NEW YORK – The Big Apple remembers the victims of the tragedy of Flight 587 on its 19th anniversary on Thursday.
American Airlines Flight 587 fell at Bell Harbord in Queens just minutes after taking off from John F. Kennedy Airport for the Dominican Republic on November 12, 2001.
The aircraft carried 251 passengers, the vast majority of them Dominicans, including two pilots and seven flight attendants. Five people also died on the ground.
The tragedy shook the entire Dominican community in the tri-state area of New York, and also the Caribbean country.
The Airbus A-300 plane crash sparked all the alarm speculation in New York City, as the incident occurred just three months after the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) ruled out the possibility of a terrorist attack, after its investigation revealed that the accident was caused by excessive use of the plane’s rudder, which caused the vertical stabilizer of the aircraft detaches from the craft.
The NTSB said in the report that the co-pilot reacted aggressively to try to stabilize Flight 587 after being affected by severe turbulence; it could have been caused by an American Airlines Boeing 747-400 plane that took off moments before bound for Japan.
New York authorities raised a monument in the area of the accident to remember the victims after the plane crash, where family, friends and city politicians gather every year to venerate their memory.
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