 961 was heading home to Quebec with 270 passengers and crew. At 3.45 pm last Sunday, the pilot noticed something very unusual. His Airbus A310's rudder - a structure 28 feet high - had fallen off and tumbled into the sea. In the world of aviation, the shock waves have yet to subside.

Mercifully, the crew was able to turn the plane around, and by steering it with their wing and tail flaps managed to land at their point of departure in Varadero, Cuba, without loss of life. But as Canadian investigators try to discover what caused this near catastrophe, the specialist internet bulletin boards used by pilots, accident investigators and engineers are buzzing.

One former Airbus pilot, who now flies Boeings for a major US airline, told The Observer : 'This just isn't supposed to happen. No one I know has ever seen an airliner's rudder disintegrate like that. It raises worrying questions about the materials and build of the aircraft, and about its maintenance and inspection regime. We have to ask as things stand, would evidence of this type of deterioration ever be noticed before an incident like this in the air?'
He and his colleagues also believe that what happened may shed new light on a previous disaster. In November 2001, 265 people died when American Airlines flight 587, an Airbus A300 model which is almost identical to the A310, crashed shortly after take-off from JFK airport in New York. According to the official report into the crash, the immediate cause was the loss of the plane's rudder and tailfin, though this was blamed on an error by the pilots.

There have been other non-fatal incidents. One came in 2002 when a FedEx A300 freight pilot complained about strange 'uncommanded inputs' - rudder movements which the plane was making without his moving his control pedals. In FedEx's own test on the rudder on the ground, engineers claimed its 'acuators' - the hydraulic system which causes the rudder to move - tore a large hole around its hinges, in exactly the spot where the rudders of both flight 961 and flight 587 parted company from the rest of the aircraft.

Last night Ted Lopatkiewicz, spokesman for the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which conducted the flight 587 investigation, said that the board was 'closely monitoring' the Canadian inquiry for its possible bearing on the New York crash. 'We need to know why the rudder separated from the aircraft before knowing whether maintenance is an issue,' he added.

Airbus - Europe's biggest manufacturing company, to which British factories contribute major components, including aircraft wings - has now overtaken Boeing to command the biggest share of the global airliner market. In sales literature to operators, it described the A300 series as a 'regional profit machine'.

The firm recently launched its superjumbo, the two-storey A380, which is due in service next year. Like earlier Airbus models, this relies heavily on 'composite' synthetic materials which are both lighter - and, in theory, stronger - than aluminium or steel. Fins, flaps and rudders are made of a similar composite on the A300 and A310, of which there are about 800 in service all over the world.

Composites are made of hundreds of layers of carbon fibre sheeting stuck together with epoxy resin. Each layer is only strong along the grain of the fibre. Aircraft engineers need to work out from which directions loads will come, then lay the sheets in a complex, criss-cross pattern. If they get this wrong, a big or unexpected load might cause a plane part to fail.

It is vital there are no kinks or folds as the layers are laid, and no gaps in their resin coating. Holes between the layers can rapidly cause extensive 'delamination' and a loss of stiffness and strength.

Airbus, together with aviation authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, insists that any deterioration of a composite part can be detected by external, visual inspection, a regular feature of Airbus maintenance programmes, but other experts disagree.

In an article published after the flight 587 crash, Professor James Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world's leading authorities in this field, said that to rely on visual inspection was 'a lamentably naive policy. It is analogous to assessing whether a woman has breast cancer by simply looking at her family portrait.'

Williams and other scientists have stated that composite parts in any aircraft should be tested frequently by methods such as ultrasound, allowing engineers to 'see' beneath their surface. His research suggests that repeated journeys to and from the sub-zero temperatures found at cruising altitude causes a build-up of condensation inside composites, and separation of the carbon fibre layers as this moisture freezes and thaws. According to Williams, 'like a pothole in a roadway in winter, over time these gaps may grow'.

Commenting on the vanishing rudder on flight 961, he pointed out that nothing was said about composite inspection in the NTSB's report on flight 587. This was an 'unfortunate calamity', he said. Although the flight 961 rupture had yet be analysed, he continued to believe Airbus's maintenance rules were 'inadequate', despite their official endorsement.

Barbara Crufts, an Airbus spokeswoman, said visual inspections were 'the normal procedure' and insisted Williams's case was unproven. 'You quote him as an expert. But there are more experts within the manufacturers and the certification authorities who agree with these procedures.' She disclosed that the aircraft used in flight 961 - which entered service in 1991 - had been inspected five days before the incident. She said did not know if the rudder had been examined.

Despite these and earlier assurances, some pilots remain sceptical. The Observer has learnt that after the 587 disaster, more than 20 American Airlines A300 pilots asked to be transferred to Boeings, although this meant months of retraining and loss of earnings. Some of those who contributed to pilots' bulletin boards last week expressed anger at the European manufacturer in vehement terms. One wrote that having attended an Airbus briefing about 587, he had refused to let any of his family take an A300 or A310 and had paid extra to take a circuitous route on holiday purely to avoid them: 'That is how con vinced I am that there are significant problems associated with these aircraft.'

Another seasoned pilot with both military and civilian experience said: 'Composite experts across the country advocate state-of-the-art, non-destructive testing to prevent this type of incident from happening, yet civil aviation authorities still only require "naked eye" or other rudimentary inspections. How many more incidents have to occur for decision-makers to do the right thing by passengers and crews?'

He said that while flight 961 had come down safely, to land a plane without a rudder in a crosswind or turbulence could be impossible. The rudder was all the more important on a plane such as an A310, because its wing design meant that it was 'aerodynamically unstable' and needed the rudder for stability.

Air Transat, a charter operator which flies from Canada to Europe and the Caribbean, said that after the incident it 'immediately carried out a thorough visual examination of all its Airbus A310s... and no anomaly was detected.'

The separation of the rudder may have further implications for the cause of the 587 crash. In its report, the NTSB said the tail and rudder failed because they were subjected to stresses 'beyond ultimate load', imposed because the co-pilot, Sten Molin, overreacted to minor turbulence and made five violent side-to-side 'rudder reversals'. The report said the design of the A300 controls was flawed because it allowed this to happen.

However, the NTSB investigation has been criticised by many insiders. Ellen Connors, the NTSB chair, told reporters last January that the report was delayed because of 'inap propriate' and 'intense' lobbying by Airbus over its contents, adding: 'The potential for contaminating the investigation exists.' In America, the NTSB staff is small and manufacturers provide many of the staff employed on air-crash investigations into their own products.

Dozens of former accident investigators, engineers and pilots, including some who were involved in the official inquiry but were disappointed by its conduct, poured their expertise into a parallel investigation run by Victor Trombettas, who lives near the crash site and runs a website, usread.com. Drawing on the huge mass of technical data released after the crash, they question the conclusion that 'aggressive' rudder inputs were the crash's main cause.

'I don't think the NTSB did a quality job,' said Vernon Grose, a Washington safety consultant who is a former board member. He supported the conclusion of Trombettas's group - that more than ten seconds before any rudder movements, the 587 pilots were fighting to regain control of the aircraft for reasons that remain unknown: a still-to-be investigated technical failure, or possibly a terrorist bomb. The crash, he recalled, took place two months after 9/11. Ninety per cent of the witnesses who saw the plane from the ground said they saw smoke or fire billowing from it before the tail and rudder fell off, Grose said.

Against this background, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Transport Safety Bureau, which is performing the investigation, disclosed that there is 'no evidence' of any movements by the rudder before its rupture, while Air Transat confirmed that it had separated when the plane was at cruising altitude and speed. 'You barely use the rudder at all in those conditions,' the former A300 pilot said. 'If this plane lost a rudder with no one doing anything, it has to raise new questions about the fate of flight 587.'

And the pressure is now on the aviation authorities to review whether testing by the naked eye is really enough to keep air passengers safe.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/internat ... 74,00.html

This is an article found in Airways Magazine from July 2005.




CVR:

[quote]

HOT-1 hang onto it. hang onto it.
0915:56.6
CAM [sound of snap]
0915:57.5
HOT-2 let's go for power please.
0915:57.7
CAM [sound of loud thump]
0915:58.5
CAM [sound of loud bang]
0916:00.0
HOT-2 [sound similar to human grunt]
0916:00.2
CAM [roaring noise starts and increases in amplitude]
0916:01.0
HOT-2 holy #.
0916:01.0
CAM [sound similar to single ECAM chime]
0916:02.0
CAM [sound similar to single ECAM chime]
0916:04.4
CAM [sound similar to stall warning repetitive chime for 1.9 seconds]
28 of 28
INTRA-COCKPIT COMMUNICATION AIR-GROUND COMMUNICATION
TIME & TIME &
SOURCE CONTENT SOURCE CONTENT
0916:06.2
CAM [roaring noise decreases and ends]
0916:07.5
HOT-2 what the hell are we into *. we're stuck in it.
0916:07.5
CAM [sound similar to continuous repetitive chimes for one second]
0916:09.6
CAM [sound similar to continuous repetitive chimes for three seconds]
0916:12.8
HOT-1 get out of it, get out of it.
0916:14.8
END of RECORDING
[/img]
So after looking over the post:

-Would you still conclude that flight 587 was brought down due to pilot error?

-Since Airbus has not addressed this problem would you willingly fly on an A300 or A310?

-Since Airbus never made any changes to the A300's rudder system do you think history could be bound to repeat itself on another Airbus model? Such as the issue of not having the A380's fuel tanks certified to US standards?


http://aviationguru.spreebb.com/index.php?showtopic=717

NG737MN, ILUVDELTA
--------------------------------------

I wouldn't want to fly on an A300.

By the way, don't flame me for the article, I didn't write it.

[cancidas]

while i'm not going to comment on what that crew did i can say this; i was flying a C-208 when i flew into the wake turbulence off a 737. let's just say that i never want that to happen to me again! even with the seat belt on my head hit the bulkhead above me. our stall warning went off like mad even though we had a IAS of about 90 KIAS at the time. needless to say we had to set the autopiot and let the plane fly itself for a while until we composed ourselves. we had a vector from ATC, but the wind was blowing in some wierd ways. we filed a report with the NASA ASRS and had a mecahnic take a look at the airplane when we landed. we were lucky, no damage to the airplane. it sure as hell shook us up!

[Tom_Turner]

<<When Flight 961 literally began to fall apart at 35,000 feet, it increased fears of a fatal design flaw in the world's most popular passenger jet >>

I didn't know the A300 was "the world't most popular passenger jet". :)

<<-Since Airbus never made any changes to the A300's rudder system do you think history could be bound to repeat itself on another Airbus model? >>

Not sure, but I am certain AA pilots have been trained on this matter now...also have to believe AA A300s followed JAL (or other) 747s off 31L thousands of times prior to this accident.

A shame though...terrible loss of life..

Tom

[PhilDernerJr]

Eyewitnesses also claim of seeing a fire before the crash. Any thoughts?

I saw the toll booth video of it coming out of the sky, and it looks to me as though it was not fire, but just a lot of condensation coming off of the plummeting aircraft.

[Qantas_787]

Hi,
Speaking with little flying experience (40 hours in a cessna) I cannot really comment about this accident, but heres something ill add and cancidas and other pilots on the forum you can verify if im wrong or right here. I just thought of this, that throughout my training for my private pilots license I have been alerted to many limitations of my cessna plane. A big one is not to sideslip in crosswinds/ at all with flaps extended. Does this apply to the a300? or only to small planes like cessnas, ie. if you fly into heavy winds, or wake turbulence, and i imagine AA 587 flaps were still slightly extended due to the event occuring straight after takeoff, that full rudder on one side and wing deflection on the other with flaps extended, the sideslip as we call it, can cause structural damage?
Just my opinion, not sure if it has any relevance, but just something i thought of as going through the training.
Regards,
Matt L

[nwafan20]

Yeah, there were some misprints in the articles he quoted, the 737 is the worlds most popular passenger jet.

All I have to comment is this: Based on comments by other pilots about the accident, on any airplane, you should be able to hit that rudder as hard as you can to the left, and then as hard as you want to the right, and nothing should happen. There was a flaw, NTSB ignored it due to pressure from Airbus, and Airbus secretly tried to fix the problem (Which was somewhat successful, but there have still been many A300 rudder incidents after the "fix")

[FlyingColors]

What do you think about the absurd amount of money for the memorial?

[PhilDernerJr]

What do you think about the absurd amount of money for the memorial?

How much was spent? Whose money was it?

[cancidas]

limitations of a airplane are one thing, but dealing with an airplane where the tail has snapped off due to structural problems is something comepletely different. i personally think that the design is at fault. unfortunately, riveting composities to metals is the only way to bond the two materials. although i understand the need to build lighter airplanes, i am toally against building critical survaces out of composites and then being forced to rivet them together.

[FlyingColors]

What do you think about the absurd amount of money for the memorial?

How much was spent? Whose money was it?

You better sit down...get this...... 9.2 Million!!!!

Just another example of organized crime, that starts from the top. My reading has no official statement to where the funds come from.
If XYZ says is from 123, how do we know its the whole truth anyhow?

Who pays? We do!

[FlyingColors]

Yeah, there were some misprints in the articles he quoted, the 737 is the worlds most popular passenger jet.

All I have to comment is this: Based on comments by other pilots about the accident, on any airplane, you should be able to hit that rudder as hard as you can to the left, and then as hard as you want to the right, and nothing should happen. There was a flaw, NTSB ignored it due to pressure from Airbus, and Airbus secretly tried to fix the problem (Which was somewhat successful, but there have still been many A300 rudder incidents after the "fix")

Unless there is "another story" that we will never hear about!
Pilot error and mechanical failures were covered.....

BTW- its very convenient to just blame the crew- they are gone, unfortunately.